Growing up, I never thought of myself as a creative person. I'm good at remembering things, and I'm good at thinking about things, so I do end up coming up with clever solutions to problems --- I'm a problem solver at heart, which I suppose is a reason I went into engineering --- but I never thought of myself as creative. Somehow those two things seemed so distinct, to me.

I think I might've been putting myself in a weird sort of box. I didn't think of myself as creative, so I didn't build that muscle, or rather, I built it while solving problems, but never applied it to art.

Now, I find myself wanting to make things. Write a novel, make a game, make a movie... Stuff like that; draw. It feels weird to try and come up with ideas that don't serve a purpose. It's not like optimizing my wardrobe for durability and versatility, or writing some code to make my browser better fit my needs. I have another kind of problem: I want it to be beautiful, fun, interesting; not useful.

I do feel it's a large failure, on my part. One thing I always imagined for myself was developing a philosopher life-build: knowing a lot about a lot of things, doing a lot of things. Being an artist and an artisan and a thinker. I'm a thinker alright, but I'm severely lacking in the other departments... I'm working on both, though, and I hope to continue to make progress.