I Never Called Myself Creative (But I Was)

Here's a question I genuinely don't know how to answer: When did I become creative?

I can't give you a year. I can't point to a single moment, a single class, a single project that flipped the switch. And the longer I sit with the question, the more I think it doesn't quite work that way, or at least not for me.

When I look back honestly, it wasn't one big leap. It was a hundred small steps. Most of which didn't feel creative at all while they were happening. They just felt like life.

This is that story.

The Quiet Beginning

It starts, if I had to pick somewhere, with a Canon Powershot.

You know the ones. Those chunky little point-and-shoot cameras that lived in your cargo pocket before phone cameras were actually worth using. Mine went everywhere with me. I wasn't thinking about composition, lighting, or building a portfolio at the time. I didn't have any of that language yet. I just liked capturing moments. There was something satisfying about freezing a thing in time and being the person who did it.

Looking back, that was the first signal. I just didn't read it that way yet.

Around the same time, or maybe running parallel to it for most of my life, there was the rearranging phase. And if you grew up in a household like mine, you already know exactly what I'm talking about.

Shoutout to my mom and my sister, because this one's a family thing. We are the kind of people who will rearrange a living room on a Tuesday at 10pm for no reason other than something just feels off. You move the couch. You step back. You move it again. Sometimes you wake up the next morning, look at it in the daylight, and move it all back. People thought it was a quirk. Maybe it was. But it was also spatial thinking. It was a composition. It was learning, without any formal instruction, how to make a space feel right. I just didn't have the vocabulary for it at the time.

The Job Nobody Saw Coming

Then I got a job at Crate and Barrel, and honestly — nobody saw that coming. Including me.

I am introverted. The people around me were steering me toward warehouse roles, back-of-house work, jobs where I wouldn't have to interact much with the public. "You're not really a customer service type." Part of me believed them. But I applied anyway, got the job, and ended up staying for four years.

I did floor coverage, backroom work, all of it. But the thing I loved the most was the visual merchandising. Not the planogram work, though I did plenty of that, but what they called triptychs and quads. These were sets of 3 and 4 pillars with the product displayed on them. The way it worked: someone hands you a list of SKUs, just product numbers on a sheet, and tells you to make it look good. No template. No visual example. Just here are the pieces, now make something.

That's where I first started to understand that creativity isn't always about a blank canvas. Sometimes it's about constraints. It's about working with what you have, and sometimes what we had on hand was limited because of inventory or shipping delays. Find the beauty that lives inside the limitations. I was learning curation. I was learning how to make someone stop mid-stride and actually look. I didn't have a name for any of it at the time. It just felt like doing a good job.

When the Tools Found Me

After Crate and Barrel came a local tech startup, and with it, my first real introduction to Adobe.

Illustrator first. I was hooked immediately. There's something about getting your hands on professional tools and realizing you can make the thing in your head come to life in the real world. That is not a small feeling. For many creatives, that's THE feeling, the one that changes everything. One app led to another. Premiere. Lightroom. Photoshop. After Effects. The whole suite gradually became a language I could actually speak, understand, and become more proficient in.

But here's what I've learned: tools only take you so far. Software is a vehicle. It matters, but it's not the thing. The thing that actually leveled me up wasn't any app.

It was a community.

I found a Facebook group called CRTV Church. And I know a Facebook group doesn't sound like a pivotal moment in a creative origin story, but this one was different. It was full of people figuring it out in real time, church media folks, video editors, photographers, designers, all in the same space, sharing work, trading feedback, asking questions without fear of looking amateur. I learned a lot there. Not from any single person, but from dozens of different people with dozens of different perspectives. And maybe more importantly, I started to see myself as someone who genuinely belonged in that conversation. Community has a way of doing that. When the right people reflect back what they see in you, you start to see it too

The First Frame

Video came a little differently. Because, unlike everything else, I actually remember exactly where it started.

A week at church camp. Filming daily activities and a Women's Ministry promo. Nothing polished; the lighting, frankly, wasn't great, the audio was terrible, and the camera wasn't designed for video. I can see that clearly looking back. But I remember watching the footage back and feeling something I hadn't felt before: I made this. This moment exists because I was there with a camera.

That feeling is genuinely hard to put into words for someone who hasn't felt it. But if you've felt it, you know exactly what I'm describing. It's a kind of quiet ownership over a piece of time. That week at camp was the beginning of the video chapter — and honestly, that chapter is still being written

So, When Did I Become Creative?

I've thought about this a lot, and I don't think there was a moment. I think there was a direction.

A Canon Powershot pointed at something worth remembering. A room was rearranged at 10pm because something felt off. A retail job I wasn't supposed to get. A tech startup that taught me Adobe Illustrator. A community that said, in its own quiet way: you belong here. A camera at a church camp, pointed at something real.

None of those things felt like a creative story while they were happening. They felt like jobs, hobbies, random interests, a quirky family habit. But they were building something. Every single one of them was a rep. And creativity — at its core — is just a muscle you keep showing up to train, even when you don't have a name for what you're doing yet.

If you're reading this and you're waiting for the moment you become creative, I want you to hear something:

You're already in it.

The photos you're taking on your phone. The way you've rearranged your space. The side project you keep almost starting. The thing you make just because it feels right, even if no one's watching. That's not nothing. That's everything. It's the same stuff my story is made of — just at an earlier chapter.

Don't wait for someone to hand you the title. Just keep going.