RED ROOM

In Episode XI, RED ROOM, Gary reflects on his mother's perfectionism, a red velvet couch nobody was allowed to sit on, and a childhood spent surrounded by meticulously designed gardens, color, texture, and beauty. What once looked like obsession now reveals itself as something else entirely: creativity. Through personal stories, a career in Hollywood, a life-altering illness, and an unexpected second act, Gary explores a simple but powerful idea: creativity isn't something reserved for artists, writers, filmmakers, or musicians. It's a fundamental human trait. We create meaning, relationships, routines, homes, identities, and entire lives. Maybe creativity isn't about talent at all. Maybe it's about attention. An episode about perception, perfectionism, identity, creativity, and why some of the most creative people you'll ever meet don't think of themselves as creative at all. 

Written and narrated by Gary Naccarato.

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Topics include attention, focus, mindfulness, digital distraction, creativity, memory, and the impact of technology on the nervous system.

Transcript

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When I was small, my mom had a complicated reputation with friends and family, loved, but perhaps a little obsessive and difficult, many thought. Not so much because of her outright behavior, manners, etc. She was always kind and thoughtful and hard working, but she was a perfectionist. Some thought to the extreme. I would go to a friend's house after school and be offered a cookie. If I was inside their home eating it, I always held my other hand under the cookie to catch any of the stray crumbs. Or I would have never considered setting a glass of Pepsi down on a coffee table without a coaster. It's just the way my sister and I were brought up. People used to tease us because we had a formal living room in the house my grandfather and dad built, Crystal Chandelier. Most of the pieces were Ethan Allen, colonial inspired, well crafted wood pieces, hutches, side tables, dining table and chairs. Not outlandishly exclusive, but for Spokane, Washington in the early nineteen seventies, it represented a certain level of sophistication and formality. My sister, our friends, or I weren't allowed in that room, and especially not on that red velvet custom made couch. Once again for Meethan Allen. It was strictly for show and for special guests or special occasions. Then the invisible velvet rope would come down for a few hours. Many people we knew were horrified by this. You can't what? You're not allowed to sit on the furniture in your own living room? Normal for my sister and I, completely absurd to almost everyone else. I never really thought much of it, it's just how I was raised. I never felt it was manic or weird or obsessive. Not really. I always suspected it was how she expressed herself, through color, through fabrics, through texture, through light. My mother loved flipping through decorating books and magazines. There were always stacks of them around. The one design book she really gravitated towards I wish I remembered the name. That particular designer loved the color red. My mom learned and would often tell me no matter what room you are decorating, no matter the theme or color palette, there always and I mean always has to be one red object in the room to stand out and be in contrast with everything else. It could be a vase, a picture frame, a pillow or a candle, just one thing, no matter how small that was red. Our house sat atop a small hill. The driveway had two entries from the street that met in the middle in front of the house. At the bottom of the small hill was an immaculate large garden that ran the length of the driveway, mirroring the length of the house, like something out of a movie. And it was large. Raspberries, cucumbers, peas, squash, strawberries, beets, radishes, carrots, colorabi, potatoes and pumpkins, lettuce, a few heads of cabbage, and icicle radishes, which I haven't seen in years. I bet it's been forty years since I've actually seen an icicle radish. Our garden was pristine. Everything was perfectly lined. My mom would hammer in stakes and line out rows for the seeds and planting. Perfectly straight, perfectly uniform. Looking back, maybe that garden wasn't just a garden at all. Maybe it was the same impulse that drives someone to paint a canvas, the same impulse that drives someone to write a novel, the desire to take something ordinary and arrange it into something beautiful. The soil was constantly tilled, both with a tiller and by hand. There wasn't a weed in sight. Oh and the sunflowers. She eventually took her desire to create outdoors one step further. The dirt grade from the asphalt driveway to the bottom where the garden was shaped like a horseshoe type configuration. It was like a giant dirt berm. She decided the entire hill needed to be flowers. First the soil was tilled by hand, every weed, every pine cone, every rock, every piece of grass or fallen leaf was cleared by hand. When the planting started it was overwhelming. Roses, peonies, pink, white, red, incredible ground coverings. I remember one that was a brownish purple that would sprout these incredible deep purple flowers that looked like tiny Christmas trees. Chicks and hens and irises. We called them flags, irises of every color, pansies, petunias, marigolds. Those are just what I remember off the top of my head. Every inch of ground was covered with color. We would be driving through a neighborhood on our way home from going out to dinner and she would suddenly yell stop. My dad would pull over and she would get out and go knock on the door of the house we were parked in front of. If a person answered, she would have a brief conversation and usually the person would come and hand my mom a box or bag. While driving by my mom had noticed something in this person's garden or flower bed, something she wasn't familiar with a new variety, a color she had never seen before. She had knocked on the door to tell them how much she admired their yard, and would they possibly be kind enough to let her take a few starters of various plants or flowers so that she could plant them at home in her garden. Almost everyone was flattered and offered her access without hesitation. She would keep a small shovel, clippers, and scissors in the trunk of our car. I have pictures of our garden and hill from when I was young. It looks like something out of a television show or a movie. It doesn't look real. Some days she would spend from sun up to sundown on that hill. Picking, arranging, trimming, pruning. I never thought much about it when I was young. The jokes, the teasing, the disbelief from friends. To me it was just normal. Looking back, I don't think my mother was trying to protect furniture. I think she was protecting a