Creative recovery often involves doing the one thing you know you want to do but somehow falls to the bottom of the priorities list. 

There is an almost obligatory sense of hopelessness, grief, frustration, regret, resentment, and justification that circle like vultures when we get close to this task. Steven Pressfield is his War of Art calls this force Resistance. The cure according to him is to battle this Resistance like a dragon on a daily basis in order to show up and to do the work we know we must do. 

The term Creative Recovery I am stealing from Julia Cameron’s, Artist’s Way. This naming holds an understanding that there is likely to be pain and hurt and a sense of overcoming in the process of making our way back to our naturally creative selves. 

As a clinician and recovering creative, this process of moving closer to my nature and the things in life I most want to do has been a part of my studies and internal work. I have grieved this feeling of lost time and acknowledged this dark passenger that feels like I’ll never catch up. Writing, music, reinventing myself in my career can still cause a knot in my throat and a heavy sense of longing. Sometimes this passenger wins, but most days, I do. 

I say this to show that I have skin in the game. I know the suffering that can accompany a life that feels like an endless cycle of checking off a list of obligations, of doing what has to be done in order to survive, and the waves of guilt and feelings of entitlement that hit the moment you sit down to play the piano, to write a poem, to design that business idea. 

Part of my conviction  to keep showing up for my creative self stems from the belief that if I and more people were doing what they wanted, what they ought to do, what they were in many ways meant to do, there would be so much more joy and so less suffering. 

If you have that feeling, that hunch, or if you know there is something you are resisting….you are in good company. You are not alone. 

Together, we can soften into recovery, face Pressfield’s Resistance, and greet whatever thoughts, feelings, and beliefs arise as you move closer to what makes you come alive. 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

― Howard Thurman