To any reader who considers themselves creative:

1) Describe the moment that you first considered yourself creative.

2) Describe how others reacted to you at that moment.

My story — I could give any number of anecdotes for the first question, but I will pick the moment I wrote my first poems in third grade. My third grade teacher taught us poetry forms, including diamante, sonnet, and haiku; I enjoyed building words into new structures and quickly took to the tasks.

My third grade teacher, I suspect, thought me her prodigy and posted one of my poems on her classroom door. Some classmates and many teachers stopped me in the hallway to tell me it was a nice poem. My sister, ten months older, was livid. My parents hardly acknowledged my accomplishment because they worked hard to keep my sister from low self-esteem.

(Edited for ambiguous pronouns and nouns in the last paragraph, like a good writer 😉   )