What I Didn’t Know Creativity Was Doing

For a long time, I thought I wrote simply because I enjoyed it, which is reason enough. Who doesn’t love the flow state, that moment when the world disappears and you look up to find the afternoon gone?

Only later did I realize my creativity wasn’t just expression. It was connection. It was my nervous system finding its footing.

Humans are wired for connection—and when we connect, our nervous systems regulate and return to center. For me, writing became the place where my system could settle, reorganize, and breathe after years of striving, managing, performing, and holding myself together. During long stretches of uncertainty, creativity gave me somewhere to land.

What made writing healing was that I never felt “productive.” I wasn’t fixing anything. I wasn’t trying to improve myself. I was listening. Letting something move through me instead of pushing myself forward by effort.

It wasn’t until later—when I began studying creativity—that I had the ah-ha moment: creativity isn’t a side hobby. It isn’t making things for fun. It’s one of the ways we stay oriented inward. One of the ways we stay connected to ourselves—and something larger.

Which is to say: one of the ways we regulate.

That may be the crux of this whole human experiment: rupture and repair. We get knocked off center by contrast, change, loss, or growth. Then we find our way back. Again and again.

That’s the rhythm of being alive here at Earth School.

Contrast is part of the curriculum here at Earth School.

I see this in my clients, especially high achievers who look successful on the outside but often feel disconnected on the inside. The creative current, that inner attunement, hasn’t disappeared. Somewhere along the way, it got replaced by external pressure. That same energy was rerouted into coping: productivity, effort, distraction, force.

Doing. Doing. Doing.
More. More. More.

But what the system was actually craving wasn’t another push.

It was reconnection with what’s already alive inside us.

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