When the World Feels Impossible: Why Your Creativity Matters Most
I’m hearing a lot lately about the paralysis many folks are feeling in the face of world atrocities. Some of us are scrolling obsessively and some of us are trying to avoid the news altogether. It’s hard to know the impact of shared indignance and not feel like our individual actions are too small to matter. In my own troubled ruminations, the question that keeps coming up for me is: what is my role here as a coaching artist? Is human creativity as powerful as I want it to be?
When Creativity Goes Underground
During the pandemic, like so many of us, I retreated into a kind of palliative holding pattern, waiting with watchful eyes for anything truly actionable, telling myself I was “strong enough” to get my family and myself through it all, no matter what (and binging on Tiger King, etc). Thankfully, we did survive that time—but meanwhile, I completely ignored my creative impulses. Much later, in the past year or so when I first heard Brené Brown talk about how unused creativity “metastasizes” in us, I was gutted by the resonance. I’d felt a protracted, low-grade grief I couldn’t name, and it was pervading my everyday life and eventually would seriously affect my mental health. I think of it as a paralysis of spirit.
I managed to write exactly one song during those two and a half years, and even then it didn’t feel like much of a salve, or that it made a lasting difference. When I listen to it now, it is clearly the sound of a neglected voice, defiantly pushing up through the dirt under which I’d buried it.
We tell ourselves we’ll get back to “non-essential” things when the world stabilizes, when things feel less urgent, but I would argue there is nothing more urgent or essential than engaging our capacity for creation, for joy, and for connection.
What Creative Practice Teaches
Aimé McNee says that “creativity is the missing pillar in self development.” Not self-improvement, but development—the gradual building of capacities for that which serves us and our environment.
In my work as a songwriting coach, I watch people discover things about themselves through the process that have little to do with making better songs. They’re learning to sit with uncertainty—the not-knowing whether a line will work, whether a melody will land. They’re practicing revision without shame, trying one approach and then another, treating the previous attempts as valuable failure. They’re finding their authentic voice, which turns out to be harder than most expect and more important than most realize.
These capacities—working with ambiguity, thinking iteratively, expressing authentically—can be considered tools for navigating complexity, rather than abstract skills. They’re rehearsal for living in the worst of times and the best of times.
The Necessity of Imagination
As I’m writing this, I’m remembering a creative mini-practice I actually did maintain during Covid: bedtime stories. Our daughter, then 11, counted on hearing the latest episode of “The Life and Times of Heide the Halfling” every night, a saga I was making up on the spot about a clever young girl orphaned on an island off the coast of Iceland who finds her home among Viking Warrior Women. I remember challenging myself to make it all up in real time, and sometimes our youngest would catch me repeating myself, which turned into a game that delighted us both.
I didn’t think of it as a creative practice at the time—it was just one of those things we did in lockdown. But looking back, the act of imagining Heide’s world, of solving narrative problems on the fly, of making my daughter laugh or gasp at a plot twist—it was a ritual of creative insistence. It was agency in miniature, reminding us both that the future (even of a fictional halfling) wasn’t predetermined.
James Baldwin wrote that “the poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity, but until the people themselves apprehend it, nothing can happen.” In other words, imagination and action aren’t separate territories. Imagination is what makes action visible, possible, worth attempting in the first place.
When power insists there’s no alternative, creativity has the capacity to insist otherwise. Every time we create something from nothing—a song, a sculpture, a garden—we’re demonstrating that reality is malleable, that the future isn’t predetermined, that our actions can shape outcomes even if we feel we can’t control them.
Paulo Freire wrote about conscientização—developing critical consciousness through cycles of reflection and action. Part of that process involves naming our reality, which is itself a creative act that can transform both the namer and the named.
Creative work doesn’t have to be dramatic or public to matter. The ditty written in your kitchen that no one else hears, the painting you never show anyone, the journal entry detailing the dream you just had, the elaborate imaginary world you build with your kids—these are also assertions of agency, quiet proof that we haven’t surrendered our capacity to imagine otherwise.
Making vs. Consuming
On the Tiger King tip: consuming content—even artful content, even loads of it—doesn’t build the capacity that making something ourselves does. Even making something badly. Maybe especially making something badly.
I’ve watched this happen repeatedly with my songwriting groups. When people give themselves permission to create without the pressure of quality, when we remove the stakes and focus on process, something truthful emerges. The act of creation itself—messy, imperfect, exploratory—seems to repair our relationship to our own power. It reminds us that we can still shape things, that passivity is simply a mark of letting external messaging convince us to lose trust in ourselves.
Joy-driven making matters here. Not obligation, not productivity for its own sake. Making because humans seem to need to make things, because there’s something in us that atrophies when we don’t.
What Creative Practice Models
Like Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance”—that public realm where we show up as our full selves—and Václav Havel’s “living in truth”—his term for authentic expression under occupation—the creative process models capacities that democratic societies desperately need.
Making art asks us to be experimental, to risk failure, to try things without guarantees of success. It requires that we revise and reconsider rather than defending our first idea to the death. Most importantly, it invites us to engage in what Havel called the simple but radical act of creating and expressing authentically rather than performing what power demands.
True creativity demands authenticity. And in times when conformity feels safer, authenticity becomes genuine subversive power.
Starting Small
You don’t need a masterpiece—in fact, I would argue it’s the very last thing you need. You don’t even need a completed project. You need to make something, anything, and trust that the act of making matters more than what gets made. As Kurt Vonnegut told high-schoolers, “practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly…to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.”
The scale doesn’t determine the significance. What matters is exercising your capacity to shape something, to make choices and see their effects, to have a seat at the table that informs reality.
Not Selfish
There’s a voice many of us hear that says creative time is selfish when the world is burning. I understand that voice. I listened to it for years. It’s shite.
Our capacity for action is not zero-sum. Creative practice doesn’t deplete the energies you need for other areas of your life as a human being—it’s quite the opposite, actually. It can provide resilience for the long haul, imagination for approaching problems from new angles, community with other makers, evidence of our own agency, and joy that sustains us through difficulty.
Toni Morrison said about crisis: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” Somewhere in there is the connection between truth and beauty that Keats identified, a connection whose access is the real reparative capacity of the human spirit.
What I Keep Coming Back To
If you’re carrying the weight I described here—that sense that your individual actions are too small to matter—and/or you’re feeling a paralytic disconnect—I’m there with you. The overwhelm makes complete sense.
But I think the answer to the question I keep asking myself is this: human creativity is exactly as powerful as I want it to be. In fact, it is necessarily so: our creative practices aren’t a retreat from difficulties. They might be training grounds for facing them. They build capacities we need—for ambiguity, for iterative thinking, for authentic expression, for not giving up when things are ugly.
What I’m after here is that we need you. We need your story to help us remember how to imagine differently, we need your voice to remind us not to surrender our sense of agency, we need your vision to believe in what’s possible.
Make something this week. Make it for yourself. Make it imperfectly. Make it as an experiment in remembering what really matters.
What’s the creative practice you’ve been postponing? What would it take to return to it this week?
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