finished composition. The crystal chandelier, the Ethan Allen furniture, the red velvet couch, the carefully chosen colors and textures, the way the afternoon light moved across the room. The living room wasn't simply a room, it was something she had created, a painting you could walk through, a stage set, an expression of how she saw beauty and order in the world. Same with the garden and hill of flowers. My mother would still tell you she isn't creative, not artistic, not imaginative, not one of those people, and yet she spent her entire life creating the rooms she designed, the gardens, the colors she chose, the flowers she chased from one neighbor to the next. I think most people mistook her perfectionism for something else. What they were actually seeing was an artist. She just happened to work in a different medium. Welcome to the Art of Clarity, a podcast about creativity, the nervous system, and the strange ways the modern world competes for our mind. Creativity is not something you do. Creativity is something you are. When most people hear the word creative, they immediately think painter, novelist, musician, filmmaker. Creativity has a branding problem because we've turned creativity into a profession. You either write books, sculpt, make films, paint, write music, take photographs, or even make commercials, or you're not creative. Fuck that, it's nonsense. Somewhere along the way we turn creativity into a trendy job title, a category, a department, something certain people have and everyone else doesn't. I don't buy it. The word creative actually makes me cringe when I hear it now, because I've met too many people who swear they don't have a creative bone in their body, and they'll spend twenty years building a garden, or raising a family, or restoring a nineteen sixty seven Mustang, or cooking Sunday dinner for thirty people. They just don't recognize what they're doing as creative. On the opposite end are people who become more interested in calling themselves creative than actually creating anything. Humans are meaning making machines we are constantly creating. Stories about ourselves, interpretations of events, relationships, homes, careers, traditions, habits. Every life is a creative act. The subconscious mind doesn't sit around waiting for instructions. It's constantly generating associations, patterns, expectations, narratives. How do I take a thousand possibilities and turn them into one meaningful experience? That's the question. Maybe creativity isn't invention. Maybe it's actually attention, noticing. My mom noticed color, texture, balance, and order. An architect notices space. A chef notices flavor. A good therapist notices patterns. A writer notices meaning. Same process, different medium. I've mentioned that I was a creative director for many years. Then I got sick, very sick. I lost almost everything in my life, including my identity, my career, my partner, my house, my friends, my ability to drive, my ability to make a sandwich or do my own laundry. I was told by my doctors that I was going to have to be taken care of full time. And that's exactly what happened. For almost four years I was watched over and cared for by family. Then I went into remission. For years I thought that creativity defined me, but in some ways it destroyed me. It took me to the brink which I thought I may never return from. Rebuilding a life from nothing is daunting to say the least. I had actually come to loathe my creative background while I was ill. I kept myself under such extreme creative pressure for so many years that it eventually caught up with me. I never gave myself permission to enjoy my success or take a moment for myself. It was always the next project has to be even more amazing. The next project will bring in even more money if we really nail the creative this time. Gary, work your magic. We know you can do it. No pressure if we lose this two million dollar campaign. Uh huh. Sure, there was outside pressure, but the pressure was mostly internal. In my mind every vision I had, every creative presentation, every concept I tore apart and rebuilt couldn't just be good. It had to transcend. I had to blow people out of the water. Every single one. If I didn't get that reaction, if I didn't see the excitement and possibilities in people's eyes, it would take me days to crawl myself out of that hole. I had disappointed everyone. I'll do better next time. I have to do better next time. And the stakes just got higher and higher as the years progressed. My immune system eventually said enough. My job played a part in my destruction, a large part. I used to say my talent was both a blessing and a curse, more of a curse. Years later when I went into remission, when I realized I was being given a second chance, I didn't even consider returning to a creative environment for work. The desire was no longer there, and even if it was, I knew that if I should return within months my illness would eventually return. So I became a clinical and medical support hypnotherapist. But as the years have gone by, I realized something. My creativity never left me. But instead of giving my creative ideas to clients, advertising agencies, directors and producers for a fat paycheck, now I do it for myself, always creating new experiences for my hypnotherapy clients, writing my first novel, creating a new life, creating this podcast. I actually feel more creative now than ever without the pretentious title. My creativity never disappeared. The form changed. I've discovered that what I once thought was my profession is actually a part of my nature. And the amazing thing is now I actually enjoy it. In a lot of ways, I consider it a different kind of remission, being given a second chance to not only thrive, but to create. So maybe the question isn't whether you're creative. Maybe the question is what are you creating right now? Because whether you realize it or not, your subconscious is already at work. It's creating your routines, your relationships, your beliefs, your future. The only real choice is whether you'll participate in this process consciously. My mom is now eighty three and lives in an elderly community, feistier than ever, and even though she now only has a small outdoor patio with a patch of dirt running the length of it, every spring, she creates the most beautiful little garden bursting with color in life. What she plants in that little patch of dirt isn't random. Every inch of soil is designed, every plant, every seed, every flower. And now I realize it's not just a cute little garden. It's a work of art. In my mind, a downright masterpiece. This is Gary Nacarado, and this has been The Art of Clarity. Thanks for listening. If any of this resonated, feel free to share it or pass it along. To learn more about my work or get in touch, you can find me on my website. I'll see you next time.