How I Process the Hard Stuff
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about creativity as a way of managing trauma. I’ve been dancing around my own pain, trying to appear strong for my family, to keep the chaos inside me leashed, the cortisol levels manageable.
I’m not fooling anyone, least of all myself.
What I haven’t fully come to terms with was that creativity isn’t a luxury for me. It isn’t something I do for fun when there’s time. It’s how my body knows how to breathe through what it’s carrying. Recently I’ve needed to make protest pins, and offer them to strangers on the street. I’ve been knitting as catharsis, and to calm my nervous system down.
Many of us talk about art like it’s a hobby. As though it is an optional piece. Like it’s something you add to a life once everything else is handled.
For me, it’s the opposite. It’s the entire point.
Creativity is where the pressure goes. It’s where the words that don’t fit into conversations get somewhere to land. It’s where grief softens just enough to be touched. It’s where my nervous system stops bracing for a moment and remembers that I am still here.
I’ve spent a long time trying to be the strong one. The regulated one. The steady presence. The person who keeps things moving forward even when everything inside feels tender and overexposed.
That kind of strength comes at a cost.
It means swallowing reactions. It means translating fear into productivity. It means I catch myself wondering if I’m being ‘productive’ enough during a nap. This is something I’ve only recently begun to understand enough about myself to begin re-patterning towards something more grounded in self love.
This means turning overwhelm into competence, or skill building. For me it means learning how to metabolize chaos quietly so the people I love don’t have to feel it as sharply.
But bodies don’t forget. Mine is no exception.
I hold much of my tension in my shoulders. In my jaw. In the way sleep becomes fragile, disjointed, short. It is also in the way I startle more easily, or feel on high alert. In the way joy feels distant even when good things are happening.
Creativity is how I give that stored energy somewhere to go. How I process some of my emotions, lately grief, anger and profound sadness.
Sometimes it looks like writing, or painting. Sometimes it looks like building small beautiful things with my hands, including a small peg doll or wool felt and wood. Occasionally, it is just letting myself sit with music and feel without trying to solve the feelings.
Many times it isn’t pretty. My process has never been linear. Many times the process doesn’t produce something shareable.
But it keeps me from disappearing inside myself, or down the rabbit hole of doom scrolling.
We don’t talk enough about how much emotional labor women are doing just to stay functional. About how often we’re expected to self-regulate entire systems — families, workplaces, relationships — while quietly managing our own fear, exhaustion, and grief.
We’re praised for resilience when what we actually need is room.
I want the space to feel what I feel, I’m fortunate to have a partner and family who gives me space for that. I also sometimes need room to unravel, sometimes when it’s too much to journal, or say out loud.
And room to make meaning out of what hurts, especially now when the hurt and anger feels overwhelming.
Creativity gives me that room, not as an escape, but as a form of honesty. A place to just let go, not judge or control, just be.
I’m realizing that I don’t want to keep treating that as something secondary in my life. I don’t want to keep apologizing for how much space it takes. I don’t want to pretend that making things is separate from surviving.
My creativity is part of my healing. It always has been. It’s what has carried me through some of the hardest personal tragedies of my life.
This moment in our collective history feels different, though. Heavier. Sharper. Less predictable. And layered on top of that, I recently concussed myself, so these days I oscillate between rage and naps.
Both feel strangely appropriate.
Some days I am furious at the state of the world. Some days I can barely keep my eyes open. Some days I do both before noon.
But even here — especially here — creativity keeps showing up as a quiet anchor. Not as forced optimism. Not as spiritual bypassing. Just as presence. As breath. As something that reminds me I am still inside my body, still capable of making meaning, still allowed to feel joy alongside grief.
I don’t think creativity fixes trauma but I do think it can help. I also think it can give us somewhere to put the emotions, the pain and the hurt.
And right now, that feels like something.
xo
Dania
Please take care, I’m holding a small holding space group this Wednesday online, if you want to join us, reach out hello (at) daniamiwa (.) com