I always wanted to be a writer.
I started writing short stories when I was about 7 years old. When I was 10, I made several issues of a pretend magazine (oh yes, I was pretty cool). I won a few writing competitions in my teens. I co-founded a writing society at university, and I started a writing group in my 20s.
And then, one day, I just… stopped.
I never made a conscious decision to give up writing. I still had in the back of my head a dream of becoming a writer, but somewhere along the line I convinced myself that I wasn’t up to it, or that writing wasn’t a serious career goal, or that a creative career wasn’t for people like me. I never said that I was stopping, but I didn’t write. Days went by without me writing, then weeks, then, all of a sudden, I hadn’t written for a few years. At that point, I assumed that I just wasn’t a writer.
Until the day the words started pouring out of me. Like in the movies when someone smashes a tap from a sink, and the water floods everywhere, there’s no way to stop it. When I really needed it, there wasn’t a choice of whether or not to take up writing again, the writing took up me.
But first, an announcement…
Ok, we’ll get to the story of how and why I came back to writing, and how creativity supports healing and self-discovery, but first, I have an invitation for you…
Come create with me in November!
November can be a pretty grey, rainy, miserable month here in the UK, and everything feels in suspended animation, waiting for the festive season to start and brighten the place up a bit. Everyone’s tired and broke from yuletide planning and shopping, but the festive cheer hasn’t kicked in yet to relieve the tension. In short, November can be pretty rubbish. It’s also the month of my birthday - absolutely terrible timing on my parents’ parts, there.
So I want to bring a bit of warmth and colour back to this dreariest of months, with a Cosy Creative Retreat!
Over three days, I’ll be sharing creative prompts and reflective exercises to get the creative juices flowing, whilst also finding some joy in this time of year. On the fourth day, we’ll get together for a live writing hour on Zoom - bring a project of your own or take a prompt for me, and then get down to some focussed creative time. It’s a chance to carve out some space for yourself and your creative practice and to nurture your soul in this dull and busy time of year. And it’s all completely FREE!
Who’s with me? Fill out this form to be added to the list to receive the prompts and the live writing hour links:
Rediscovering the writing life
For the years that I wasn’t writing, I constantly had a nagging feeling that something was missing. I felt the gap in my life, like the ache of a phantom limb. There was a part of me that I’d tried to remove that was itching to be used. But I ignored it. Looking back, I realise I was carrying an irritability and frustration that would burst out at times, ususally in the form of me being sulky with my husband or quitting my job on a bit of a whim (I have done this more times than I care to admit to, but I always had another one lined up… until I didn’t - more on this later). But I carried on and it was kind of ok, as long as I didn’t think too much about what I really wanted out of life and whether I was living in the way I wanted to be.
Then my whole life was turned upside down.
I had desperately wanted to become a mother, but for a little while, due to some health issues, it looked like it might be possible. Then, all of a sudden, after no doctors having a clue what was wrong with me for the best part of two years, a prolactinoma was found on my pituitary gland (basically, a small growth in a part of the brain that affects hormone production). With two pills, it was fixed, and I was suddenly able to havve children. I then became pregnant on the first try. It was a dizzying turnaround, with little time to get my head around the idea of becoming a mother. I went from thinking I might never have children to having one growing inside me in a matter of weeks.
Up until this point, I had been a workaholic who defined myself by my career. I had given so much of myself to my job that there had been little time for my own outside interests, which helped to blot out my creative yearnings. Once I announced my pregnancy, however, it quickly became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to stay in that job any longer. For various reasons, I can’t say much more than that. But I ended up going on maternity leave a month early. Maternity pay is so woeful in the UK that I could only afford to take four months away from work, and I spent much of that time obsessing about what to do next. I knew I couldn’t go back to my old job, no one would want to hire a woman with a three-month-old baby, and I had never wanted to become self-employed, so I couldn’t do that… could I?
I was terrified of self-employment, because it seemed such a risk. But, in the end, I decided it was the only option. It gave me some control back, and it gave me flexibility to spend time with my baby. So I made the jump, with no plan and no clients lined up. Somehow, I made it work.
