Finally, in a real way, warts and all

Seeing what it really looks like to make space for creative work while in the midst of grief and injury

Apr 10, 2025

I started Rootsie about two months after I fell and sustained a traumatic brain injury that I still—nearly a year and a half later—have not fully recovered from. I had plans and a focus for Rootsie that I’d begun developing before I fell: to cultivate, celebrate, and write about the joys of living a small, creative life. I had hopes to make it different from the personal blog I’d been writing, something a little bigger, a little better. I wanted to be all in with it.

I have recovered enough to be able to look back at January, 2024 and realize I was not in anything close to what I think of as my right mind. The irony of forging ahead at that time with plans to launch a project extolling the virtues of a small, slow existence does not escape me.

A lot of other things have happened since then, too, in both my personal life and the world, some of which I’ve written about here and some of which have been so profound, painful, and private that I have only alluded to them or not mentioned them at all. After a strongish start, my writing here became sporadic, and I abandoned efforts to promote it or build an audience. I increasingly felt I’d lost the thread of the conversation I’d started. Or that the conversation I thought I wanted to have had become irrelevant.

What creative work was I doing, anyway? What could I possibly say about living a creative life, and why would it even matter given all the terrible things happening to so many of us?

In mid-March, exhausted from one of the most difficult winters (years? decades?) I’ve lived through, I left for a two-week visit with my daughter and her husband in her new home on another continent. What an emotional and mental palate-cleanser! It was good to get some distance from the US and my life in it. It was good to be in a landscape with so much white space.

While I was there, I received an email notifying me that an essay I’d submitted to an online literary journal had been accepted for publication. Maybe it was being in a place with so much expansive sky and ice, or maybe it was having some respite from my troubles, or maybe it was achieving the level of physical recovery that I have, but with that acceptance I came to see all the ways in which I have been doing what I set out to do.

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know?

Something like this, which is actually Pinterest 2025 talking (can’t find a source)

I’ve maybe had a few mornings kinda like that, but our small home doesn’t have a room dedicated to writing, and if I’m taking time to write I’m taking time away from all the domestic chores that make such a scene possible. Thus, I’ve had many more mornings perched at a table covered with unprocessed mail, used napkins, and dirty dishes, my feet cold because I haven’t done laundry and air comes right through the big windows I sit in front of. I’ve had even more sacked out on the couch in old sweats, felled by a migraine and/or emotional exhaustion.

When I thought about my intended focus here, I felt as if I didn’t have much creative life to share, or much worth sharing. Who wants to see a tired older woman’s photos of the canned soup she made for lunch because she spent the morning paying bills and meal planning and doing a little bit of writing in her messy living room, and she now feels too worn out to make something better to eat? Where’s the creative inspiration or interest in that?

And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to accomplish a long-term creative hope (publication in a literary journal) that isn’t an easy one to realize. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, and it’s caused me to reflect on how it happened. I hope to go into more depth on what I’ve seen in later posts, but the big bullet point components of the small creative life I’ve actually been living are these:

No consistent schedule. Creative work happens in and around a lot of other things (chores, illness, life crises, feelings, political action). It comes in dribs and drabs and occasional spurts.
Consistently creating. I can’t manage a set writing schedule, but I’ve written something almost every week.
Low standards. I give myself permission to spend time on things that might amount to nothing much. (That’s how consistency happens.)
Small, attainable goals. Mine for this school year were simply to submit something somewhere and write consistently. (See: low standards)
Relationships with others doing similar work. We all write alone, but I’ve learned I can’t go it alone. At least, I can’t go very far.
Compromises. In the past year, I’ve let some creative tasks and desires go so that I could hold onto others. (Looking at you, Rootsie.)
Attending to mental and physical health. I can let the house get messy, but taking care of myself is pre-requisite to anything else. (I hate this.)
Abundance mindset. I will not start or continue anything if I focus on how long it might or will take me to finish it. I try to live and create as if time is infinite, even though I know it isn’t. (That accepted essay began as a blog post nearly 3 years ago.)

So, yes! I have been creating. I’m not an imposter.

OK, great, but what about the question of relevance? Does it matter to think and write and talk about what a small creative life is or might be like? Especially now? Or does doing that make me a privileged a-hole who’s not reading the on-fire room?

It is easy for me to lose faith in the belief that art matters, but I’m going to argue that it does. Given all the fires, life is only going to get harder for those who make art or craft of any kind, especially for those who do so only in the margins of our lives. And art, by everyone at every level, matters.

Art, by everyone at every level, matters.

I’m using “art” in a very broad sense here. Gardening is a kind of creative work I’ve been hanging onto. Even though my husband I don’t know much about gardening, we see our front yard, especially, as a canvas. We see it also as an offering. We get a lot of foot traffic past our home, and I’ve lost count of how many people have stopped to tell us how much pleasure they get from our garden. Sometimes, through the window, I see people stopping and looking at it. Creating small moments of pleasure for other people matters, especially when so much of what we find outside our doors is grim.

But it can be hard to feel OK about spending time on making art or feeling joy in our creations.

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”1

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

(Lotta joy in that last sentence, isn’t there?)

All the creative life bullet points are embodied in this garden

I can’t speak for all folks who create, but I know that for me to keep at it, it helps to see different and real ways of making a life with creative work in it. My work might happen in bits and bobs around various kinds of trauma and turmoil, and I’ve had to make (and will continue to make, I’m sure) all kinds of compromises with it, but doing the work has helped get me through those hard things. And I know, from the generous comments of readers here, that some of that work has helped others get through what they need to get through, too, as the work of other creators (many of you reading here) helps me.

Our creative work doesn’t have to change the world or our lives to have value. (One published essay certainly isn’t going to substantially change mine or anyone else’s.) It just has to make those things better, even if only for brief moments. I’m coming to see the sharing of both our art and our processes of making it as a kind of mutual aid, a way of keeping each other going in the face of all that challenges us.

Figuring out, together, how to make space for the power and joy of creative work isn’t less relevant when the world is on fire. It’s more. I’m so glad to be doing that with you. Finally, in a real way, warts and all.

My real creative space, as it looked one day while I worked on this essay. This is our desk, dining table, physical therapy table, entry table, and holder of things that need to be processed/put away somewhere else.

Whew! That was a lot of words. I’d love to read some of yours. What is giving you joy in this dark time? What’s the value of making for you? What cool things are you making/doing? If you’ve struggled to make or find the a place for creative pursuits, what have you learned from the struggle?

Finally, in a real way, warts and all

Seeing what it really looks like to make space for creative work while in the midst of grief and injury

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