when I thought creativity had left me
There are some things that many of us have always been searching for: truth, clarity, that ever-fleeting creative spark. Yet more often than not, those things have been right there in front of us the entire time.
Of those, creativity is something innately human.
As it happens, it’s also something we might easily take for granted. Despite its natural but annoying ebbs and flows, we come to see it as something that’s accessible to some degree, no matter what our circumstances. If we’ve spent our lives tapping into it with relative ease, it’s understandable that we assume it’s a well we can draw from pretty much anytime we like.
We’re all familiar with writer’s block, or other times when the creative muse seems a bit more difficult to capture. That’s just an accepted part of its nature. But what happens when the entire creative impulse seems to disappear altogether? What does that mean?
I come from a home that was filled with creativity. Both of my parents passed down an appreciation for beauty and art of all kinds, whether that showed up in the special touches that adorned every corner of our home, the care that went into what we ate and wore, or the countless hours spent learning to sketch and paint and exploring the cultures behind the music we listened to. Art museums, crafts, and a bounty of art supplies were regular parts of our everyday lives.
That love of all things creative never left me. Amid the more mundane demands of everyday living, I relished those precious hours when I could grab a sketchpad or notebook and savor whatever new drawing or poem came to mind. I always associated creativity with tapping into a source I couldn’t quite put my finger on but somehow knew was there.
Fast forward to early 2016. I was fit and healthy, thriving in my career and enjoying raising my daughter in the home I’d managed to purchase on my own, despite never being exactly… rich. Though my work kept me busy to a point that I now know was a bit overzealous, I was at the top of my proverbial game.
In February of that year, I undertook a vigorous fitness regimen that started out well enough, until my body decided to rebel against it. What began as mild discomfort turned into lingering pain and, shortly thereafter, difficulty walking. I didn’t know then that my body had been compensating for past surgeries and other physical conditions for so long that what seemed like something easy enough to resolve with time… wasn’t. Over the next couple of years, it became clear that continuing to work and live as I had before was no longer in the cards.
I found myself on very unfamiliar ground. It seemed like overnight, I went from a routine that had me dashing to and fro and spinning multiple plates at once, to lying motionless on my living room floor among a pile of pillows and blankets, in deafening silence and isolation, with nowhere to go and nothing to do except breathe through the worst pain I’d ever experienced. At the time, I genuinely believed it was all… over. My life as I knew it. My career. My prospects for the future. My financial security. For the life of me, I couldn’t visualize any point in time beyond the immediate present. It all felt blank, hidden behind some curtain and completely invisible. Together with the relentless pain, it was, without doubt, the darkest time of my life.
Before then, creativity was something I’d always reached for when working through something difficult, whether through drawing, writing, knitting, painting, or playing with clay. I would express myself by dressing in vibrant colors and wearing lots of fun accessories.
But during this particular period, when it was all I could do to put on pajamas and stand long enough to brush my teeth, the reflection in the mirror seemed to represent the shoddy, wrung-out, and decidedly less-than-vibrant state of my inner world.
Expression of any kind felt utterly muted. Even my words, used in desperation and primarily in trying to prove myself to my doctors and to those managing my medical leave and disability claim, felt meaningless and ineffective. And I kid you not: I’d been told at times not to speak at all, not to ask questions, and to let others do the talking on my behalf. I had no say in anything, no agency in what was taking place. I felt totally… silenced.
While I’d lived through challenges in life before then, I had never felt so powerless, so helpless, and so out of control in all my days.
I tried to put my feelings into form. I tried every familiar means of creative expression I’d reached for in times past. I often placed a pen to paper, waiting for something – anything – to emerge. Perhaps a few words, an image, even random lines or circles. Nothing happened. Not a single thing.
It was as if that part of my mind had gone offline, something I simply couldn’t access no matter how often I tried or how patiently I waited. It still feels impossible to describe how shattering that felt. The word “devastating” doesn’t even begin to touch it. I wondered whether my self-expression had become useless even to myself.
While everything I knew crumbled around me, this profound and ongoing inability to express myself seemed like further evidence of all that “over-ness.” For well over two years, I believed I had lost something that was still truly mine: my creativity. My ability to produce something that, however simplistic or rough around the edges, had never existed in the world before.
It’s only in retrospect that I understand what was truly happening. I had been in full-on survival mode for a very long time, with so much happening both within my body and around me. It’s no wonder I couldn’t create in ways I had come to expect. There simply was no room for the creative part of me to breathe or function as it normally would. Every part of me was already overextended, and what energy I had was spent just getting through the day.
I can see now what I couldn’t see then: even though everything I had come to recognize as creativity was completely out of view, I had actually been forced to exist creatively, adapting to an impossible set of circumstances every single day while the rules of the game changed constantly. I was figuring out how to modify just about everything. How to communicate a need and salvage a day that didn’t go as planned. How to find another route to the simplest of tasks. How to make a life inside circumstances I didn’t choose.
As it turns out, my creativity hadn’t died at all. It simply wasn’t showing up in the forms I had learned to recognize.
I realized only much later that creativity isn’t only about making things.
Sometimes it’s the human capacity to respond to what’s in front of us with something that wasn’t there before.
Eventually, one familiar form of creativity did begin to find its way back to me, though not in the way I would have expected.
At the time, my disability benefits were being challenged, and I was furious. I opened a Word document intending to draft an email to my disability representative, but instead I began writing everything I wished I could say — completely uncensored, unfiltered… every thought and feeling I’d accumulated over several years. What began as therapeutic venting kept growing into something much larger.
Somewhere along the way, I noticed something interesting happening. My voice in my writing was shifting from “I” to “we,” and it soon became clear that I wasn’t writing only for myself anymore.
By the time the document had grown to about seventy-five pages, I stopped writing and began extracting the main themes and separating them into chapters. And all of a sudden, the entire tone and purpose of the writing changed, too. What had begun as a reaction to powerlessness and mistreatment gradually became something rooted in self-advocacy, compassion, mindfulness, and the possibility of living differently.
The creativity that came back most distinctly arose out of the very circumstances that had seemed to destroy it. It became the beginning of my book, the dawn of The WordWise Project, and part of the life I’m building now. I’m not trying to restore the life I had before. I’m starting with a fresh, blank page… my favorite kind.
Writing has returned as my clearest creative channel, while drawing and other familiar forms still come and go. But creativity is also present in the business I’ve built, the books I continue to write, and the ongoing work of figuring out how to live meaningfully within a life that includes pain and limitation.
Creativity doesn’t have to mean bringing forth something familiar or recreating what we knew in the past. It doesn’t have to arrive through the same tools, the same impulses, or even in a form we immediately recognize. Sometimes creativity gets creative with us, too.
So when a familiar form of creativity feels inaccessible, I’m not sure we always need to assume that the creative part of us has disappeared with it. Sometimes it may simply be harder to recognize. It may be showing up in the way we adapt, improvise, begin again, or make something workable out of circumstances we never would have chosen.
I think that’s one of the strangest things I’ve learned about creativity: sometimes, while we’re desperately searching for that familiar spark, we’ve already been using it to build what comes next. If we look closely enough, we may find we’ve been living inside it all along.
With you on the journey,
Julie 🍃