Episode 20: Creativity

00:52

Hello, and welcome to the 20th episode of Don’t lose your balance. My name is Mallory Durrick. And I want to thank you all for joining. And if this is your first time here, welcome. And if it’s not your first time here, I really appreciate the support. And hopefully that you’ve all been enjoying listening to this podcast, I recently just closed out a gratitude room on clubhouse. And I love this gratitude room. I run it Monday through Sunday with a bunch of other people at 8:30am. Eastern time. And the reason I’m telling you that is if you’re listening and you want to listen in to the gratitude room, feel free to join us on clubhouse. Anyway, we talked today about things in our life, maybe two things that you could find that bring you so much joy that you make priorities for those things. And you can find gratitude in those but putting them as priorities and what are they as priorities that make you really happy. And the first thing that really came to my mind was creativity. And so I’d like to talk a little bit about how creativity has actually helped heal me, as well as helps me to look forward to things in my life that I can then keep going and saying well, you can always fall back on this part of your self and enjoy what you have the skill set to do. And if I, you know, I’m gonna be honest, if I don’t have the skill set, I somehow I learn. And when I learn, I realize that there are things that I’ve never actually tapped into that I just love. So I’m gonna step back a little bit and talk about why the podcast was created in the first place, and how I think it’s actually helped heal me a lot. And bring me to a place of a better understanding about myself. And honestly, this is a creative outlet. And I think podcasts are a wonderful, marvelous thing because of the fact that you can just talk into a microphone, and if people want to listen, they will and if they don’t, okay, that’s fine, too. It didn’t really occur to me at the time I was doing it, how cathartic it would feel. The reason the podcast I think I’ve talked about this in many episodes, but if you’ve not listened to the other episodes, the reason I did this was because I I needed to come to terms with what was really happening in my life and how my past was following me into my present and, and God forbid, into my future. And while I’ve made a lot of good, you know, made good decisions in my life, I’ve also made some really bad ones, as we all know, and I don’t want those things to follow me anymore. And so I use this creative outlet to say, you know what, I’m done hiding. People can have an opinion about who I am and, and what what choices that I’ve made. And Isn’t she a horrible person? And the truth is, no, I’m not I just made some bad choices. Like a lot of people have made bad choices. And I regret those choices. But regret doesn’t have anything to do with getting you into the other side of what I would call a balanced and healthy life. So what did well for me This podcast was a really good creative outlet that I didn’t even know I could do and, and found myself in this wonderful place of oh my gosh, I can I can let go of a lot and I am going to I’m I’m going to guess the people write books. For the same reason I’m doing this podcast, they have a story to tell. There is something very positive about what happens when they share that story. And for some people, their story is so compelling that it becomes a movie and for other people. It’s just like okay, well I’m done.

04:59

I’m not done with my life. I’m just done sharing my story. And hopefully if somebody else read the story, they resonated with it. They felt like they weren’t so alone. So in the gratitude room today we were talking about creativity. And I thought about how important creativity has been my entire life. I don’t think there’s ever been a time where I didn’t use my creative skill set to feel like something mattered in my life, whether I was sewing and I used to make all of my children’s clothes, and I made antique button jewelry with a girlfriend and then on my own, and those button jewelry, bracelets were highly coveted by many people that I knew and they love them. And I still have a handful, a big handful of them. I learned how to knit. I taught myself how to knit when I was six weeks due for my baby girl. And I thought, well, this is going to be great. And I just kept going with it. And I learned how to knit so well that I worked in a yarn shop and I wrote patterns and I made tons of sweaters and I even taught classes. And that knitting then at the time that I was knitting, I was not doing well with drugs and alcohol. And yet somewhere along the line, it didn’t stop me from knitting. In fact, I went so overboard with it. There was a massive amount of yarn in my life too much. Actually, that was the indulgent part. When I look back at cooking, cooking was always a place that I would find extreme comfort, I would go to the supermarket, I would buy fresh fish and I would look at the high quality meats and I would go down into the Explore the Asian markets, and I would be just mesmerized by all the interesting ingredients that I couldn’t even pronounce, let alone know what they did. But I buy them. And I would make amazing recipes. I remember once I looked at Mark Matsumoto on Instagram, I followed him for years and supported him on Patreon. And he’s Japanese chef and he was on chopped, and I loved his recipe for homemade ramen took three days to make and I was buying pigs feed.

