Creativity and it's Subjectiveness

I’m finding myself in an odd place after reading this chapter… I honestly came into this chapter with the belief that illness was very much an integral part of the creative process. In some morbid sense of anticipation I was awaiting the day that I would fall into the illness that would propel my creative career into a new realm. However, I now find myself arguing that philosophy, in the first place, as well as my own definition of creativity and how it can be classified. This bog is not about arguing for or against a certain idea within the chapter, but rather, I am arguing the chapter itself.

I now feel that creativity extremely subjective, such that one is unable to label creativity in another person. Creativity can only be identified from within that person, creative ideas, however, can be subjectively identified by all others. Allow me to explain: The schizophrenic paints a picture of what they are living/experiencing/perceiving, not a creative idea that they got from a schizophrenic episode. That picture can then be viewed as being quite creative, but it is not a representation of creativity. My grandmother, for example, suffers from dementia and she has a plethora of creative stories about her past and present. I particularly like the one where my dad is a money hungry maniac that has put her into the nursing home so that he can steal the family fortune and take control of the business (of which neither exists to take). Now, again, these are fantastically creative, but to my grandmother they are the truth and she is living these situations.

I think for creativity to be called such, the person claiming the creativity must be able to make a distinction between the “normal” operation of the brain and the departure from that into the creative process. When I take a drug to enhance my creativity, I knowingly make a departure from my normal brain function into a part of my brain that has become unlocked for the use of retaining that information and using it in the future, or present if I am physically able. That is creativity. The works produced by troubled, or ill, individuals is creative, but cannot, in my eyes, be called creativity until it is drawn upon as a external source of inspiration and not the memoirs of everyday experience.