Originally Written on July 25, 2018 // Updated April 2020

"If you're alive, you're a creative person." - Elizabeth Gilbert (from Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)

She's right, you know. Every single one of us has the potential to create. Beginning with curiosity, blending into discovery. To lift a log up off the ground just to see what's living underneath it in wet darkness. To scratch pennies on rocks to see what kind of patterns they might take. To repurpose used firework packaging and sell it to people on the road (because who needs a lemonade stand when you can make cool sh*t out of burned bits of paper tubing instead?)

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

In 7th grade I burned a serious creative bridge with my math teacher, Mrs. W--- (To this day, I 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 - vexed by the illogical high school stuff: trigonometry, calculus and factorials (exclamation points should be saved for super exciting things only, IMO).

So Mrs. W, the 7th grade math teacher, 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 (yes, a fish, don't ask me why), using those exact measurements.

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 by age seven. Fast forward to age twelve: I wasn't thrilled about making the fish for Mrs. Waskowski, but to be clear, I also wasn't incapable.

The week of the math fish project, I was shopping at the mall with my aunt and 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. Waskowski 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. Mine...

Mrs. W was irate. Not happy about my genius fish pillow. Not happy I bought my fish at JC Penney in a bin on an end cap. Not happy that even though I didn't sew the fish myself, I was creative enough to recognize that yes, this fish pillow is the exact size I need, and given there were no rules at all 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.

Mrs. W told the class that I cheated, made me take the fish down from the ceiling, 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 told 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 (yes, creative) solution for the project. Sometimes "creativity" means more than coming home from Michaels with a bag full of wooden birdhouses and every color 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 will not let closed-minded people like Mrs. W get me down.

And when you put it out there, sometimes the creative solution you need falls right into your lap. Sometimes in the form of a fish pillow.

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