It happens. You’re on a creative roll and suddenly life gets in the way. There’s no time to do the thing you love. You’re forced to break away and suddenly your personality changes. You get cranky. You get angry. You get nervous. You feel like your life is falling apart.
What can you do when life causes your creativity to come to a screeching halt?
First, don’t panic. Panic causes the emotions to come out stronger and you can end up taking your feelings out on the ones you love. Panic can also put a damper on your creative genius. It doesn't matter that you're not able to create at the moment, but you certainly don't want that creative spark to go dormant while you're taking care of whatever life situation is putting your creativity on hold.
Remember, this is just a hold. It doesn’t mean that you’ve given up on the creative dream. It just means that other responsibilities must be tended to. While on hold, let your imagination soar. Keep a notebook handy so you can jot down the ideas that are flying around in your brain. You know you’ll return to the creative life you embrace.
Keep in mind this hold is temporary. It may only be a few days. It may be weeks or months. It could be years. But that doesn’t mean that your creative life is over. When you truly love what you do creatively, you will always return to it. There’s something about the creative passion that can’t keep you away from your dream.
Even when life gets in the way, there are moments in time when you can sneak away and spend, even if only for a few minutes, time on your creative project. Work your creative life into your new situation. It may take some maneuvering, but you’re a creative. Get creative in your time management.
Know that life is constantly changing. While you may have some control over it, embrace the changes and use them in your creative endeavors.
There’s always a calm after the storm. It’s during that calm that you’ll return to your creative endeavors. It may be a bit scary depending how long or violent the storm was, but there’s a possibility that the storm created new ideas for your creative life. You know you’ll be stronger and more daring after the storm. Use it to your advantage and allow your creative genius to grow and flow.
Be open to the possibilities that this break in your creative life was meant for a reason. Look back on life before the break and see if you were stuck or just recreating the obvious. Life could simply be telling you to try something new and it needed to create a distraction for you to see it. Taking a short hiatus from the creative life, whether you want to or not, opens doors that are often stuck and when you look through to the other side, you may find something new and exciting.
When life gets in the way of our creative life, it's not the end of the world. It will pass.
Top image from The Creative Finder.
This is a cross-post from Ezine Articles.
Kerri Williams is a freelance photographer and writer on a lifelong creative journey. You can learn more about her photography and view her work at http://www.magpistudios.com.