if you've ever had a crush, you're a Creative

there's an art gallery hiding in the mind of everyone who has ever longed for someone. a space where we become architects of possibility, painters of futures that exist only in the tender space between reality and desire. we rarely acknowledge this curious truth: having a crush might be our first and most universal creative act.

when we develop a crush, we surrender to a magnificent form of madness. we construct elaborate fantasies around glances that lasted mere seconds. we choreograph conversations in shower steam and before sleep swallows us whole. we create entire universes around the simple question: what if?

isn't this precisely what art demands of us? this willingness to imagine beyond what exists, to see possibility where there is only void?

in the grip of infatuation, you become a tender collector of whispered details: the way their fingers brush against their neck when they're focused, their unexpected laugh at a joke, how shy they look in their glasses on a lazy day, how their body catches a beat with a quiet sway, how they tilt their beer bottle just slightly askew, as if sharing a secret with gravity. these observations become the soft clay of your imagination, the gentle pigments with which you paint worlds inside yourself.

and like any dedicated artist, you begin to work with these materials. you arrange and rearrange them. you imagine scenarios: running into them at that café they mentioned once, the perfect witty response to their joke, the comfortable silence on a hypothetical road trip. each daydream is a sketch, each fantasy a draft.

what makes both crushing and creating so exhilarating (and terrifying) is the threat of rejection hovering at the edges. the painting might be ridiculed. the poem might be misunderstood. the crush might never wake you up with coffee.

yet we persist. because the alternative — never imagining, never risking, never feeling the electric current of possibility — seems unbearable compared to even the sharpest sting of rejection.

when we develop a crush, we practice the essential creative skill of emotional speculation. we ask ourselves: what would it feel like to be loved by this specific person? how would my life reshape itself around their presence? what version of myself might emerge in the light of their attention?

these questions mirror the ones that haunt every artist: what world am i trying to build? what truth am i attempting to reveal? what does this creation say about who i am?

a crush transforms ordinary moments into occasions for creative problem-solving. the strategizing alone is worthy of a chess grandmaster: calculating the perfect moment to arrive at a gathering where they might be, crafting the message that seems casual yet invites deeper connection, choosing clothes that might catch their eye without seeming to try. this is craftsmanship. this is revision. this is the meticulous attention to detail that any creative process demands.

and when the crush is unrequited (as so many are) we learn another crucial lesson of creativity: how to transmute disappointment into meaning. we become alchemists, turning the lead of rejection into the gold of understanding. we tell ourselves stories about why it couldn't work, what it taught us, how it changed us. we metabolize the experience into something that nourishes rather than depletes. isn't this what we do with failed poems, abandoned paintings, stories that refuse to resolve themselves? we salvage what we can. we carry the lessons forward.

have you noticed how time stretches into an endless beige corridor when you're without a crush? how days blend into one another, how routine becomes not comfort but confinement? this is the same emptiness that follows the completion of a creative project: the canvas is blank again, the page is empty, the clay unformed.

without something — or someone — to imagine into existence, we move through spaces without truly inhabiting them. we observe without absorption. we exist without enchantment.

it's a peculiar kind of drought, this crushless, creationless state. you can feel it physically. a certain dullness behind the eyes, a slight heaviness in your movements. the world loses its shimmer. colors seem less saturated. possibilities contract.

this is why, after the grief of rejection has softened, you might find yourself longing for even the pain of an impossible crush. at least then you were alive. at least then you were creating something, even if it existed only in the private universe of your desire.

some of our most intricate creative works exist only in the private galleries of our almost-loves. elaborate date scenarios that never materialized. conversations that never unfurled. lives that never intertwined with ours.

these phantom creations matter. they reveal our deepest yearnings, our hidden capacities for joy and connection. they show us what we're capable of imagining when our hearts are on the line.

i'm afraid not enough of us are crushing on the world itself. yet that's what attention truly is! (see: the sweetest scene from sweetest movie, ladybird) a form of devotion, a kind of longing. when you stop to notice the way late afternoon light filters through winter branches, when your fingers trace the raised veins of a leaf with the same attention you'd give to a lover's lips, when you catch yourself mesmerized by the concentric ripples in your coffee as the cup trembles in your hand: you're crushing on existence. but how rarely we allow ourselves this romance with reality, how quickly we scroll past the everyday miracles that surround us.

and like any crush, this attentiveness transforms you. it makes you more alive to nuance, more receptive to beauty, more capable of wonder. it turns you into a collector of moments, a curator of experiences, an archivist of the extraordinary hiding within the ordinary.

