Around the time that I was twelve years old, my primary area of interest started shifting from sports (specifically baseball), to the arts (specifically theater). It must have partially been due to the fact that I wasn’t very good at sports, but it also had to do with the way that I was starting to find a voice, a persona, a sense of belonging in the world of middle school theater. I had started acting in the school plays and was part of a cast that traveled to perform at the town’s elementary schools. Being on stage was a thrill, but even more exciting was getting to be part of a whole production. We were a little community, a group of middle school students who got to miss school for the sake of something fun, something different, something creative.
Through the rest of middle school and all throughout high school the theater became my home inside of school. It was the place where I found my closest friends, the place where I could escape from the stress and boredom of high school, and the place where I could explore my creativity. In addition to being onstage I learned how to operate the light and sound board, I helped build out sets, and in my junior year I got the chance to direct a play.
But even more than the productions that I loved, it was the community and our culture of creativity that was most meaningful to me. Whether it was a theater class, after school drama club, or the games we made up backstage, it was the practice of thinking and acting creatively that was most impactful on me. While the rest of my school life felt confining, rote, and unbearably scripted, the theater was a place of improvisation, a place where I learned to think on my feet, where I learned to solve problems. While the rest of my classes were trying to fill my head with answers that people before me came up with to the problems that they encountered, the theater was where I learned to imagine answers that didn’t exist yet to challenges that were right in front of me.
The other place in my life where I got to practice creativity was my summer camp. Around the same time that I was directing plays and being given keys to the light booth of my school auditorium, I was becoming a counselor at the summer camp I grew up going to. At sixteen years old, before I was allowed to drive, I was given a group of ten year olds to be responsible for, and I thrived in the role. There was something about the responsibility of it that unlocked a confidence in me that had previously been dormant. Standing in front of this group of rowdy ten year olds, I found myself knowing what to do, I found myself engaging my problem solving skills, I found myself able to imagine answers to the challenges that were now in front of me.
This in the moment problem solving, this thinking on my feet, this instinct I discovered I had for imagining answers to emergent challenges became a key element of the person I was growing into, of the way I was beginning to understand myself in the world. And once unlocked, the confidence I had in these abilities grew more and more with every new challenge that I faced, with every new responsibility I took on.
Responsibility, it turned out, not only unlocked my confidence, it unlocked my creativity. The more I was relied on to figure things out, to find out of the box solutions to out of the box problems, the more comfortable I became stretching my imagination, the more comfortable I became thinking outside of all of the boxes.
Camp soon became a blank canvas where my creativity could thrive. With my newfound confidence and emerging creativity I began designing entire day-long immersive activities that brought elements of the theater into the camp’s educational programming.
That outlet, that space to practice and to play, widened my understanding of where creativity lived and what it could be applied to. I knew fairly early in my high school theater career that I was never going to be an artist in a traditional sense, but the opportunity to unlock, practice, and build my muscles of creativity in the world of camp, in the world of experiential design, allowed me to see other pathways for centering creative expression in my life and my work, allowed me to expand my understanding of what an artist could be, and allowed me to feel comfortable seeing myself as one.