🎨Creativity is not a luxury🎨

Mar 03, 2026

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This month, you’re practicing navigating discomfort by clearing your kitchen counters or declutter 3 things a day. Here’s the blog post if you missed it. 🤕Practicing Discomfort🤕 . Start today if you haven’t started yet. Keep going if you started last week.

I was asking a client recently what her dreams were and with her permission, I’m sharing some of our conversation.

“Would you be shocked,” she said, “if I told you I’ve forgotten how?”

I wasn’t shocked and I told her so. I hear this often from the women I coach. It’s a common topic that they have forgotten how to dream. As I’ve listened, I think I’ve identified a pattern.

To navigate their current life, many women have set aside things. Sometimes it’s intentionally. Sometimes it’s survival. It makes sense when you think about it. Some seasons take more resources than others and we can’t, and probably shouldn’t, try to keep everything going all the time.

The thing that often gets set aside is…creativity. Somehow, it slips into the luxury category; something nice to do if you have time and of course, there’s never time. We tell ourselves we’ll come back to it. I think we mean it, but maybe because of the way we set it down, we forget to pick it back up when the season passes.

No one reminds us.

Without creativity, I think we diminish our ability to dream. Dreaming starts to feel impractical and indulgent. We stop imagining new possibilities because we’ve stopped asking ourselves what we want or what might make us feel more like ourselves.

At this point, I usually hear, “Also, I’m not good at creativity.”

I don’t think putting creativity aside is not the same as not being good at it. I also don’t think that being good at it is the point. Creativity isn’t about talent or outcomes. It’s about engaging a part of you that is energizing. It can be grounding. It makes space in a busy life.

Elizabeth Gilbert says it well in Big Magic:

“If you are alive, you are creative.”

Creativity is how we make meaning, or find it again. It’s how we play, like a kid in a sandbox. We can explore ideas. We can notice beauty, choose words, solve problems, tell stories, and make food.

Creativity is a life force.

For me, there was a season when creativity looked like cross stitch, needlepoint, and knitting. They were portable. I could carry them to where the kids were playing or tuck them in a bag for ballet lessons. They fit my life.

Until we adopted our cat, Maggie.

From the moment Maggie arrived in our home, her favorite things were string, yarn, and thread. My projects included cross-stitch floss, needlepoint wool, and knitting yarn. If it could be chewed swallowed, or cleanly severed by cat teeth, Maggie was interested.

If you’ve ever had a cat swallow string, you know this isn’t just inconvenient, it’s dangerous and can involve emergency vet visits and expensive surgeries. It’s a real risk.

I tried to be responsible. I didn’t leave projects out. I used an L.L. Bean tote with a zipper. She learned to unzip it. I used a large cheese box with a heavy lid. She nudged the lid off. One by one, I put my projects away. Cross stitch went first…so many skeins of floss. Needlepoint went next because it was too expensive to keep replacing the wool. Knitting was last…nobody enjoys a blanket full of knots.

I stopped those projects so Maggie would be safe. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I didn’t replace them with anything. This was also the season when my kids were deep in their own creativity: painting, jewelry-making, Sculpey clay creations, and baking. I was immersed in the middle of their creative process as I bought supplies, helped get projects started, and because of that, I didn’t notice right away that I had stopped practicing my own. I experienced it constantly, through my kids, in their classrooms, during vacation bible school. I was experiencing it, but I wasn’t practicing it.

This is what we do. We set creativity down for good reasons and the longer it sits in the storage room of our lives, the harder it can feel to return to it.

If it feels like creativity packed its bags while you were busy making something else run well, maybe it’s time to acknowledge that and see what might fit now.

If you feel like you don’t have dreams, it’s probably not because you’re unmotivated or unimaginative. It’s more like that creativity became a luxury instead of a companion.

Creativity is the doorway to curiosity.
To wonder.
To joy.

So welcome to March. This month, we’ll cheer each other on as we talk about creativity…what it is, what gets in the way, and how to invite it back into our lives.