Writing Is How I Think. Maybe It’s How You Do Too.

I have been writing for most of my adult life.

Not always for an audience. Not always with a purpose. Sometimes just to get what was inside of me out onto a page where I could look at it. Blog posts, journal entries, LinkedIn articles, essays, notes to myself that no one was ever meant to read.

Writing has been a way of thinking for me. When something is too tangled to sort out in my head, putting it into words helps me find the shape of it. When I’m restless or unsettled, writing is often the thing that tells me why.

But writing is just my practice. Yours might be painting. Photography. Drawing. Playing an instrument. Woodworking. Gardening. Cooking something beautiful from scratch. The medium matters less than most people think. What matters is what the practice does. Every creative practice does more or less the same things.

The Seasons I Stepped Away #

There were times in my life when difficult things happened and I found myself, as I once described it, wordless. Not without thoughts, but without the capacity to put them into language.

In hindsight, those were probably the seasons I most needed it. But I couldn’t see that from inside them.

What I know now is that the silence wasn’t the problem. The problem was believing I had nothing to say, or that what I had to say wasn’t worth the effort. Both turned out to be wrong.

When I started writing again, consistently, the relief was immediate. Not because I produced anything worth sharing. Because I got to hear myself again.

I hear something similar from people who’ve set down a creative practice they once loved. A painter who stopped when life got busy and hasn’t picked it back up in years. A photographer who put the camera away after a hard season. Someone who used to draw and somewhere along the way decided it was frivolous. The thing they all miss, once they notice it’s gone, is hard to name. But it’s real. It’s the part of themselves that breathes differently when they’re making something.

What a Creative Practice Actually Does #

My notes when I started thinking about this were brief. Just a list:

It clears your thoughts. It generates ideas. It relieves stress. It’s therapy. It’s cleansing. It’s settling.

Every one of those is true regardless of the medium. Let me say what I mean by each.

A creative practice clears your thoughts because making something forces you to actually look at what’s inside you. Vague anxiety lives comfortably in your head. The moment you try to paint it, write it, photograph it, or shape it into something, it has to become specific. And specific things are workable. You can do something with them.

It generates ideas because the act of creating opens a channel. One image leads to another. One written sentence leads to a thought you didn’t know you had. One photograph teaches you something about how you see. The creative process is generative in a way that passive thinking often isn’t.

It relieves stress because it gives your nervous system somewhere to put what it’s been carrying. You don’t have to solve anything. You just have to make something. There’s a real release in that, one that talking or scrolling or staying busy never quite reaches.

It’s therapy in the truest sense. It helps you process, integrate, and make sense of your experience. When you paint a feeling you can’t name, draw something that’s been bothering you, or write toward a question that keeps returning, you’re doing real inner work, just in a language the rational mind doesn’t always speak.

And the cleansing, the settling — these are harder to explain but instantly recognizable if you’ve felt them. There’s a quality of stillness that comes after a genuine creative session that didn’t exist before. Like something has been drained off, and what’s left is clearer.

You Don’t Have to Be an Artist #

You don’t have to think of yourself as a creative person to have a creative practice.

A creative practice isn’t about talent, output, or having something to show for your time. It’s about the process of making something. Engaging. Experimenting. Following where curiosity leads. The painter who never shows their work is doing real creative practice. So is the writer who never publishes, the photographer who shoots only for themselves, the person who draws badly and keeps drawing anyway.

The bar isn’t “be good at it.” The bar is to “show up.” Those are entirely different standards, and the second one is available to everyone.

If you’ve always wanted to try something — photography, watercolors, pottery, writing, learning an instrument — the fact that you’re not yet good at it is not a reason to wait. It’s actually the right place to start. Beginners have something experts often lose: pure curiosity, not clouded by expectation.

What Happens When You Make It a Practice #

At one point I committed to writing three pages a day. The practice came from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which calls them morning pages. The goal wasn’t to produce anything. It was to clear the channel.

I noticed quickly that the first page or two was usually noise: the to-do list, the lingering worries, the mental clutter I’d been carrying without realizing it. But somewhere in the third page, something quieter started to come through. A thought I hadn’t had before. A connection I hadn’t made. An honest feeling I’d been managing around rather than actually feeling.

That’s the part a consistent creative practice reaches. Not the surface, but what’s underneath it.

The same thing happens in other forms. A photographer who shoots regularly starts to notice what they’re drawn to, and what that reveals about them. A painter who shows up to the canvas consistently begins to develop a visual language that’s genuinely their own. A musician who plays for no one but themselves discovers what they actually want to say.

It doesn’t happen in one session. It happens through the accumulation of showing up.

A Practice Worth Starting #

If there’s a creative practice that’s been on your mind — something you keep meaning to return to, or something you’ve always wanted to try — the invitation is simple:

Now. With whatever you have. For fifteen minutes if that’s all you can give it.

Get the notebook. Set up the easel. Pick up the camera. Sit down at the instrument. Make something that doesn’t have to be good.

You may be surprised at what’s been waiting for you on the other side of the practice.

If you want to think more broadly about what it means to come alive in your work and life, Your Values, Your Season is a good place to start getting honest about what you actually want more of.