Originally Written on July 25, 2018 // Updated March 2026

"If you're alive, you're a creative person."

- Elizabeth Gilbert (from Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)

Liz is right, you know. Every single one of us has the potential to create. Beginning with curiosity, blending into discovery. Here were some of my creative beginnings.

Lifting a log up off the ground just to see what's living underneath it in wet darkness. Scratching pennies on rocks to see what kind of patterns they take. Creating an altar for a dead tree in the woods using exclusively rusty metal objects. Repurposing used firework packaging and selling it to people on the road (because when lemonade stands are a dime a dozen, standing out is essential).

Obviously throughout my life, my definition of creativity has been loose.

In 7th grade I burned a serious creative bridge with my math teacher, Mrs. Waskowski (to this day, I still see it the other way around). I was always okay at math. Good at the middle school stuff: algebra, geometry, and those long-worded sentence problems, yet vexed by the illogical high school stuff: trigonometry, calculus and factorials (exclamation points should be saved for exciting things only, IMO).

So Mrs. W assigned us a project - something to do with triangles and hypotenuses. The problem, when solved, lended a length, width and height in inches which we then had to create a fish out of using those exact measurements.

Now look, I've always been a crafty kid. I managed a restaurant, including menu design and preparation of every play-doh item on the menu by age eight and my grandmother had me embroidering monograms by age seven. Fast forward to age twelve: I wasn’t thrilled about making the fish for Mrs. W, but to be clear, I wasn’t incapable.

The week of the fish project, I was shopping at the mall with my aunt. JC Penney, I swear on everything that is sacred to me, had a huge bin of fish pillows on an aisle end cap. You read that right: FISH. PILLOWS. Silky cotton-like pillows all different colors and shapes and sizes of fish.

I will never forget the moment I saw those fish pillows. It was a pivotal moment in my life. I raced over to the bin hardly able to believe my eyes. I dove my hands in and threw the fish pillows up in the air, My prayers have been answered! All the fish pillows I could ever need to fulfill this stupid fish project!

One of the fish pillows matched my exact length, width and height measurements of the math problem. It was one of the prettier pillows - a pirhana-shaped fish with streaks of magenta and royal blue all across it. When I got it home, I hot glued silver glitter and sequins in an undulating pattern across the sides. I'm such a genius, I thought. Look at this beautiful fish I found.

When I brought it to school the next day, Mrs. W hung my fish, along with everyone else's, from the ceiling (turns out she just wanted free classroom decor). Mine was by far the best and prettiest fish project. Two days went by and peers were still telling me how awesome my fish was. Granted, I did not care whether I had the best fish or not — all that mattered to me was that the fish project was complete.

A few days later, someone in class noticed the spot where I had cut off the UPC tag on the seam of my fish pillow. They pointed up and said, Mrs. W, why is there a tag on that fish?

Her reaction: (face bloodred) WHOSE fish IS this?

Me: (face also bloodred) Um. It’s mine...

Mrs. W was irate. Not happy about my genius fish pillow. Angry I thwarted her arts & crafts project and bought my fish at JC Penney in a bin on an end cap. Unable to recognize that even though I didn't sew the fish myself, I was creative enough to discover this fish pillow was the exact size I needed. Given there were no rules whatsoever about how to make or acquire a fish, I thought it perfectly acceptable to use the fish pillow. There were lots of loopholes in her fish project.

On the spot, Mrs. W told the class that I cheated, made me stand on a desk and take the fish down from the ceiling myself, and told me to go home and make a new one to put up the next day.

So what did I do? I went home and made the ugliest goddamn fish you would have ever seen.

I tell this story because to this day I disagree with Mrs. W’s treatment of my 7th-grade fish project — more so, her treatment of my creative solution for the project (and 25 years later, I also realize this was no way to treat a kid).

Sometimes "creativity" means more than coming home from Michaels with a bag full of wooden doodads and every metallic paint available. Sometimes creativity means throwing your fears to the wind and thinking beyond the typical solution to a problem. I face this everyday in the flower field, and as I grow my business, I do not allow closed-minded people to tamp down my creative compass.

When you put it out there into the universe, the creative solution you seek eventually always falls right into your lap. Sometimes it’s in the form of a fish pillow.

So what is it you seek?