Why You Need Creativity, with Roxane Gay

(gentle music) Headspace Studio. (gentle music continues) Hello, I am Roxanne Gay. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning. I am your guest host for the week, and I am thrilled to be spending this time with you all. If you aren't familiar with my work, I'm the author of several books, including "Bad Feminist", "Hunger" and "Opinions". I'm also an editor and a professor at Rutgers University. Writing and being creative have brought me so much joy, so much satisfaction, a real sense of purpose throughout my life. And when we all tap into our creativity, I believe it can do the same for all of us. So this week is all about how to bring and foster creativity into your life. I'll cover things like why creativity is so essential to the human experience, how to bring ideas to life, and of course, how to navigate creative blocks. Today we're gonna start with unpacking why creativity matters and why this week applies to everyone listening. I started writing when I was four years old, and at the time I would draw little villages on napkins, and I couldn't tell you why it was napkins, but there we are, and I would write stories about the people I imagined living in these little villages. And I just loved it because I loved reading and I read from a very early age. And being able to tell stories to make things up was just incredibly satisfying, and it was fun. Reading and writing brought me great joy, and they still do to this day. I am not an angsty writer. I love doing it most of the time, and I love just being able to articulate my understanding of the world and to share that with readers. One of the greatest things my parents ever did for me, well two of the things, when they noticed that I loved reading, they took me to the library every Saturday, and they also got me a typewriter, which of course dates me, but they gave me the tools that would help me do the thing that I loved, and I absolutely credit them with allowing me to believe that becoming a writer was possible. The most enjoyable part is ideas. When there are no boundaries, there are no limits, it's just me and the page, and I don't know what something is going to be yet. I'm not working under any kind of deadline. It's just for me. Writing allows me to have good mental health. I definitely, when I'm not writing, when I have too much time away from it, it completely affects my mood. And so writing is a space where I get to do anything where there are no limitations. If there are limitations, I get to use my imagination to figure out creative ways to overcome those limitations, and I encounter them all the time. You know, I deal with writer's block as much as anyone, but...