Day 15 of taking myself to Creative Camp, though when I’m making this it’s Day 22? I think?! I’ve lost count. I’m halfway through but the finish line is getting further away.

Creative Camp has done its job; my life, my summer is so full, so overflowing with inspiration – it’s SO MUCH and I’m grappling with how to tame and harness and contain my creativity when it’s so big it scares me. It’s wilder than my life is allowing!

I started Creative Camp at the beginning of July with the goal of 30 days of creative adventures. It is now the end of August and I’ve only published 14, well, now 15 of those days.

The creative experiment has been a success (ish). I jumpstarted my creativity alright. But now I’m overwhelmed with the creative abundance coming from this project.

I feel so creative, it’s almost like camp is unnecessary?

⚠️ THIS IS THE DANGER ZONE ⚠️

Where it would be so easy to give up halfway and see all the pudding I’m drowning in as proof it’s okay to give up now.

I wanted to be creative and now I am! So creative I have too much on my plate AND a triathlon to train for, a business to run, a daughter to raise, a SELF TO LOVE!!!

Rule #3: Process > product is here for a reason.

See, we often guard against failure. What if I suck? What if I fall? What if I don’t get up the mountain?

We prepare to want to quit because we experience too much failure, but not because we experience TOO MUCH SUCCESS.

The practice is the point: it will buoy me and carry me through in times of creative drought AND flood.

But now that I’ve lost momentum, the danger doesn’t stop here.

When we build a practice and then fall off, that loss of rhythm can feel like all the permission slip / shame spiral we need to just quit.

I succeeded in my goal, but lost the rhythm of the practice. Maybe I should just quit while I’m ahead-ish?

Screw Rule #4: I won’t YES AND! the little voice telling me to turn back now.

You know who knows the answer to this? A tree museum full of suburban Swifties and their middle aged moms. (It’s me. Hi. I’m the middle aged mom it’s me.) JK we def don’t have the answers but that’s where we’re at in Creative Camp today. At the Morton Arboretum for their summer concert series. And it’s Taylor Swift night!

Back to the practice, back to the process.

I am so overwhelmed by my overflowing creativity, I forgot we had tickets to this thing!!! So here I am, laying out crayons and colored pencils in the grass, halfway through Creative Camp and today’s random prompt is:Illustrate.
Architecture.
Slow.

Obviously we’re drawing the Eras House.

Now the fact that I didn’t see the next part coming is kinda hilarious and embarrassing.

Who brings a briefcase full of crayons to a Taylor Swift concert and expects not to become everybody’s favorite camp counselor?!

I look up and I’m surrounded by…CAMPERS!!! 🥹🥹🥹

“Can I color with you?”

This is what camp is supposed to be about. Not to create a 31 part documentary series about a creative director gone wild. But to BE MORE CREATIVE, EVERY DAY EVERYWHERE. To invite EASE whenever possible. To have fun. And hopefully to spread creativity as I go, inviting people to explore their own.

This moment – coloring in the grass with a bunch of happy creative kids all singing the lyrics to their favorite songs – is why we stay in the practice, even when we think it’s too much.

There are never enough moments like this.

This childlike connection to creativity- unfettered by brand culture, the algorithm, performance of the most marketable version of the self – is the part of camp, the anchor that even now pulls me back as I cry making this vlog.

I thought the power of Creative Camp might be in the retelling here on the Internet. I thought camp might rub off and YOU might be inspired to explore your creativity a bit.

But The Internet didn’t bring me campers. Crayons in the grass did.

Welcome to camp.