Unshelved
I grew up in a house without labels. You’d open the kitchen cabinet to pull out a jar with a Horlicks cap and a ‘sugar’ label, only to find flour in it. Board games were hardly arranged in stacks, just placed in the vicinity of a designated area. And the Dr. Suess lay next to the Atomic Habits in perfect irony of what the Cat in the Hat stood for. Growing up, I embraced this chaos. My love for writing translated to me writing plays, eventually finding my way to the stage. My love for expression bled into my love for dancing. My journey with classical dance led to a proclivity for perfectionism, which infiltrated every other aspect of my personality. Comparison might be the thief of joy, but perfectionism is the thief of creativity. But I had already begun labelling myself as the ‘type of person’ who was creative - the person who always thought out of the box, the one who’d express herself with different mediums, the one who’d always pushed the boundaries of what...