My friends are creatives. They make things that are so beautifully rendered, you would think they had grown of their own accord. They can turn their hands to anything. Glazing ceramics, knitting scarves, painting murals. It's more than their artistic ability, though. Creatives have a particular way of being and doing in the world. They approach situations that I see as problems as opportunities for something different. They move in flow state, without ego, focused on the work. Each one of them living breathing contradictions to the Tortured Artist trope.

I am not a creative. Yes, writing is considered a creative act but it's an important distinction in my case. Look, this is not for lack of trying. I've dabbled in singing lessons, embroidery, air clay pottery kits. A friend bought me a gorgeous set of Japanese wax crayons. I doodle when I should be working, only capable of crude blocks of colour. My husband picked me up from a dress-making workshop where I had been holding hot tears in for the whole two hours, bursting with frustration at my lack of skill. Nothing sticks.

Well, I write. I always have. Nowhere near as often as I would like. I get angry if I haven't written for a while. But then when I come back to it, I also resist it, fussing about the conditions. Sure, I have this afternoon but I don't have the entire day. Turns out you can be anxious avoidant about anything, kids! Kind people might argue that I am specialising. But my narrow artistic range haunts me. The creatives emanate an ease, a freedom that is alien to me. What if I am not an artist, just an astonishing control freak?

An underrated function of philosophy is to dash any illusion of being a singular individual. I was recently reminded of this Nietzsche quote:

Every artist knows how far from the feeling of letting himself go his "natural" condition is, the free ordering placing, disposing, forming in the moment of "inspiration" - and how strictly and subtly he then obeys thousandfold laws which precisely on account of their severity and definiteness mock all formulation in concepts... The essential thing "in heaven and upon earth" seems to be protracted obedience on one direction, from out of there always emerges and has always emerged in the long run, something for the sake of which it is worthwhile to live on earth, for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality - something transfiguring, mad, and divine.

Huh, that horse-hugger can really write.