I came across this quote on Instagram recently that was “I hope you heal so hard that you become creative again” and it hit me like a freight train. 

Many of my long-time readers have spotted that I’ve not been posting as much, and thank you to all of you who have reached out privately during my absence.

Truth is it’d be so easy to just say once I’d published my book I dove straight into corporate work and my career, I got my head down and put in the hours to the point where I was able to buy my first home just a few months ago – this would be a half truth.

The reality is I was going through some things behind the scenes and maybe my dive into my job was more of a distraction, a reason not to look too closely as to how I was really doing. 

Well, with all things you push to the corner of your mind, they have a way of coming to the surface at the most inconvenient times and that’s what happened to me. 

Let’s just say 2026 has come with some personal challenges and forced growth. 

A theme that has spanned many of my posts over the last few years was my disappearing creativity. 

At first I put it off to the idea that I’ve just finished my book and that was such a massive creative endeavour, of course I’m going to be creatively fatigued. Then it turned to well now I’m working a corporate job, it’s hard to be creative with a 9-5. But I don’t think these were the real reasons. 

Mental health used to be such a large topic on this blog, I have since archived those posts as I no longer resonated with sharing my struggles so openly online as I got older. But just because I don’t talk about it openly anymore online doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an impact on my creativity. 

I think it was only as I’ve come through the other side of arguably a very challenging 4 year period that I finally feel like I can breathe into my creativity again.

It was small to start with, I restarted journaling, then it was a art journal. Soon I was crocheting, my camera had the dust blown off it and I started painting. 

Eventually I wrote my first poem in over a year. 

I healed so hard I started creating again. 

It’s this fragile creativity but it’s there any it’s beautiful. I cannot wait to honour it and see where it takes me.

So a little note for those who may be feeling like their creativity has well and truly vanished, I hope that this can be some reassurance to you that there is hope for its return.


Thank you so much for taking a few minutes out of your day to read my thoughts and ramblings. If you’d like to order a copy of my book you can order it direct from my publisher (we love to support small publishing houses direct) or for ease of international shipping you can find it on Amazon too.

2 responses to “Healing So Hard You Start Creating Again”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    being creative is difficult when your life is already busy, especially after a big project like publishing a book! looking after yourself always comes first, and well done on getting back into it.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. Greg Dennison Avatar
    Greg Dennison

    Thank you for sharing! Glad to hear the creative spirit is back. Glad to hear you’re on the other side of the challenging time; hopefully life settles down for a while, and you can find a balance between work and creativity. Good to hear from you.

    My creative spirit still kind of comes and goes… after character-Greg graduated in fictional timeline June 1998, in a post I wrote in October 2023, I stopped writing for about nine months. I had another ongoing creative project that I was spending more time on back then. I eventually started posting here again, but only about once or twice a month instead of weekly like I used to. It took a coincidental quirk of the calendar to get to me to start posting weekly (most of the time) again.

    In March 2026, I posted an episode that was set in March 1999. Since there are usually 1-2 weeks between episodes in the fictional timeline, I realized that if I were to start writing again most weeks, then the story would continue to take place in the same time of year as real life. My original plan with DLTDGB was to keep writing until January 1, 2000 in the fictional timeline, because that was the end of a decade and start of a new one, then do a few more episodes to tie up loose ends. So I’ll be done with this ongoing project in January. I have pretty much neglected my other ongoing creative project since then, though, so I guess the lesson here is that I only have time for one at a time…

    Liked by 1 person

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