I Don’t Remember Wanting to Be Creative

I don’t remember wanting to be creative.
What I do remember is always feeling different.

Long before thinking about doing something, producing something, or “being” something, there it was—that hard-to-name sensation: not fully belonging, not quite matching, not being in the same place as others even when sharing the same space.

First, I felt things in my own way.
Then I started thinking from that experience.
Later, I suffered from not belonging.
And over time, I turned that difference into a form of happiness.

The First Encounter with the World

I met society in March 1974, when I entered kindergarten.

Before that, the only people I really knew were my family. They had always been there, and somehow I knew everything about them—what they thought, what they might do next.

But that first contact with the unknown, with people who were not “the usual ones,” changed everything.

I remember feeling, with a clarity I couldn’t have explained then, that I was not like them (much later I understood that no one is like the person next to them—not just me).

I was interested in things they weren’t.
And they enjoyed things that meant nothing to me.

Today, more than fifty years later, some of those children are still my friends.

But back then, what settled in me wasn’t what we shared.
It was the difference.

When Difference Hurts

And difference, when not understood, hurts.

Because difference is not absolute.
It is always relative—to someone, to a group, to a context.

And when that difference means not fitting in, not being chosen to play, not being understood, not being considered because you are “outside the norm,” it stops being a trait and becomes an experience.

And that experience, often, is painful.

The Invisible Door

And yet, at the very same time, there was a door.

Without reflection, without theory, without any conscious processing—I was five—I interpreted that difference as an advantage.

I don’t know where that interpretation came from.
But it was there.

Being different meant, in some way, being myself.
And being myself meant something no one else could be.

That was, I believe now, my first creative act.

I didn’t make anything visible.
I didn’t produce anything.
I didn’t build anything.

But I began to build myself.

Before Creating, Becoming

Over time I understood that this happens, in one way or another, to all people we later call creative.

Long before they create something,
they create themselves.

And creating oneself inevitably means:

• becoming different
• seeing differently
• feeling differently

This, of course, does not mean being better.
It never does.

It simply means being.

But when that being doesn’t match expectations, doesn’t fit what is common, when it means being apart, it can hurt deeply.

Living Translated

For many years I lived with that feeling of being “outside.”
I still do.

Watching groups from a distance that is hard to explain.

Feeling like I had to constantly translate myself—
what I thought, what I felt, what I said.

As if my nature were written in another language.

As if, to be understood, I had to adapt it, simplify it, or even hide it.

And that is exhausting.
And that hurts.

The Turn

Over time, I began to find pleasure in that difference.

In contrast.
In being, as we say, an outsider.

Not because it stopped hurting entirely—that discomfort never fully disappears—
but because something else began to coexist with it:

a form of freedom.

Because there is something deeply natural about belonging.
And when that doesn’t happen consistently, there is always a residue, a discomfort that returns from time to time.

It still happens to me.

But something else happens too.

Naming It: Creative

Much later, I began to see and think of myself as creative.

That role gave me a way to present myself to others.
A way to be socially recognized (in the sense of being perceived, not famous).

Not because it explained who I am—I never needed that—
but because it allowed me to channel that difference.

Today I work at ByBa.

And I often think it’s as if I had gone to a tailor and asked for a job made to measure.

A place where that difference not only makes sense,
but is the raw material.

The Seed

Looking back, I now believe something I could never have said in that kindergarten:

Difference is the first seed of creativity.

Not something technical.
Not something you study.
Not something you learn like playing the piano.

But something much more intimate:

the experience of not being like others.

From Curse to Resource

And very often, that feels like a curse.

“Why am I like this?”
“Why can’t I be like everyone else?”

But over time—if you manage to hold it, inhabit it, cultivate it—
it becomes something extremely valuable.

Because it allows something irreplaceable:

to be, without a shadow of doubt, yourself.

And from there,
everything else.

Blithe Ernst