How To Be an Artistic Person

Becoming someone who sees beauty in everything

To be an artistic person, you need to see opportunity in everything.

Throughout my lifetime, I’ve met so many people who want to be creative, but continue to put themselves in this narrow box or label. Oh, I’m a computer science or engineering major, I can’t create music or pick up a paintbrush to draw self-portraits. And I, too, almost fell into this trap. After four years of an intensive art high school, I thought I was never going to write again because suddenly I was a business major. Business majors, even though mine was fashion focused, were crunching numbers and making capitalism great again. And guess what? I became miserable quite quickly.

For awhile, my main source of inspiration came from art and classical music. I used to play those Dark Academia playlists on YouTube at 1 am in the morning, closing and opening my eyes again and again, writing poems from how the music made me feel. I discovered a lot of Soviet composers I liked this way, then I started moving into the ekphrastic poem territory. And, suddenly, for the first time since my senior year of high school, I was putting out a ton of new content. I was writing 1-2 poems every single night.

People will always discourage you from taking this path. But they don’t see that artists and creative people are needed in this world. I was at the AWP conference this year and attended a panel on unorthodox careers where writing played a key part. One woman worked for the US Department of Energy as a writer; she turned high-level jargon into digestible content for the common man. Something these panelists discussed stuck with me: even in the careers that seem completely and utterly mundane, there is room for creative, whether it’s the execution or the little choices you make.

By limiting ourselves with a label, we limit our potential. I try to label anything as little as possible, even my own relationships, because often things are much more complex than a simple label. Take a step outside of the box of what you’ve been always taught. Make hybrid works. Write a poem. Ain’t no one stopping you but yourself. If you never take the chance for risks, you’ll live a life of regret and missed opportunity.

You really only do get one life. If you feel this is something you should do, then do it.