Creative vs. Technical: What’s your Drug?

Tell me what itches you? Moves you out of bed? Makes you Brew!

This has been an endless question of my pursuit for a vocation. Endless times have I had this conversation with myself in the head. If there was a transcript to this repeated conversation with my brain, science would discover a loop of an epidemic syndrome of “Not Willing to Decide” that itches me? What makes me get out of bed? What makes me Me!

Here is what I have done in my career, to be precise with my Technical Career:

1. A-Grader all my school life
2. Aced my 10th Boards and like anyone and everyone who think above 80% entitles them to become a doctor or engineer I take Science
3. Math, Physics, Chemistry: There is an over exhaustion which causes combustion and I tank in my 12th Boards
4. Like all those desolate science students frizzing out in their 12th grades, I sign up for B.Sc and accidentally check for Statistics as my majors and voila I’m in.
5. I do well in my B.Sc. and come out with good colours
6. CLUELESS ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO DO
7. Started as a Junior Executive in Back End Customer Support Operations for a Telecom giant in the UK
8. I move to Marketing Analytics with all the buzz around Big Data and also because it goes back to my roots in Statistics (which I loved studying btw)
9. 2 years in Analytics and I’m out, exploring a whole new dimension- earning from writing- I’m a burgeoning Content Writer
10. After a year of earning on my own, I am invited to join a start-up and I tell myself how will it hurt anyway? And I’ll get a regular paycheck. Let’s do it. BEST JOB in my experience list to date
11. A year and I’m out moving to a new city, taking up a new job, trying to make sense of a team I can see no rhythm of structure in
12. Close to completing 4 months and here, I am simmering in these thoughts writing what I will write further

Here’s what I have done with my creativity:

1. I’m about 11 or 12 years of age and something happens, I have an inspiration to write and I write a poem. I thought that’s splendid
2. But this happens again after a few months and I write again
3. I stumble across our not so fancy school library where the minimum school budget was spent and there were no upgrades. The librarian agrees to give me a book to keep for summer vacation (because it is in a torn and tattered condition) and I leap to that opportunity
4. Summer vacation: I read Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven. I am hungry I want more. I am addicted but we cannot afford to buy me books (sob story)
5. So I wait for the school to reopen and the very first day I get another book
6. There I am reading Hound of the Baskervilles, Wuthering Heights, The Brontë Sisters and my journey continues
7. I have occasional inspirations and I etch poems in my school book- the only one book we were allowed to use for ‘Creativity’ and that was limited in number too
8. I’m about 12 or 14 and I tell myself “I want to be a writer” or maybe it’s vice versa, some voice inside me telling me, guiding me, “You want to be a writer”
9. I am 16 and I tell everyone I want to be an engineer
10. I am 19 and I have to take up B.Sc. with zero hopes of my dream of becoming an “engineer” ever coming true
11. I am 21 and I start a blog which over years has evolved into many other blogs finally settling down to The Brewing Writer on Medium- poetry, philosophy, life, love, letters; everything that has moved me from within is etched and most times shared on this public reading space
12. I am 18 I fall in love; I am 21, I fall in love; I am 25, I fall in love; I am 28, I fall out of love

This morning when I wake up and am lazying around in bed, like the way I have been lazying around for the past three years since that very first time the unsettling feeling started to whirl within me- This morning I ask myself:

“What makes me itch? What makes me get out of bed? What brews me? What stirs me? What is my purpose? Where is my direction? How does it stop? When is it not unsettling anymore?”

So I pick up my sword and fight- the mightier sword of all! I fight the unsettling question of all: Creative vs. Technical, what makes the juices flow? What is it that will rest me in peace? What is more important? What has the higher risk of unbecoming? What has in them the satisfaction that I need?

And here, by the end of this piece, by the end of every piece of writing, by the end of that tunnel of every single inspiration, the cluttering sound of my fingers moving on the keyboard typing real fast, words flowing, the rhythm of the fingers that can find the right keys without even looking, the brain finding the right words to complete the right statements: THIS IS MY MUSIC.

There is composition, there is movement, there is creation, there is an essence, there is rhythm, there is divine, there is peace.

The period at the end of the last word of every piece of creation- That’s where my peace lies. That shines the light bright. That makes me breathe in and breathe out at peace. That’s where it smells like that beautiful morning coffee that brews.

My drug is Creation and the juice is Creativity!