07:31

Oh my gosh, it was so great. And I even went to culinary school as a result of my love for cooking. And the reason I’m talking about this now is because I just close out that gratitude room with the other people and I talked about how creativity has really been a part of my life. And when I talk about cooking, even though I’d cook for 30 years, I still went to culinary school and I still can’t figure out why I did that. Other than the fact that I just wanted that culinary, culinary degree. And then I realize how important creativity was in quarantine. quarantine helped a lot of people tap into their creativity. I suspect there were things that were selling out on Amazon and I tapped into the first time the first time ever I tapped into digital art. I didn’t even know what it was I was stumbling into YouTube. And I remember seeing Adobe live. And then it led me into behance, which is a streaming service of Adobe. And I was watching all these digital artists using Adobe Illustrator which I knew how to use but never Photoshop not to the extent that they were illustrating in it. And that led me into other digital art that went to procreate and I got myself an iPad Pro, because I wanted one and I was totally due for an upgrade on my iPad which was really small and really slow and I thought well I can’t really afford this but I said maybe I can’t afford not to have this and I got the iPad and I let it sit in the box for two days before I opened it and said once you open that box you’re committed. And then I got the pencil to go along with it. And I started following tutorials I think Tila Cunningham was the first one and she’s a more like a doodle artist and I looked at all the brushes and I joined Facebook groups and I was really active and realize that once I learned the software between procreate and Photoshop, I’m not actually bad. And I say that in the context of not being bad meaning I’m not stellar. I’m not gonna throw my stuff into galleries or sell NF T’s but I’m not. I’m not bad. I mean, and I think that art is is subjective. So I’m going to be way harder on myself than somebody else might be who might say, well, that’s pretty good. And I look at my stuff and I say, yeah, that is pretty good. But let’s, let’s put the end result aside for one second. And I think to myself, well, gosh, I mean, I could use the procreate and Apple Pencil and iPad Pro for hours. And it and I did, and I would just keep getting better and better and better. And I remember thinking to myself after that, well, my gosh, what would happen if I got my, my hands on actual paints? So I, like I always do, I joined a Facebook group, I thought, well, let me try a watercolor. And I talked to my stepsister in law, my stepbrothers wife, who’s a professional artists, and she’s incredible. And I talked to her first and I said, you know, I’m thinking of watercolor. And she said, Well, watercolors probably the hardest medium. But if you’re going to go do it, get good quality paper. And that is the most important thing to get, and good paints and brushes. I think the paper was more on the lines of if you don’t have good paper, you will not be successful, and you will be more likely to give it up. And she was right.

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So I bought really expensive paints, I really couldn’t afford them either. And I thought, well, I’m stuck inside all by myself, I got to I’ve got to figure out what to do. With all this creativity that I’ve got, you know, building up inside of me that I just, you know, watching art watercolor artists on YouTube, and I’m getting ads through Facebook, and I thought, let me get the let me just get some really good supplies. And let me tell you something, I, I grabbed the paints that I wanted, and I grabbed the paper that I wanted, I grabbed some good quality brushes, and I started painting some really good paintings since I’ve also painted some really ugly and bad paintings. And it didn’t matter what the end result was because the process was saving me creating is something that we can all do. And you don’t have to actually be artists level, to use your creativity to help you get through the rough times. I realize even people who even people who who use Instagram to create really cool collages, they’re being creative, creating mood boards, and going on Pinterest, and you don’t have to be a professional and you don’t have to be exceptionally good at it to tap into that creativity, I’m going to tell every person who may be listening to this right now, if you’re going through a rough time, or if you’re feeling down, find for an hour, if you can find an hour out of your day, find something that you’ve thought about that has interested you and try to tap into that in one way or another. Some people dive into cooking just like I did, they don’t go to culinary school, but they totally dive into cooking. Other people will paint, you can actually take a piece of paper and a pencil and follow a tutorial on YouTube or an online course and learn and the resources that are out there are phenomenal. And I know that as this episode airs, it’s the holiday season and there’s a great opportunity for time off and time with family and things to be creative. With become more prevalent. There are a lot of things that we can do as individuals that can help us get through some really rough, rough times. And when I look back on my life, even though I had suffered with the drugs, even though I was either drinking moderately or excessively, creativity had never really failed me. I remember even being a little girl and building doll houses and dollhouse furniture and I loved it, you know, a sick day. If I didn’t have a fever a sick day, always men today home from school. Well, I could do something creative, whether it was you know, coloring or like I said the doll houses.

14:47

And I don’t think I really recognized it to the extent that I’m recognizing it right here and right now how creativity can actually save you and if you can find whatever that might be, you can find a way into balance. So if you’ve got all this chaos around you, or you’re going through a really difficult time, or maybe you’re just unhappy or, or let’s say you’re even bored. If you find creativity, whatever you can tap into, even in its smallest entity of your life, you may actually find you’re not only good at it, but you feel a lot better. And it helps kind of bring you up to something that you feel balanced, you know, you look forward to it. At the end of the day, I’m going to go make some jewelry, I’m going to go paint a picture, I’m going to create a collage, I’m going to create a mood board or an inspiration board by clipping magazine pieces and gluing them onto a one to a canvas of some kind. And that can really help you. I hope that whoever’s listening doesn’t feel like just because they’re not superbly tapped into creativity yet, or they’re not an artist, that they don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s in everybody, I really believe that it is in everybody. It just comes out in different ways. Even scrapbooking is so creative, and I like the idea of scrapbooking, but I was never very good at it. And I’m not sure why. And I even had all the supplies and I ended up giving them to my sister and she’s got them and they’re just sitting in a closet probably, but they’re always there for her you know, so I come from a very creative family my mother and my father are interior designers and while I was never graded interior design, I had my own skills and my own talents and I tapped into many of them and I’m 58 years old and I’m still tapping in them today. So as the holidays are coming to a close and I’m recording this before the holidays but I am putting myself into the future I want to say to everybody that I hope that you had a great healthy and happy holiday season with your family and your friends and that you tapped into your creative juices and if you haven’t that you’ll start and think about this episode and say I can do that I think I’m going to go do something creative today.

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Okay, well that’s it an all I’ve got for today I want to thank everybody for listening and if you like this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance Feel free to share it download it write a review that would be really appreciated. And you can follow me on Instagram I have two handles one is Mallory underscore direct and the other is don’t lose your balance Emma’s and Mary SS and Sam D as in David, don’t lose your balance m s d i also have a website which is don’t lose your balance calm and a Facebook page with the same name. So I will see you next time and I hope you have a wonderful and healthy and happy day. I’ll see ya thanks for listening. Bye!

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.