Creativity, Lost and Found
On trading in my creative identity for a career-first one, and finding my way back again
This was the second post I had ever published on my blog. (It’s since been reworked once and lightly refreshed again.)
At the time, I didn’t realize that this essay would be the foundation for so much of my future writing. I was simply trying to find ways to stay connected to my own creativity while raising two young kids and working as a public accountant.
Since writing this essay, I’ve developed more conviction in my feelings on work culture. Specifically, I don’t believe in work cultures that constantly reward us for how much of our humanness we can ignore. There must be a healthy convergence point between keeping businesses alive and honouring our needs for community, family, rest and self-care.
I had also assumed I’d stay in that career forever, so I was focused on finding ways to feel okay as a creative soul holding down a demanding day job — “bloom where you’re planted,” as they say.
I succeeded, but only until my creative calling grew so loud that it started drowning out the work. (I’d love to write more on this in the future.)
Nevertheless, the post that follows still holds and marks an important milestone on the path back to myself.
Originally published on my website, debitthiscreatethat.com
Creativity, Lost and Found
To express our creativity is such a simple and natural thing, isn’t it? Yet as our lives fill up with other things, our creativity is often the first to fall away.
Quietly, our unique connection with our world and our deep connection with ourselves fall away with it.
Whether you’re feeling disconnected, uninspired, or you simply can’t remember the last time you made something just for you, here’s your sign: It’s time to reconnect with your creativity.
By all means, stop reading and start creating — make it big and bold, or make it small and inconsequential, because all it takes is one little creative act to start the process of reconnection.
But if you’d like a little introspection first, feel free to read on.
How we veer off creative course without knowing it
Any number of things can cause us to lose touch with our creative sides, but the pervasive, underlying issue is this notion that creativity is not valuable unless it’s profitable. Even if we logically disagree, we can still hold this idea unconsciously.
Our environments and the people in them frequently reinforce this idea, usually unintentionally.
Who defines what is valuable?
The corporate world is the perfect environment to perpetuate this issue. Your employer decides what’s valuable during working hours. And hey, we’ve got a job to do — at the end of the day, we help the company with its profitability, and in turn, we receive financial security. (Oversimplifying, but stick with me here.)
Career becomes a huge part of our lives, by design: The more of yourself you can give to your career, the more valuable you become. That’s not just in sheer working hours or social events, but in our attention, focus, and brain capacity.
We need that motivation to do well and stay ambitious so that we (and our organization) can grow. So our careers go beyond paying our bills by satisfying our craving for connection (making our colleagues like family) and validation (praise, promotion, awards, and raises for a job well done).
I should pause here to say: I’m not entirely against any of this. Done right, such a career can be really fulfilling and rewarding. But we need to be aware of how it impacts our perception of value.
When we’re not aware, we miss the signs that we’ve poured too much from our own cup.
How much is enough?
When we’re feeling ambitious and connected to our career, we want to devote more time and energy to it. That time and energy spent feels productive and important. But where does it leave our personal endeavours? Our passion projects? Our balance?
We start losing our creativity when we make choices that devalue it.
If we only adopt a corporate notion of value, we’ll start to view creative self-expression as a frivolous form of self-care — and we simply don’t have time for it.
Perpetuating this cycle is the fact that we don’t receive the same reinforcing validation for our creative work as we do for our career work. This, too, is by design. The magic of creative self-expression is that it’s for us, rather than for external validation (monetary or otherwise).
I don’t think the system is completely broken, but I do think we need to be aware of our bias that favours work-work over creative work.
The all-or-nothing approach and an unintended consequence of putting creativity on pause
We’re naturally in touch with our creative sides when we’re younger, and I think it’s easy to assume that we’ll always be that way. It’s a part of you, so how could you “lose” it?
I don’t think you truly lose it, but you do get used to ignoring it.
When I finally decided to get serious about a career in accounting, I thought the smart thing to do was to release all of my creative projects. (Frivolous self-care, right?)
Accounting was a practical choice (and not a talent), so I knew it would require all of my energy and effort to become academically attractive enough to land a job. Then I’d have to be decent enough at said job to keep it while continuing to study for my accounting designation.
