I delete the same sentence from my thesis introduction, for the twentieth time today. It feels like no combination of letters will save me: how will any of them convince a PhD assessment committee?
The ringing bell is a welcome interruption. I join my friend for a walk, happy to enjoy the three days of summer we get this year.
We wander through the canals when she stops abruptly, summons a notebook, and starts sketching the alleyways. She tells me how she can use it in her next commission: a cover for a fantasy book.
For a few minutes, her attention is entirely absorbed. She sees something I am not, hears magic whispers in an unknown language, and takes notes of their message.
“I envy how creative your job is,” I tell her.
“But your job is creative too, no?”
Not the right question for today.
“Well, in a way,” I say. “I can be creative with my lectures and my research, but both come with constraints. I teach what needs to be taught. I research what I'm funded to research. My work depends on collaborators, deadlines, publishing venues... It never feels as creative as stopping in the middle of the street because you've just found inspiration.”
We stay silent for a while.
“You know, I was quite creative as a kid,” I add. “Always making up stories. My mum could leave me with a pencil case and come back hours later, to hear all about the adventures of the courageous Blue Pen, who fought the evil Black Pencil for the love of Red Eraser.”
“Look, I get it,” she laughs. “But you see: I have a creative job. I’ll stop mid-street if I get an idea, but I also have to prepare the content they asked for. I can't use just any colour because it depends on the printer. It depends entirely on what the client wants, and there is nothing - nothing - that will make preparing the printing tests any less boring.”
She shrugs.
“It's on you to find space for creativity. If you can't find it in your job, no one will.”
She continues towards a café, sketchbook in her hand. In my desk drawer, I have a notebook of the same size. It is filled with spiderwebs of connections between concepts from the papers I read.
I think about my supervisors and me, surrounded by post-it notes, trying to find themes amid participants’ responses, suddenly realising two themes belong together. The whiteboard behind my desk, covered with Dutch expressions, plant-watering duties, and the structure of my PhD thesis.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped recognising the creativity in what I was doing. I told myself that creativity required a freedom I did not have. But maybe creativity exists precisely within boundaries, because they define the space in which our ideas can play with one another.
After all, if I once built endless stories from a pencil case, surely a PhD project is enough to work with.