Materials: a recycled Harney & Sons Tea tin box, paper, tape, markers, sticky notes
I don’t think of myself as an artist or “creative,” so I really had to figure out the answer as to why I don’t create things. Growing up, I liked to do arts and crafts, and don’t get me wrong I still like to do it to this day, but it’s something that I didn’t and still don’t typically do. In my family, education, a good paying job that you love, and success is valued. In my childhood, whether it was said or not, I was told that getting good grades is good, becoming the best player on the team is good, and being an innocent child and following all of the rules is good. While yes, these values are good, these values have also caused me to put really high standards and expectations on myself. It is hard to explain, but I think that I didn’t create, and still don’t create, because there are ingrained expectations in my mind that creativity and art do not lead me to being seen as that good and perfect child that I want my parents to see in me. I always want to make my family proud so I always follow what they say is good, and a lot of the times too, I follow what this world says is good and perfect. So I strive to be “good” and “perfect,” and when I don’t meet those expectations that I have for myself, I beat myself up, and my own voice calls me “not good, bad, broken, hopeless, failure.” I am constantly striving to be that good and perfect student, daughter, Christian, sister, friend, employee, and human, that I cannot think outside my box. I don’t have the time to be creative because I am putting all of my efforts into becoming the person who I am expected to be, and that person is not supposed to be a creative. It is a person who is supposed to be successful, good, and perfect.
Obviously, these things are unrealistic for me. I am a broken human being who falls short daily. Here is my problem though, when I fail or do something “badly,” I become very hard on myself, and my inner critic comes out to say mean things to me. I created this box for the thoughts that enter into my head when I don’t meet my unrealistic expectations. Thoughts such as, “A ‘C’ means that you are a bad student, your past failures define you as a bad Christian and human being, and you are not good, skinny, or pretty enough” are thoughts that I have put on sticky notes and have thrown away into the bin. What is cool is that this bin has Bible verses on it, like Galatians 1:10 or 2 Corinthians 12:9, that remind me that 1) God loves me as I am, 2) He created me uniquely and beautifully; I am made in His image, 3) Jesus Christ has covered my imperfections, and 4) I don’t have to be good or perfect to come to Him, He accepts me as I am. Those mean thoughts that I have in my mind are never from God, and so I wanted to create something that allows me to get rid of those thoughts and to receive the thoughts that God thinks of me. This project has shown me that it is okay to be imperfect, and that God is the only one who gets to decide who I am, not my parents, professors, employers, peers, or society.
