Just kidding 🙂 . I don’t know where it comes from, but I have a constant worry that I’m not creative. That I do not create, but just consume. I can’t really draw (though I can make a mean doodle!), I’m not a great cook and don’t take joy in it. I don’t create video games in my spare time like my partner. I thought I didn’t have a creative outlet and should be contributing something to the world when I realized…I already do that.
I LOVE taking photos and always have. I’m always snapping candids or stopping to take a picture of a new, beautiful flower I haven’t seen before (always to my partner’s annoyance 😉 ). I love looking at photos: seeing all the food, landscapes and portraits of people in our beautiful, crazy world. As for taking photos I prefer that my subjects be inanimate :). I’m all about food and landscape photos.
I realized I do create and have created for a while. Most recently I’ve been creating multiple times a day actually: on Instagram. I’m constantly capturing photos of my food, editing them, writing a caption and sharing the moment. But let’s take a step back to how I got there.
I used to journal about every thing I did in a day. This started in college and continued through all four years and into my first year of the working world. Sadly I wasn’t able to keep it up once I started my first, crazy job. Maybe too much was happening. Maybe I just didn’t have the time (or make the time), but it fell my the wayside. I needed another way to answer the questions:
“What the hell did I do last year?!
Am I wasting my life?!
Where did all my money go??”
So I started posting the thousands of pictures I take on Facebook as a bit of a catalogue describing where I ate, what I did and if I enjoyed it. Now I can just look at my Facebook timeline and be pleasantly surprised “Oh – I got all that restaurant food for only $2,000?? That’s amazing!” or “That vacation was totally worth the money and/or travel hacking.” It helps me to record my experiences with one of my favorite media: Photography. It actually might be my favorite because I have a horrible memory outside of work :). I guess I’m using all my capacity and hopefully I can redirect it after retirement.
Since I started eating low-carb/high-fat in January I’ve been looking for recipe ideas, food inspiration and a community. Reddit provided a bit of those things, but I wanted more. Someone suggested I check out Instagram which I never used because I thought of it as a mini-Facebook. I was wrong. Most people create a specific Instagram account to share a certain interest: in this case keto. Instagram was a game-changer. It turns out it’s an even tighter community than Reddit and has a lot more lazy style food suggestions (since it’s what real people are eating instead of just sharing recipes). And I love lazy :). In addition to learning and having a community I wanted to catalog my journey learning to cook and trying new recipes so I started posting to Instagram for basically the first time ever.
I’ve now been posting for 7 months and Instagram has done more than provide what I was looking for. It’s helped other people find inspiration and even start keto. I know because they told me in real life(!) which I didn’t think would happen. Digital and real life don’t seem to intersect that much strangely.
I’ve mentioned in another post about how I enjoy cooking more (more like hate less 🙂 ) since I can now easily create delicious meals with butter and cheese. Well not only have I developed that creative outlet, but now I have another one: food photography on Instagram! I’ve also been a bit of a food arranger, thinking about the best ways to plate food to make it look good. It’s hilarious. So I went from thinking I was uncreative to realizing I’ve been creating all along.
To finish this post here’s a picture that had me cracking up. Enjoy:
