A good friend recently sent me this article by Tom Wright-Piersanti in The New York Times about rediscovering his joy in drumming. It immediately lit something up in me. Not just because I, too, have returned to practices I once thought I had outgrown. More than that, it was the simple truth at the heart of his story that stayed with me: the realization that he hadn’t stopped being a drummer just because he hadn’t played in a while.
That sentence held me.
In my work with artists, especially those navigating illness, trauma, caregiving, or chronic overwhelm, this question comes up often.
“Am I still a writer if I haven’t written in months?”
“Can I call myself an artist if I only create when I have energy left over?”
“Do I get to keep that identity if I’m not producing anything new?”
We talk so much about creative output, we can sometimes forget that creative being is something we carry even when the materials are untouched. Even when the pages are blank. Even when we’ve been away a long, long time.
Wright-Piersanti reminds us that sometimes it just takes one small, unexpected portal for that part of ourselves to rise again. It might be anything - a child’s drum set, a moment in the laundry room when the light hits just right. Not because we forced it, but because it never really left.
I have developed these ideas after decades of lived experience, interview-based insights, and deep research into the complex relationship between art and health. They are based on my unique 6-part framework and Creative Health Cartography. If you are interested in assistance in applying these ideas to your own life: Order a Creative Health Map.
Play Without Proof
There’s a purity to the way he describes sneaking in a few joyful minutes at the drum kit. No intention to perform. No need to improve. Just the giddy energy of making noise for its own sake.
That kind of creative presence, not goal oriented, attuned to pleasure, is rare in adulthood. Especially for those of us who’ve turned our creativity into our livelihood, or whose practices are bound up with recovery. We’re always being asked to prove something with our making. That we’re healing. That we’re progressing. That our art has value.
But what if the act of creation didn’t have to carry all that weight?
Winnicott called this kind of activity play. Not in the frivolous sense, but as a psychological space where experimentation and self-expression can exist without judgment. A space where we don’t have to be good. We just have to be with ourselves. Loosened. Alive.
When art returns in these moments, not as obligation but as spark, it’s a kind of quiet reclamation. Not a comeback. A remembering.
The Constraints Are Real
The article also makes a case for structured creativity: writing poems under constraint, solving problems with limitations in place. That is valuable. In fact, constraint-based creativity has deep roots in both literary history, like Oulipo and erasure poems, and in therapeutic art practices. It teaches us flexibility, focus, and the capacity to reframe.
But for many, constraints aren’t just a creative device. They’re lived realities.
Fatigue. Pain. Parenting. Structural violence. Executive dysfunction. Disability. These are not optional limitations we can play within. They are conditions we must move through daily. And so for some of us, the five-day challenge might not feel like an invitation to stretch creatively. It might feel like another way to measure what we aren’t doing.
That doesn’t mean the approach is flawed. But it does mean the frame needs to widen.
Constraints can inspire. But they can also overwhelm. The difference is how we’re met. Whether we’re offered permission to modify, to opt out, or to fail gently. Whether we’re reminded that creative identity isn’t lost when the exercise doesn’t get done. Whether we’re encouraged to let making feel good, not just productive.
Creativity as Capacity
What struck me most about the piece, beyond its sweetness, was its optimism. It reminds us that creativity is something you can practice, grow, stretch into. And I agree although perhaps with a caveat:
Creativity doesn’t live in one mood state. It doesn’t arrive only when we’re well-rested and inspired. It’s not always sparked by novelty. For those of us navigating trauma or grief, it can also be cyclical, fragmented, slow.
In the frameworks I return to (feminist psychology, trauma-informed art therapy, disability justice) creativity isn’t a light switch. It’s a relationship with our nervous system. A dialogue with capacity. A negotiation between what we want to express and what we have the energy or safety to hold.
That relationship changes. Sometimes dramatically. Sometimes it goes quiet for years. Sometimes it surprises us with its return.
But it never stops belonging to us.
You Don’t Have to Feel Inspired
If you’re holding an instrument you haven’t touched in a decade.
If you’re staring at a yarn stash you no longer know how to begin.
If you’re flipping through an old notebook, wondering where your voice went …
That is okay. You’re still a maker. You’re still an artist. You’re still a creative being.
Not because you’re producing. But because something in you still wants to feel.
Maybe that’s the deeper invitation: not to ignite a spark, but to trust that the fire never really went out. It’s just been waiting for a moment quiet enough to return.
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I've been thinking about this a ton lately! I launched my first poetry book just a few months before the pandemic. I was so happy to have it finished and out into the world, I was planning a book tour and doing readings then: COVID happened. Now I have a dusty box of books under my bed.
It's been years since then, of course, but I struggled to get my mojo back for creative writing. I think there were many reasons: the combo of motherhood trenches, professional life, my intuitive/mediumship work, the giant wet-blanket that is hormonal change at this age. But also our culture's emphasis on "Things aren't worth doing unless they're validated as 'productive'". That just squashed my desire to create. If my art didn't advance a strategy toward something bigger - toward becoming a big deal in my creative space - why bother?
One GOOD think about aging in this phase of life is that I've moved into a place where I don't much care about that cultural view of what "achievement" means. I recently started writing poems again, bad ones, good ones, who knows!? No one sees them but me (so far) types of poems and it's a whole new mindset, whole new world.
This is such a rich topic to explore… and what I notice is an undercurrent of “creative” as an identity in our culture… a very western notion that we have to consistently “do” to be entitled to claim it.
For me, flipping it on its head to see creativity as the language of the heart (and our fire element), changed my relationship to it. What am I passionate about and love - those are my creative fuels and outlets. And when I work with clients, I ask what brings them joy, and they frequently go blank - as if they only know joy is in relationship to validation/service to others.
So we explore what they loved to do when they were younger… swing on the swings, color, blow bubbles, play in the waves at the beach…? I see these sweet memories as portals into our joy, creativity, and passion (all elements of the heart).