How Creativity Helped Me Heal After Abuse
- May 3, 2012
- 3 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
I did not have a plan.
I just loved it.
That is honestly the whole story of how the fairy pots started. I was in a season of rebuilding. On my own, my boys with me, doing what needed doing. And one day I found myself standing in a craft shop looking at teacup planters thinking, I want to make something like that.
So I did.
Hello Beautiful Souls
I made fairy gardens inside large teacups. Little worlds with tiny doors and miniature figures and real plants tucked in. I scrapbooked. I cut and layered and arranged photographs of my kids into pages that felt like mine. Nobody asked me to. Nobody was going to grade me on it. I just followed what my heart said yes to.
And somewhere in all of that, without me noticing, something started coming back.
What Gets Quiet When You Are Surviving
Abuse does something to your imagination that is hard to describe until you have lived it.
It is not that you stop dreaming exactly. It is more that the dreaming stops feeling like it belongs to you. Your world shrinks. Your preferences start to feel irrelevant. After long enough, you stop having preferences, because there does not seem to be much point.
The part of you that says I wonder what would happen if I tried that goes very quiet.
And when you leave, that quietness does not just switch back on. You are in survival mode. You are managing. You are getting through. There is not much room yet for following where your heart leads.
What I did not know then is that creativity is one of the most natural ways to invite that part of yourself back.
How Creativity Helped Me Heal After Abuse: What I Did Not Expect
I did not sit down one day and decide to use creativity as a healing tool.
I just made fairy pots because I loved them.
My friend looked at one and said, you should make more and sell them. So I did. I made them in all different shapes and sizes. I went to the markets. I sold every single one.
Was it a sustainable business? No. The margins were too thin. People did not want to pay what they cost to make. But here is what I got from it that no spreadsheet could capture.
I had an idea. I followed it. I made something real from it. And then I did it again.
That is what imagination looks like when it is waking back up. Not a vision board. Not a five-year plan. One pot. One page. One small yes.
Creativity does not ask you to have it all figured out. It just asks you to begin.
Your Heart Knows the Way In
You do not need to know where it is going.
You do not need it to make sense or be practical or impress anyone. Art therapy is a real thing for good reason, but you do not need a therapist's office to access what it gives you. You just need to follow what your heart says yes to, even if it is something small and a little bit unexpected.
Make something with your hands.
Bake the thing you used to love baking.
Rearrange the corner of a room just because you feel like it.
Take photos of things that catch your eye on a walk.
Write something in a notebook that no one will ever read.
Let your imagination go somewhere, anywhere, just to remember that it can.
Because here is what I know now, looking back: the fairy pots were not a detour from my healing.
They were part of it. The creativity, the following of something I loved just because I loved it, that was the light starting to come back on.
If you have ever wondered how creativity helped me heal after abuse, this is the honest answer: it started with one small thing I did just because I loved it.
It is in there for you too.
If you are wondering where you are on your healing path right now, this is a gentle place to start.
A Note Before You Go
If this resonated, the blog from last week on how to dream again after an abusive relationship sits right alongside it. The two go together.
And if you want a community of women who get this season from the inside, come and find us.
Join us inside the Inner Freedom Facebook Community
With warmth and compassion,
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