Making Time for Creativity: Is There Room for Yourself in Your Own Life?
On creativity, grief, the women who held us, and learning to make room for ourselves.
I have been thinking about that more than usual as we approach this Full Moon eclipse in Pisces, and about why I continue to find astrology, the Moon and its cycles so meaningful.
I don't look to astrology to tell me who I am. I don't take it as gospel. I think of it more as another way of looking at my reflection.
Sometimes it shows me something I recognise immediately. Sometimes it gives me a different language for something I have felt but haven't been able to articulate. Sometimes it simply asks me to look again.
And I think there is value in learning as much about ourselves as we can.
Not so that we can define ourselves more rigidly, but so that we might understand more deeply how we move through the world.
For me, the Moon has also become a grounding.
As creative, cyclical women, many of us have spent decades living with the rhythm of our own monthly cycles. And then, in midlife, that rhythm can change. It becomes unpredictable. It falters. Eventually, it stops. The Moon offers another rhythm to return to.
It waxes. It becomes full. It wanes. It disappears. It returns.
It is always there when we need it. And perhaps grounding isn't always about feeling steady.
Perhaps it is having something that helps us find our way back when we don’t. When time becomes strange.
I decided to write about this now because this eclipse season feels especially poignant.
There seem to be a lot of emotions spiralling, not only for me but among many of the people I speak to. This summer has felt intense. I was a baby in the summer of 1976, but that summer was talked about throughout my childhood. I wonder whether we will talk about this one in the same way.
Watching the landscape suffer has been difficult. There is a particular kind of grief that comes from seeing nature struggling before our eyes — the trees, the wildlife, the dry ground — and it can bring other griefs closer to the surface too. Nostalgia can bring enormous comfort. But it carries sorrow with it.
This cycle I have experienced déjà vu, episodic memories and vivid dreams of my childhood. I have also spent the past few months learning much more about how the brain works, how memories are formed and stored, and beginning to work through some old experiences I had carried with me for a very long time.
Periods like this can leave us feeling strangely untethered. Past and present seem to overlap. Days become weeks, weeks become months, and sometimes we wonder how we arrived where we are. This is when I find myself returning to the Moon. Not because it has an answer for me. Because it locates me. Here. Now. On this day, beneath this Moon, standing on this particular piece of Earth.
A piece of leather
This morning, in my studio, I found a small piece of soft beige leather. It was part of my grandmother's old key case. The moment I picked it up, I was transported back to her flat. I could see her passing me her keys as I left to do her shopping. And somehow, impossibly, it still seemed to smell of her. Her home. Her handbag. That little flat.
It was one of the places in my life where I felt completely contained and safe. Somewhere I could always go and know that I was loved. Nearly eleven years have passed since I last held her hand. Most of the time I carry that knowledge quite easily. And then something as insignificant as a scrap of leather can open the door and the pain is suddenly sharp again.
Grief is peculiar like that. For me, it has never really been something standing in my way. It has been more like a heavy winter coat dropped over my shoulders. Sometimes the coat opens and I can move quite freely. Sometimes it becomes soaked through and so unbearably heavy that I have to stop. But it remains something I carry. Perhaps this is why I am increasingly interested not in getting over things, but in understanding what we need in order to keep living alongside them.
The women who held us
My life on Earth is insignificant in the enormous scheme of things. And yet it is also extraordinary that I exist at all. There is a whole lineage behind each of us. Women who lived, loved, endured, created, nurtured and made choices that eventually resulted in us standing here. I think often about the women in my family who brought me up and who are no longer here. My darling Mum joined me at art college when she was in her 50s to do a diploma of her own. Now I am in my 50s.
Last year, as I approached this decade, I made a decision: I wanted the next ten years to be the most creative decade of my life. That meant acknowledging that there were things standing in my way. And rather than continually finding ways around them, I wanted to begin working through them. There is an analogy I have heard about trying to hold a beach ball beneath the water. We can keep pushing it down, but eventually it comes bursting back to the surface. At some point we have to stop using all our energy trying to submerge it. We have to find another way.
For much of my life, care has flowed outwards. My mum sacrificed enormously for me. Later, I sacrificed things to care for her when she needed me. I wouldn't change that love.
But now I am learning something else. I am learning to care for myself. To offer myself some of the care that those women once gave to me, and that I later gave back to them.
And surprisingly, perhaps, creativity has become part of that.
Making room for ourselves
I see this again and again in the women I work with. They know how important their creativity is to them. They know how they feel when they are making. They know that creating connects them to some essential part of themselves. And still, it can be extraordinarily difficult to make it a priority. There is always something else. Work. Family. Caring. The house. The endless list of things that appear more urgent, more responsible or somehow more legitimate than spending an afternoon making something.
The thing that makes us feel most like ourselves can become the thing we find hardest to prioritise. I know this because I live it too. Being an artist, for me, is an act of self-love. Waking up and choosing to show up as an artist has to be an act of self-love because it does not always come naturally to me. It takes practice. I have to remind myself that my creative life belongs high on the priority list. I have to allow the other things to wait occasionally. I have to put my own needs above somebody else’s. And then, inevitably, I drift away from it again. So I return. Again and again.
Perhaps this is another reason I love the Moon. It doesn't ask us to get everything right once and for all. It reminds us that we live in cycles. We begin. We grow. We become full. We release. We disappear for a while. And then we begin to emerge again.
What can you make room for?
A Full Moon eclipse in Pisces feels like an appropriate place to consider what has become complete, what we have been carrying, and what might finally be ready to soften or change.
But I don't think we necessarily need to make some enormous ceremonial release. Perhaps the question is much smaller.
What can I release so that what matters has room to take form?
An obligation.
An expectation.
Perfectionism.
Guilt.
The idea that everything else must be finished before we are allowed to make.
The habit of putting ourselves at the bottom of our own list.
Perhaps we can make just a little more room. Because I am beginning to wonder whether part of the inheritance we receive from the women who loved us is learning eventually to become a safe place for ourselves. To care for ourselves as they once cared for us. To recognise the things that make us feel most alive and protect some space for them.
A Full Moon Reflection
If you would like to sit with some of these questions yourself, I have created a tarot reading for this Full Moon.
You don't need to know anything about tarot to use it. You might pull a card for each question, choose just one that speaks to you, or simply use the questions as journal prompts.
At the centre of the reading is the question I keep returning to:
What can I release so that what matters has room to take form?
The seven cards explore what you are being invited to see differently, what you have carried with you, what is longing for more room, what might be ready to soften or be put down, and what can help you return to the things that make you feel most like yourself.
Perhaps, before you begin, simply ask:
Is there room for myself in my own life?
And when we inevitably lose our way again, perhaps we simply need something that calls us home.
For me, sometimes, that is the Moon. And sometimes it is a tiny piece of soft beige leather, lying on my studio table, reminding me where I came from.
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