I begin to feel wary as I step through the front door to my house with my new friend from down the street. I feel safe by the door, because the entrance doesn’t reveal anything embarrassing like the rest of my house. All my new friend can see is a rug, mirror, and umbrella stand, so for now I’m ok. As an awkward fifth grader, I’m trying desperately to be socially accepted, according to mid 90s fashion: neon leggings, oversized t-shirt, high tops, big pink granny glasses, and brown hair tied in a sideways ponytail. I quickly try to plan a course of action so my friend will avoid making contact with anything that might damage my chance of being cool. I dart forward through the living room, hoping my friend will follow me closely, hopefully keeping tunnel vision until we are safe in my bedroom. My heart sinks as I hear her steps slow down behind me, and stop.

“Is that a real dead rabbit?” my friend asks me.

At the time, I wanted to die. And one of my Dad’s most popular artworks, a stuffed bunny inside a glass top hat covered in gold question marks, was the culprit.

Other kids had more normal responses to the question of what their parents did for a living: plumber, computer programmer, doctor, teacher, lawyer, the list went on. Not my parents. My dad was a sculptor, and my Mom worked in four different art museums while I was growing up. When I told other kids about my parents, the look on their faces was at best intrigued and at worst confused. Either way, I ended up feeling like a weirdo.

Even though I tried to be my own person, with my own interests and aspirations, I often wondered, like so many kids, whether I would just end up like my parents. Even though I enjoyed taking art classes, as I got older I became less interested in excelling in visual arts because I didn’t want to be compared to my father. Instead I replaced art with music and writing, which despite my attempts to distance myself from my family’s talents, are still creative interests. After all, the very definition of being creative isn’t necessarily to be a visual artist, but having the ability to create new and original ideas, to be a flexible thinker—not necessarily a visual one. Creativity can manifest itself in many different ways, beyond performing or visual arts. Nevertheless, I didn’t stray too far from being an artist like my dad. Instead of creating new ideas through pictures, I did it through words and songs.

On the opposing side, I know people who grew up with artistic parents who are in no way creative, which leads me to believe that some of us are innately born with that “creative gene” and some of us aren’t. But perhaps they weren’t encouraged to pursue creative interests like I was, which leads into the classic question of nature v nurture.

So which is it—are we born as a blueprint, with the ability to be creative and artistic, or are we oriented to be or not be creative from our parents and environment?

Dr. Thomas Spencer, a professor at SF State who specializes in child development and social and personality development, says children develop their creativity through a combination of their genes and environment.

“It’s not either/or genetics. It’s more an emergent type of process where the genetic program plays out in the environment you’re raised in,” Spencer says.

Spencer suggests that children with creative parents are born with a disposition to be imaginative, but whether that potential is developed depends on whether the child is exposed to and encouraged to interact in creative activities. Generally the years parents have the most influence over their children is in the early years before they go to school, where their primary influence then shifts to their peer group.

I can pretty much pinpoint my decision to not scholastically pursue art through interactions with my schoolmates. Besides the mortifying question of whether the bunny in the glass hat was real, the question that was even worse to hear from friends when they laid eyes on my dad’s artwork was, “What does this mean?”

Ironically, every kid who asked me this was unknowingly asking the crucial question, not just about my dad’s art, but about conceptual art in general—what ideas does this represent? What does it really mean?

The trouble was that while as a fifth grader I could answer the question of whether the bunny was real, I could never formulate an explanation for what any of it meant. After all, I was only ten years old! Most kids just paint rainbows, cars, flowers, or whatever, and that was the be all and end all. Having to attest to the deeper meaning of something more than that was too much for me to explain and too much for the other kids to take in.

Music and writing was a creative outlet for me that never required me to answer questions that were over my head. It was something I did that my parents encouraged me to do and at the same time was independent from them. I always felt I inherently had to put my creative energy some place, I just didn’t want to do it in the same way. It was very much about proving my own individuality, which at the time seemed completely unrelated to my parents. In retrospect, I was actually doing exactly what my family advocated—to find a way to show how you are the exception from everyone else, to exercise your mind to find the way in which you are different. Being raised in an artistic family was hard sometimes, but the outcome was tremendous. As I got older, I ceased being embarrassed about my family and all the weird stuff in our house because I finally had the vocabulary to support what it meant, thanks to countless conversations with my patient dad. I began to see that it was actually really cool. I mean, who else grew up with a stuffed bunny inside a glass top hat covered in gold question marks in their living room? Growing up in my family gave me a great advantage, because it showed me how to see life through a different lens—always question everything you see and find a way to show your own slant, your own angle to the world around you. Whether I was born to be creative or not, I am greatly a product of what I grew up with—different in pursuits, but the same in purpose.