It was an intense period. I was trying to get to grips with motherhood, amongst all the chaos and sleep deprivation that comes with that, but I was also trying to rediscover myself. If I wasn’t in that career, wasn’t living that full-on lifestyle, who was I? Who was I as a mother? I had not been at all prepared for how much motherhood would change me - I think I assumed that I would just carry on being the same person, living the same life, but with a baby in tow. It didn’t turn out like that at all. Motherhood tore me apart - in frightening but also beautiful ways - and rebuilt me as a completely different human being. My relationships changed, my lifestyle changed, my body was almost unrecognisable, and I had to figure out what this new me was all about.
That’s when the words started coming.
Rewriting my story
I found pregnancy very draining, and all the stress in my life at the time took it out of me as well. As a result, I couldn’t read a book for months. I found it hard to concentrate on any text longer than a tweet from about 20 weeks of pregnancy until my daughter was about 4 months old. I worried that reading, always my favourite pasttime, was going to desert me just as writing had.
But once my daughter reached about 4 or 5 months, it was like someone flicked a switch. One day I found I needed paper. I needed it immediately.
I grabbed a notebook, and I started writing. I couldn’t stop.
I filled pages and pages of journal entries and short story ideas. Then I started on an idea for a novel. Then I started to fill my laptop with chapters of that novel. I was writing in any spare minute that I could find - when my daughter was asleep, on the train to see clients, in cafes when I could get the baby to fall asleep in the pram. Finding space to write became an obsession. I had less time than I’d ever had before, but suddenly I was writing more than I ever had.
I came to realise that I was finding myself through writing. I was using journalling and fiction writing to explore this new me and my sense of identity, and to process everything I had experienced over the last few months. It enabled me to integrate all the changes and start to make sense of it all. I could make it all mean something.
I also started reading. And I read fiction and non-fiction that resonated with my experiences and my new identity. It helped me to understand and name my own feelings, and also helped me to realise I wasn’t alone.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’d found creative therapy. Writing was giving me a mechanism to process my experience, find my voice and take back some control. It also enabled me to rewrite my story with a better future.
Now that I look back, I realise writing has always been my therapy. When I was being bullied at school, when I was struggling with my mental health in my teens and twenties, when I was escaping from an emotionally abusive relationship, I turned to writing. I’ve also now discovered the power of painting as another therapeutic tool, after freeing myself from a story that “I’m no good at art” that I’d been telling myself since a teacher told me off for how bad a drawing was when I was about eight years old.
We often dismiss creativity as a frivolous past-time, but it is of vital importance to us as human beings. Art and stories are how we make sense of the world, and of ourselves. It’s how we understand how we feel and how we express those feelings to others so that they can recognise who we are and what we need. It’s how we connect to one another. A regular creative practice has been shown to have huge benefits for mental wellbeing, for stress reduction and for building empathy.
Taking control of your narrative
The problem is, so many of us carry around limiting beliefs that we’re not good enough at creative activities or that we’re just not creative types.
All humans are creative. It’s in our DNA. We make art, tell stories, sing, dance and make things from childhood, and we have done since we first arrived on this planet. We stop because society tells us it’s not a valuable use of our time, or because, like me, someone in authority tells us we’re not good enough and we hide out of shame.
I desperately want to see more people embracing creativity. My wish for you all is that you will:
Not give a damn what anyone thinks about your art - there’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” anyway, art is all subjective, and if someone doesn’t appreciate it then it’s not meant for them
Produce art for yourself, not for anyone else - if you want to share it and other people love it, then that’s great, but if you don’t want to share it that’s fine too, it’s not about anyone else, it’s about letting your soul speak
Give yourself permission to play - it’s in the experimentation and following crazy ideas, just splashing paint around on paper or allowing your pen to wander across the page following whatever trains of though present themselves, that you find yourself
Make time to let yourself create - not let the world crowd in and make you feel that you have bigger priorities, because your soul, your self-care, your self-expression and nurturing your joy is the highest priority you have
Call yourself an artist - not wait for anyone else’s permission or any external accolades to annoint you as a painter, a writer, a creative, just allow yourself to be a creative
That’s my manifesto for creativity that can nourish the core of ourselves and free us from so much of what holds us down in life.
I’m now studying creative therapy in the hopes of sharing it with more people. But most of all, I’m finding time to create whenever I can.
Will you find time for your creativity?
Beautiful