Flaws Connected to Gifts and Creativity is Alive

So I was talking to someone about how I personalize things a lot. By personalizing, I mean, that I'll take someone's actions, whether they are directly interacting with me or not, and think that it somehow displays how they feel about me, and it's usually in a negative way. It's quite a horrible habit and I'm trying to stop it.

Anyways, I was telling someone about this, and she just laughed and said, "Wow Hannah. You ARE super creative. You begin to create these long elaborate stories and just go with it." I just laughed back and said, "Yeah, I love stories, and I tend to just do this all the time in my head." And then the conversation continued as we talked about personalization and such.

Then it hit me later: this person was able to take something that can essentially be seen as a HUGE flaw, and saw the good point in it: creativity. She saw that while it wasn't good for me to create all these assumptions in how I must be bothering people and such, she also saw that in it, laid a gift. Granted, I was using the gift to create horrid assumptions and play out fears, but it was still a gift.

So it made me wonder on how many of our "flaws" are intricately connected to our gifts or hint at our gifts in someway. One basic thing is that I'm a disorganized person for the most part. I've learned organization and it's helped me to handle mass amounts of information and other things, but it doesn't come to me naturally. However, I realized that this lack of organization also points to how I never really put things in categories, physically and mentally. I see a car hubcap and I don't think, "It is an automotive part that belongs on a car wheel," I think, "That could be on a car wheel, or a dinner plate, or a clock, or a frisbee, or a sweet decoration on my wall." I see something and don't put it in a category, but automatically begin thinking about all the other categories I could fit it into. This is why organization can give me a literal headache at times. I'm so used to thinking outside the box, that it's a struggle for me to figure out what box to put things into.

This comment also hit home because I do struggle with what it means to be creative and wonder if I'm creative or original or not. Being creative and original can be very hard in today's society. So much information gets passed out there and around, that it's hard to not just want to copy others. And even if we don't originally copy someone, many times, we find out that someone else did the exact same thing we did.

But as I've entered more into the art world, I see that many artists do look at other art for inspiration. We copy each other all the time. But what ends up happening is that an artist looks for art for inspiration or for a technique, takes it, and then adds his or her own twist to it. Or takes parts from other artists and creates a whole new thing. This is still being creative. You're breaking down other original ideas, and creating something new with them. Creativity isn't dead. It is being reborn each and everyday.

So summary:
-Whatever "flaws" you think you may, also point to gifts that you really do have; Start figuring those out and try using those gifts for good too.
-Being creative doesn't mean you have to 100% original; just create something that wasn't there before. Learn skills and techniques, and then BAM, let your creativity soar. Have fun!