Somewhere along the way, a lot of us were taught that creativity comes with rules. That it has to look a certain way. That you need to actually be good at it for it to count.
I was never encouraged to be creative growing up. Drawing, knitting, anything remotely artistic — I was genuinely terrible at it, and because nobody ever told me there might be another way to approach it, I quietly decided I just wasn’t a creative person and stopped trying altogether.
What Shifted at the Retreat
Years later, I went on a retreat at O Jardim, and something in that belief actually cracked open. The organisers had set aside real time for exploring creativity, but honestly, what moved me most wasn’t the structured time itself. It was the other people there — most of them visibly far more at ease with their own creativity than I was, and being around that kind of ease was strangely contagious.
One woman had brought all sorts of materials for everyone to experiment with, and one of them was cyanotype, something I’d genuinely never heard of before. The process itself needs no skill at all, which is exactly what made it land so hard for me. You lay something on a treated sheet of paper — a flower, a shell, a single leaf — and leave it out in the sun. After a while, you lift the material off and rinse the paper, and what’s left behind is a bright, deep blue print with the pale white outline of whatever you’d placed there. I loved it instantly. There was nothing to get wrong. You just placed something you liked the shape of, and the sun did the rest.
Being surrounded by people who were so gentle and unguarded about their own creative attempts made it feel genuinely safe to try something myself, without the old fear of being bad at it creeping back in the way it always had before.
What I Found When I Got Home
When I came home, I found doodling. A few pens, nothing fancy, and I just started. I wasn’t good at it, not at first, but I liked it, and that turned out to be enough reason to keep going. I still look at other people’s work for inspiration and then twist it into something of my own. Oddly, I’ve discovered I prefer bold, colourful designs over the delicate, careful lines I always assumed would suit me better. It wasn’t remotely what I expected to enjoy, and that’s exactly the part I love about it.
Creativity for the Sake of Play
Creativity doesn’t need an audience. It doesn’t have to be pretty, finished, or useful to anyone, including yourself. It can be messy and strange and entirely unresolved, existing purely because you wanted to make it exist. Sometimes the process matters more than whatever comes out the other end — the focus and flow of actually making something can be genuinely calming, almost meditative, the way certain kinds of stillness are.
If that kind of quiet, purposeful slowing down appeals to you, A Gentle Reset is a free e-book of small rituals for finding exactly that stillness in ordinary moments.
Making Space for It
Starting small is usually enough — one sketch, a few words, a short hummed melody, nothing that needs to go anywhere afterward. Letting go of the outcome matters more than it sounds like it should; it genuinely doesn’t matter whether anyone else ever sees what you made. Trying a new tool, colour, or material without expecting to be good at it the first time tends to open up more than sticking to whatever you already know you can do reasonably well. Even ten minutes is enough time to start, and it’s worth letting the result surprise you — I never expected bold colour to be my thing, and it turned out to be exactly that.
Why It Matters
Creativity isn’t really about producing something. It’s about expressing something, about noticing what you’re actually drawn to and letting it move through you without judgment attached. Slowing down enough to let that happen matters here just as much as it does anywhere else in a gentler life — even ten minutes with a pen and no plan counts as exactly that kind of slowing down.
If you’ve been waiting for permission to start, here it is. You don’t have to be good. You just have to begin, with whatever’s nearest to hand — a pen, a leaf, a patch of sunlight, and absolutely no expectation of what should come out the other side.
A little something for free — small, gentle rituals for the days that feel like too much.