How to keep creating when your world falls apart

13 Mar, 2025

Okay so, I have cancer, was diagnosed in June last year.

And every day since, except on days where I felt really sick and my brain was mush, I created something.

Here are ten random ideas on how to stay creative while your world falls apart.

1. Change your purpose for creativity.
   Create for distraction. Create for healing. Create for self-compassion.

2. Don’t expect perfection.
   (Maybe that’s a good habit for when you feel better, too)

3. Just create what you need.
   If all you want is to smash random blobs of colourful paints into the pages of your journal, smash those random blobs with perfection. If all you want is to write tiny poems, write tiny poems.

4. Don’t expect it to be the same.
   I expected, for instance, that I would keep writing, because writing is like breathing. Yet, I had a writer’s block the size of a mountain. Guess how much writing I did in the first months. Yep. Zilch. I did however paint and draw like mad, and knitted.

5. Don’t expect the same “production”.
   It’s easy to put on expectations of the same work hours, for instance, but when your body is worn out from chemo, fifteen minutes of creativity may be all you manage.

6. Give yourself the best.
   This isn’t a make do time, this is where you give yourself the best notebook, the most wonderful pen imaginable.

7. Practice gratitude.
   It may sound strange, but that really worked for me. Every day I was grateful for what I created, and I took that feeling with me into the next.

8. Embrace your emotions.
   The path you walk isn’t easy. What can you create when all you want to do is cry? Or when you are angry?

9. Make lists.
   I’m a list maker. I didn’t have this idea at the time, but I can imagine so well that I would have loved to make lists of things I could create when my body felt up to it again.

10. Journal.
    Journal about your creative explorations and how they made you feel. And don’t be afraid to journal in different ways too. Make doodles of your world as it is right now. Write radical poems.

PS This list was written about health issues and creativity, but it can also be applied in different ways to those creatives who now live somewhere the government falls apart, or is torn apart.

In this case, I suggest a book more than the list above. The guerilla art kit by Keri Smith. It’s all about how you as an artist can use your art to change the world.

#inspiration