I believe creativity can be an important part of any healing process but apart from that it is something that can bring joy into and enhance anyone’s life. Having my own experience of chronic illness and knowing how much I’ve personally got out of being creative, I wanted to share some of my more practical tips that I hope will be helpful if you’d like to include more creativity in your life.You don’t have to have an illness to find these tips helpful, but I created them with that in mind.
1. Do something you love
If you are unwell, the last thing you want to spend your hard fought for energy on is something you don’t enjoy. Choose something that lifts you up in a positive way. It may be reconnecting to a previous creative practice, project or hobby or trying something new. Creativity is a broad concept that can apply to any area of life but you may want to start by considering the obvious, art and craft, design, writing, journalling, photography, music, performance, acting, singing, dancing. It doesn’t have to be highbrow or complicated though, taking photographs or making videos on your phone counts.
2. Make it manageable
So this one isn’t fun, especially as when you have a chronic illness you can become acutely aware of your limitations and your whole life becomes a negotiation around them. I do believe that through creativity we can transcend our perceived limitations. I Used to have a wise yoga teacher who would say something along the lines of ‘I am my limitations, without my limitations I am’. But! It is important to be realistic about what you can manage in terms of time and energy and physical or cognitive limits. The last thing you want to do is to set yourself up for disappointment or cause yourself a setback or flare of symptoms. Remember it’s OK to ask for help if you need to.
3. Pace yourself
Following on from the above. Work for as long as is manageable, probably a bit less than that even for it to be sustainable. Take rests as much and as often as you need to. Take into account all the other things you need energy for in the day, next day, next week and try and keep things in balance.
4. Work in short periods of time
This can be trickier than it sounds for a couple of reasons. One if you’re really involved and enjoying what you’re doing - i.e. in a state of creative flow, it’s really easy to lose track of time and over spend your energy. Another problem can be our default attitudes and expectations around what’s a ‘normal’ amount of time to spend on something especially if you would have spent a lot of time on something before you were ill. It is ok to work in really short amounts of time, 5 minutes if that’s all you can do without overdoing it. Set a timer if that will help you.
5. Adjust your expectations and start small
It’s really important to not place unrealistic expectations on yourself about what or how much you want to achieve. It’s possible that you will have to downscale ambitions, at least to start with, and break tasks down into smaller parts. Start with something small, in terms of physical size and the time and energy it needs from you. Hopefully you will find that you can build on this in the future. You are likely to find even small amounts of progress add up to bigger steps of progress over time.
6. Ditch the Perfectionism
This one can be easier said than done if you have a tendency towards perfectionism and setting high standards for yourself. If you’ve gone through formal education in a creative subject you can become stuck in the rules of the ‘right’ way to do things. If you’re trying something new, we can often think we should be good at something right away and be unnecessarily hard on ourselves or give up on something. Perfectionism is also a direct route to taking all the fun and enjoyment out of something. Try focusing on the positive feelings you get from the process and release any attachments to ‘doing things the right way’.
7. Only do more when you can
Don’t worry if you don’t do anything towards your creative project for a while. It’s ok to take time off, days, weeks, months, maybe even years if you need to, it will still be there when you feel ready to come back to it. Yes there is value in committing to working on something regularly to make consistent progress, but realistically when you have a chronic illness consistency can be challenging. There is no need to mentally beat yourself up if you’re not feeling up to it. Chronic illness symptoms can be unpredictable and fluctuating, what’s manageable on a good day, isn’t on a bad day.
8. Don’t compare and despair - with your former self or with other people
This one is a bigger life lesson too! Comparison and competition are built into our culture, it’s a frame of mind we grow up with, it hangs out sneakily in our subconscious waiting to pounce on us when we’re down or just subversively directing our thoughts and decisions. It can be a real problem when you have a chronic illness when you compare yourself to how you were before, or even the fictional, who you would be now if illness had never happened. It applies to creative projects too, if in the past you painted giant murals and now you can only manage a 15minute sketch, the contrast can seem overwhelmingly negative. Same goes for comparing your achievements with people who don’t have the same challenges you do, it’s not helpful and it’s not fair.
9. Reflect on your progress
I promise you’ve made more progress than you think. Often we don’t see or recognise the progress we are making over time, especially over a long time. It can be a good thing to spend some time reviewing and reflecting on your creative ‘journey’. Not just to see if your skills have improved but to take account of the flow of ideas and creative directions. Often this will also be a prompt for new ideas or to revisit and rework things. For me I was also able to track that the amount of energy and focus I can give to creative projects has increased over time and this certainly feels like a positive.
10. Celebrate the achievements
We are all hard wired to notice negatives rather than positives, it’s a survival thing. This means it’s generally much harder for us to notice and acknowledge positive things like achievements. So after you’ve reflected, celebrate the wins. They can be really small things, or at least things that might seem no big deal to other people might be massive if they’ve been hard won. So celebrate! Either quietly by yourself or sharing with others who you know will support you.
Amie Wiberley
Creative - Artist - Mentor