The sentence I have heard more times than any other in twenty years of working with artists is some version of this:
And then I had to change my medium again because of my health.
People say it with resignation. With dark humor. Sometimes with surprise at how many reinventions one creative life can hold. It comes up whether I’m talking with someone navigating chronic pain, a late ADHD diagnosis, grief, or a long stretch of depression that made words temporarily inaccessible. The medium shifted. The body had different terms. Health impacts medium.
In this episode, I walk through my own medium biography, prompt by prompt, from the friendship bracelets of fourth grade through the crochet that found me in my twenties through the collage and podcast work I’m doing now.
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In this episode:
The medium biography is one of the exercises I return to most often in one-on-one sessions and in the workbook. It is a chronological account of every creative medium you have worked in, laid against a timeline of your health. The health layer that was invisible in any given period has a way of becoming visible when you look backward.
In my twenties, when I discovered crochet, I was in a period of undiagnosed, serious depression. I had read somewhere that it helps to think about what you loved making around age eight or ten. Friendship bracelets came to mind immediately, and from there, the memory of knotting something tactile with my hands. Crochet was the adult version of that. I did not consciously think: I need repetitive motor movement to regulate my nervous system. I just followed what my body remembered. Looking back now, the connection is clear.
The six prompts I work through in this episode:
1. The first medium you remember making as a child. What did it require of your body? What happened to it? For me: friendship bracelets, which I now recognize were a form of macrame. The focus, the immersion, the first failed attempt at monetizing my creativity at age ten.
2. The mediums of your teens and early twenties. What drew you to them, what were you navigating in your health, what did they give you? I worked through three: writing letters to over a hundred pen pals, the mail art and handmade zine culture that came with it, and double-exposure photography. The pen pal work now reads clearly as someone who needed connection while depression was beginning to close around her. The photography was the first time I worked in something visual and nonverbal, something that accessed a different part of me.
3. Any medium that arrived because of circumstance or necessity rather than choice. Crochet sits here for me. Accessible, affordable, learnable alone, portable, requiring nothing beyond what I could already afford. I did not choose it for aesthetic reasons.
4. Any medium that changed significantly or that you stopped working in during a health change. Photography is my honest answer here, and working through it on air I realized something I had not fully named before: I think the breaks I have taken from visual and photographic work were in part because I did not want to go to the places it took me. Writing feels more graspable, more controllable. The visual and collage work goes somewhere I cannot fully predict. I got chills saying this out loud. I had not thought it through to that conclusion before.
5. The mediums you are working in now. Collage for the mapping work. Podcasting. A spoken word piece I have been working on. The collage requires me to be present in my body in a way that digital collage does not. Physically cutting and laying by hand keeps me in the intuitive rather than the analytical.
6. Any medium you would like to work in but your current health makes difficult to access. Music is my honest answer. I literally cannot parse individual instruments in a song. The idea that I could identify a C note is like magic to me. I played flute as a child and cried through every lesson. I think I would like piano in my life at some point, though I am not sure I want it as a body of work, more as something private and mine.
The comfort medium
After the biography, the workbook asks: across your entire history, what medium keeps showing up most steadily?
For me that is crochet. It is not what I am most known for or what I consider my primary creative identity. But it is the one with the lowest threshold, the most forgiving relationship, the one I reach for when other things are not available. When brain fog makes writing inaccessible. When anxiety makes the kind of project-holding that writing requires feel impossible. Crochet does not ask that of me.
Knowing your comfort medium matters for two reasons. First, it is something you can return to when nothing else is working. Second, losing a comfort medium to health change is its own form of grief, and it deserves to be named as that.
A note before you do this yourself
Working through the medium biography can surface grief. The loss of a medium, the realization of how much a health period shaped what was available to you, the recognition of a self who made something you cannot access right now. That is not a problem to solve. It is information to sit with.
If you want to work through this with someone, this is exactly the kind of terrain we map together in Creative Health Cartography sessions.
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