I've never really thought of myself as a creative person.
Growing up, I had a pretty clear picture of what creativity looked like. My grandmother was an artist. She painted with watercolors and oils, made clothes and other things with her hands, and was always finding some new way to create. She even went through a clown phase, because apparently painting and sewing weren't enough. My mom is much the same. She paints, makes pottery, and is constantly trying some new creative outlet. Last Christmas, she painted individual watercolor greeting cards for everyone in the family. Those were the creative ones. I wasn't.
It wasn't something I was particularly upset about. Creativity just seemed like one of those traits you either had or you didn't. I admired it, maybe even wished I had a little more of it, but I never considered that my definition of creativity might be the problem.
A few weeks ago, near the end of my first week learning about AI engineering, I finished a class project where we'd built a functional little airline chatbot. The instructor encouraged us to take what we'd learned and change something. Experiment with it. Make it our own. The airline chatbot was useful as a learning exercise, but it didn't particularly interest me, so I started wondering what else it could be. I'd spent years as the unofficial tech support person for friends and family. What if the chatbot did that instead? What if it wasn't just technically useful, but actually felt like someone patient was helping you? What if it had a little personality? There wasn't some grand plan behind it. I just decided to try.
That small experiment eventually became Relative Tech Support, the first project I've built that actually feels like mine. Somewhere during that process, something strange happened: I started feeling creative. At first, that almost felt like giving myself credit I hadn't earned. I didn't invent chatbots, Python, large language models, or any of the tools I was using. I hadn't even started from my own project. But my grandmother didn't invent watercolor, and my mom didn't invent pottery. The tools were never what made them creative. They were the medium. My grandmother had her tools. My mom has hers. Maybe I'm starting to find mine.
I'm still very new at this, and things go wrong constantly. Code doesn't work. An idea looks better in my head than it does on a screen. Something I thought would take ten minutes turns into an hour of figuring out why it refuses to cooperate. But those moments haven't felt like evidence that I shouldn't be doing this. More often, I find myself excited to figure out what went wrong and what to try next. Somewhere along the way, the mistakes became part of making the thing.
I think that's helped me realize how narrow my old definition of creativity really was. I recognized it easily when the result was a painting, a piece of pottery, or something made by hand. I didn't recognize it as easily in questions like: What if we did it this way? How could this be better? What else could this become? I'm not convinced everyone needs to think of themselves as creative, and I'm not sure I could give you a perfect definition of the word. Maybe I don't need one. I just know my own definition was too small. Creativity may have less to do with what you make than I once believed, and more to do with imagining something that doesn't exist yet and trying to give it form.
I don't think I understand my grandmother's creativity any differently now. But I think I understand her enjoyment of it a little better. She found something she loved doing and spent a lifetime making things. I'm only at the beginning of whatever this is, but for the first time, I understand a little of the pull to make one thing and immediately wonder what you might make next.
I discovered that creativity wasn't what I thought it was. Once I understood that, I could finally recognize some of it in myself.
Maybe I'm creative after all.