The Creative Person (Week Six)

    This week's class was about our creative personality, and how complex that personality is, how someone can hold two traits that are seemingly opposite. Csikszentmihalyi discusses the idea that what makes someone creative is embracing all parts of ourselves, even if society would say that it is not possible to have two polar traits, Csikszentmihalyi says otherwise, "If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this, I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes- instead of being an "individual," each of them is a "multitude." Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves." (Csikszentmihalyi, The Creative Personality.)

    I adored the activity for this class, we were to pick four traits and the polar of those traits. After picking those traits we were instructed to draw a self-portrait exemplifying all of those traits. I have some traits that I embrace that are polar so I struggled to decide what traits I particularly like of myself and their opposites. In the end, I chose:

            daydreamer//reality

            pain//hope

            introvert// extrovert

            discipline// playfulness 

For two of the sets, I felt that I embraced both which created some confusion for me in my drawing, particularly daydreamer/reality and discipline/playfulness, but in the end, I think I felt good about what I thought of myself and of what I want to grow into being.  I tried to be more abstract with it as I felt that it represented being an extrovert, and I added lots of colors to represent playfulness. I made myself look "deformed" to represent a daydreamer as in my daydreams everyone always looks slightly different from reality.