So I chose an all-or-nothing approach: I traded in my novels for textbooks, packed away my paint brushes, said goodbye to my garage band, and extinguished any other extraneous projects.
It “worked” — I got the job, and then the designation.
It was a six-year-long journey from decision to designation, though. After all of those years with a singular focus, it’s really common to feel a bit lost on the other side.
It was from within that blank space that I could hear my creative voice again. “Great! Now it’s my turn to live my best life.”
Where do we go from here?
Fear of ambiguity in the face of creative freedom
The thing with creative freedom is that it can feel really ambiguous, and ambiguity is frightening.
It requires you to find your intrinsic value. Your intrinsic value is inherent in all that you are, not built on grades or accolades, salaries or promotions.
I definitely felt the fear (although I didn’t realize it at the time). I knew I had to do something creative, though. So after I designated, I learned to play the violin. It was wonderfully satisfying and challenging, but it didn’t quite satisfy my drive to create. The language of music was still too foreign for me to feel like I was in the driver’s seat.
My next instinct was to exercise my creativity in a space that was familiar and safe: my career!
It was only a few months before I found myself trading in my music sheets for spreadsheets in pursuit of a second professional designation. This time, it would be different! This time, I was studying to become a business valuator — a relatively creative specialty in the realm of accounting and finance.
Would it satisfy the creative itch, though?
Well-meaning but misplaced creativity
Do you enjoy thinking “outside the box”? Are you always full of ideas? Amazing. Creativity can be a huge asset in your career!
An honest question, though: how much of your creativity is really for sale?
My new designation did not disappoint on the creative thinking front. I did what I could to build a great body of valuation work and to help develop this budding branch of service from inside the firm. It kept me learning and creating on the job — really engaging stuff! I loved my new specialty.
What I didn’t realize was that while creative work is fantastic, it’s not the same as having freedom of creative self-expression. Being so career-focused, I was still ignoring that curious, playful voice that longed to be expressed fully. (Later – we’re building something here!)
Creative deficit: signs that it’s time to reconnect
If you ignore that creative voice long enough, it will quietly slink away to give you some space. It’s still there, waiting to reconnect with you — the problem is that we forget to check in. We may even forget entirely that it’s there.
But there will be signs:
Restless energy that you wish you could pour into something meaningful.
Feeling like something is missing, but you can’t put your finger on what.
That groundhog day feeling, where you’re running on autopilot, your days lack punctuation, and you lack motivation.
That may very well be creativity knocking — you just need to open the door.
Oh, one more thing to watch for:
Burnout.
Burnout (and her sisters, stress and anxiety) could be a sign that you need to make a big change to your environment, routine, or mental health. We don’t necessarily burn out because we’re missing our creativity, but its absence is certainly felt.
I recently went to a beginner’s watercolour class. The class was small, but almost everyone in attendance was there because they were experiencing corporate burnout and needed to do something creative just for them.
It helped.
The path back to creativity
Start noticing subtle shifts, pangs, ideas, and curiosities. Notice what brought you here to this article!
You might need some time and space to do this, and that’s fair. It’s not a type of introspection we’re used to. In fact, it wasn’t until my first maternity leave that I really noticed how ungrounded and restless I felt. I needed that shake-up to realize how much I missed expressing my creativity.
On maternity leave, I could steal time to reconnect while my kids were sleeping. So I started painting, because it was so familiar to me. I picked up various other new hobbies. I worked through Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and wrote morning pages. I had Scott and Donna Sava‘s YouTube livestreams playing in the background several times per week.
While working, you could absolutely do these things in little bits at a time if you were motivated, but I think it’s harder to do without the “shake-up” — the leave, the sabbatical, the time and space away from work to refresh your priorities.
If I wanted to reclaim my creativity while working a demanding day job, here’s what I would do:
1. Reframe your relationship with the workplace
For so many of us, our careers displace our creativity. In my case, I accidentally started trying to use my career as a creative medium, which was constricting and frustrating.