this is why children seem to exist in a perpetual state of creativity. they haven't yet been taught to ration their attention, to hierarchize their interests, to be embarrassed by their enthusiasms. they crush on everything: the iridescence of a soap bubble, the mysterious workings of a doorknob, the perfect roundness of a pebble found on a walk.

what would happen if we reclaimed this capacity? if we treated each day as worthy of the same obsessive attention we give our romantic objects? if we allowed ourselves to be as absorbed in the texture of our daily lives as we are in the imagined texture of a crush's hair?

the most profound gift of a crush isn't the flutter in your stomach when they enter a room. it's the way they transfigure ordinary time. suddenly, a tuesday afternoon becomes pregnant with possibility. the walk to work becomes a narrative rich with potential plot twists. the most mundane errand might contain the seed of an encounter that could change everything.

this is precisely what creativity does to our experience of time! it rescues us from chronology and delivers us to kairos — sacred time, time outside of time, time that expands to contain multitudes.

think about how you feel when immersed in a creative project you love. how hours dissolve. how you exist simultaneously in multiple dimensions: the physical space where your body sits and the imaginative space you're building. this time-bending magic is identical to the alternate reality created by a crush.

what if we understood this connection not as coincidence but as instruction? what if the purpose of our crushes — beyond their potential to develop into actual relationships — is to teach us how to bring this same quality of enchanted attention to everything we do?

there's a particular quality of attention that both crushes and creativity demand. it's not just concentration. it's contemplation. not just focus. but fascination. it transforms the observer as much as the observed. it's a form of devotion that changes what it touches.

this quality of attention is increasingly rare in a world engineered to fragment our focus and monetize our distractions. perhaps this is why crushes feel so deliciously countercultural — they force us into a state of sustained concentration that feels almost rebellious in its intensity.

when you have a crush, you become a scholar of specificity. you notice the exact shade of their eyes in different lights. you catalog the particular rhythm of their speech. you develop theories about the meaning behind their most casual gestures. it's observation elevated to an art form.

now imagine bringing this same quality of attention to your work, your relationships, your surroundings. imagine treating everything with the reverence you bring to the object of your infatuation. many call this mindfulness: the radical act of perception that refuses the flattening effects of familiarity.

not everyone can paint. not everyone can write poetry or compose music or design buildings. but everyone — absolutely everyone — can develop a crush.

this is the great democratic truth about human creativity: while talent may be unequally distributed, the capacity for rapt attention, for fascination, for imaginative projection? these are birthright gifts we all possess.

you don't need an mfa to create elaborate scenarios in your mind about the person who makes your coffee every morning. you don't need special training to construct entire conversations with the stranger whose smile caught your attention on the subway. this form of creativity requires no credentials, no permission, no external validation.

and yet, somewhere along the way, many of us begin to doubt our creative capacities. we divide the world into "creatives" and everyone else. we convince ourselves that imagination belongs to a special class of people, not to us ordinary mortals going about our ordinary lives.

this is the great theft: not that our artistic endeavors might be rejected, but that we might never recognize ourselves as artists in the first place.

both crushing and creating require us to be simultaneously dissatisfied with what exists and deeply in love with possibility. they demand a peculiar kind of optimism! one that acknowledges the incompleteness of the present while insisting on the potential richness of the future.

this is true even when we're in committed relationships or content with being single. in long-term relationships, this might mean deliberately cultivating a sense of mystery about your partner, refusing the illusion that you know everything about them. it might mean creating space for continued discovery, for the delight of realization.

for those content with singleness, it might mean channeling the energy of infatuation into passionate engagement with ideas, with nature, with community. it might mean recognizing that the flutter in your stomach when you're about to start a new project is biochemically identical to the flutter of meeting someone new.

what crushes and creativity have in common is their ability to metabolize wonder into meaning. they transform our raw amazement at being alive into something we can share, something that connects us to others, something that outlasts the initial impulse.

this metabolism isn't automatic. it requires practice. the practice of staying open, of refusing cynicism, of choosing vulnerability over detachment. it requires us to risk looking foolish, to embrace the possibility of failure, to accept that our hearts will break and our efforts will sometimes fall short.

because the alternative? a life without wonder, without fascination, without the courage to imagine beyond what exists… is dreary. it's mere survival, a going through the motions that honors neither the gift of consciousness nor the brief miracle of being here at all.