Creativity is Not Healing.

Reclaiming what was never broken

There is a story being told about creativity, and it goes something like this: pick up a paintbrush, return to the page, make something with your hands, and you will feel better. The anxiety will soften, and the grief will find somewhere to go. The self you mislaid somewhere in your forties will come home. It is a kind and optimistic story. It is also, I want to suggest, not quite true.

I know from my own experience that creativity does restore something. I have seen it with my own eyes and felt it in my own body. Picking up a paintbrush in the midst of a perimenopausal storm of anxiety and depression a decade ago gave me a tiny nudge towards recovery. But so did therapy, prescription drugs and a few grudging barefoot steps on the grass. I am not here to dismiss anyone’s experience. But I want to gently challenge the story, because I think we deserve a more honest one. The word we reach for too quickly is healing . And I think the word we actually need is reclamation.

The wellness story and what it leaves out.

The ‘creativity heals’ narrative has become so ubiquitous that it has started to feel unarguable, like death and taxes . Art therapy, journaling as self-care, the creative retreat as prescription. Underneath all of it there’s a troubling implication: that the problem is inside you, and the solution is too. Make more art. Feel better. Crack on.

Kristie De Garis has written sharply about a parallel phenomenon she calls the ‘nature cure’- the cultural habit of offering women long walks and cold swims as a response to structural conditions that have ground them down. Her observation cuts right to the bone: ‘If walking were sufficient, ramblers would have dismantled the patriarchy by now.’ The same logic applies here. If making art were a cure, we (mid-life women!) would be running the world. But the conditions that have silenced us - domestic overwhelm, the cultural dismissal of women’s inner lives, the way ambition in a woman was for so long read as selfishness - those conditions are not a mood. They are not treatable with watercolours.

Dr Simon Willems, whose work explores the intersection of art and wellbeing, puts it plainly: wellness programmes, however well-intentioned, tend to ask us to ‘meditate our way through impossible workloads’ rather than examine the structures that created those workloads in the first place. We are asked to manage ourselves. The system is left entirely unchanged.

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of the healing narrative. It takes something political - the long, accumulated silencing of women’s creative and intellectual lives - and turns it into something personal. A problem with our nervous system. A deficit in our self-care practice. It asks us to heal, when what actually happened was that something was taken.

What bell hooks understood about reclamation.

In 1995, bell hooks published ‘Art on My Mind: Visual Politics’ - a book so direct in its argument that I still find myself feeling a little whiplashed. She was writing about art and oppressed communities, but the logic arguably reaches into the lives of midlife women with an accuracy that startles. Art, she argued, is how silenced people reclaim subjectivity - their sense of themselves as full human beings with an interior life worth attending to. And then this, which I think is one of the most important sentences written about creativity in the last century:

“If one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonisation, is complete. Such work can be undone only by acts of concrete reclamation.”

Phew. Read that again slowly. Losing touch with your creative capacity is not a personal failing or a consequence of being busy. It is, hooks is telling us, what subjugation looks like when it has done its work properly. And the undoing of it - picking up the pen, returning to the canvas, letting yourself make something - is not therapy. It is reclamation. It is an act with political potential.

The word reclamation does something that healing cannot. It implies something was taken. It names a prior wrong. It puts the agency entirely with you, not as someone recovering from illness, but as someone retrieving what is rightfully theirs.

The care in making, not the cure.

Maggie Nelson, in ‘On Freedom’, approaches this territory from a different, challenging angle. She is suspicious of the impulse to turn art into a vehicle for personal healing, a prescription that, if followed correctly, will deliver the desired outcome. What she asks us to focus on instead is ‘the care in art-making’ -the quality of attention, the commitment to the practice itself, not what the practice is supposed to do for us afterwards.

This distinction is subtle but important. A prescription has a desired outcome. A practice is its own justification. When we talk about art as healing, we are secretly still in the language of productivity - the creative act is legitimised by what it produces (a better, calmer, more functional you). When we talk about the care in making, we are saying something different: that the act of attending seriously to our own inner life is inherently valuable, regardless of what it fixes or fails to fix.

Your silence will not protect you.

Audre Lorde wrote her most famous words about self-care - that it is ‘an act of political warfare’- while she was dying of cancer, as well as fighting racism and sexism. The wellness industry later ‘borrowed’ that line and placed it alongside bath products and breathwork, stripping away the context: she was not talking about rest as reward. She was talking about survival as resistance, the refusal to disappear.

She also wrote, with equal force: ‘Your silence will not protect you.’ It did not protect any of us. And yet so many of us went quiet anyway, in our thirties, our forties, not because we chose silence but because the effort required to keep speaking became too costly, and society did not value what we were saying enough to make the cost bearable.

Picking up a paintbrush does not undo any of that, but it refuses to let it be the final word.

What I want for you, and me.

I am not asking you to give up the comfort that creativity has brought you, or to reframe your studio practice as political activism when it does not feel that way. (Mine certainly doesn’t.) I am asking something smaller and perhaps more difficult: that you let yourself believe how significant it actually is.

When we return to our creative practice after years away, we are not just being kind to ourselves, though we are doing that too. We are insisting , maybe against a long cultural habit of insisting otherwise, that our inner life still matters. That our vision of our world deserves to exist in material form. That what we have to say has not been overwhelmed by everything that blocked or interrupted us.

That is not healing. Healing suggests we were broken. We were not broken. We were overwhelmed, maybe somewhat suppressed, and we were busy, and the world made it very easy not to speak.

Reclamation starts, as hooks said, with concrete acts - not grand gestures, but the real and particular work of returning to yourself. This week. In whatever form that takes.

If this essay resonated with you, I would love to hear what word - healing, reclamation, or something else entirely- best describes your own return to creative practice. You can reply directly to me, or leave a comment below.