If you notice that you’re excessively people-pleasing, or if you have some intense perfectionistic tendencies at work, it helps to try to release that. Here’s why:
If you’re people-pleasing, then you may be so invested in making sure everyone else is happy that you forget to check in with yourself and what you want. Being too outwardly focused makes it difficult to reconnect with your creativity. That reconnection has to come from inside.
If you’re a perfectionist, then it’s hard to connect with creativity because creative expression is by its very nature an imperfect practice. If you feel the need to control the outcome by setting high standards for yourself, the connection is stifled.
If you can let these go, then you can turn inward, prioritize yourself a little bit, and experiment. You’ll find time and make space for your creativity, breaking the old narrative that time spent being creative is not valuable.
2. Pick something small and achievable to start
It really doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s:
Something you know you love, OR you are curious about, and
Something just for you.
I love projects. It’s easy to want to come up with a big, important one and dive into it. If it’s too big, though, it can be intimidating to start (especially if you aren’t already in the habit of maintaining a creative practice).
It’s better to start small so that you will… start.
And what if, in an effort to reconnect, you put too much importance on it? Then your perfectionism kicks in, and you become paralyzed.
So the key then is to keep it achievable and low-stakes.
The whole point is to show yourself that you can be creative, and the best way to do this is in a pressure-free environment.
When I was just starting to reconnect with my creativity, I told myself that all I was going to do was pick up a paintbrush and lay down some colour. I hadn’t painted in years, so this was easy and accessible. It wasn’t long before it inspired me to do more!
3. Enjoy the process by refining your definition of value
Especially if you’re coming out of corporate burnout, looking to reconnect with your creativity.
Profitability is one way to judge the value of an endeavour. We’re trained to think this way, folks — look to the leader, they’ll tell you what’s a valuable use of your time, and what’s not.
In creativity, we are our own leaders. We have to decide what is valuable to us. (Hint: It does not need to be monetary — we already have our jobs for that.)
When we become our own leaders, we find ourselves in creative ambiguity. In the freedom that we aren’t used to having, we start looking outside ourselves for hints.
This is where tutorials and Pinterest become super tempting. And if you’re there getting inspired, go for it! But don’t feel that you must execute to perfection — the tutorial makers will not be grading you.
You must also get curious, because nobody is going to tell you where to turn next. You have to decide how your own creative path will unfold.
And more than anything, you must enjoy the process. Not every minute of it, but in a general sense.
Part of the enjoyment is simply discovering that there’s great value in the creative work you do. There’s value in self-discovery, in genuine self-expression, and in finding meaning in what you make.
Life is meant to be lived, after all!
Parting words
Although I’ve reworked this essay, I wanted to save this snippet from the original:
That simple act [of putting paint on paper] was the start of a new creative journey. I imagine much of that journey will comprise the content of this blog! As I write this post, I’m now on my second maternity leave (if I can manage to hit “publish” before it ends, darn perfectionism). Even with the attention-stretching jump from one kiddo to two, I’m making the time to follow my curiosity and embrace a more creative life, little bits at a time.
Still stressed? Still anxious? Sure — having a young family will do that, and breaking old habits like overthinking and overworking is hard! But now I feel like I can show up to all these other important areas of life more authentically and with presence, no longer a reactive fart in the wind.
Upon re-write, I’m still painting, and I have a few other hobbies that I love and continue to maintain, not the least of which is writing this blog.
When I first wrote this post, I was hoping that maintaining the blog would support my theory that a creative practice can help you feel more grounded, even with a demanding day job. Now I can confidently say that it can.
Maintaining a dedicated creative practice really has helped me curb overworking by reprioritizing and rebalancing my life, and I feel so much better for it!
How about you? If you are here, my friend, you’re already doing great! Now it’s time to take action. Do something creative. Anything! Bonus points if it’s something you loved to do as a kid. Extra bonus points if it’s something you’ve always secretly wanted to try as an adult.
Take the first step on your creative journey.
I wish I had read this when I was in the thick of my corporate career and my only creative outlet was powerpoint...
I love to hear other creatives perspectives on creativity and this was such a wellrounded one. I feel like creativity is very much a thing that ebbs and flows, stops and starts and that is some of its beauty.