Navigating creativity through change: Insights on when creativity feels like walking through mud

I've been thinking a lot about creativity lately. Not necessarily about what I'm creating, but about where creativity fits into my life these days, and how different that feels from how I imagined it would be.

For a long time, I think I took my creativity for granted. It was just there. I would have an idea, get excited about it and then somehow find the time, energy and enthusiasm to make it happen. That doesn't mean I was always productive, or that everything I started turned into something wonderful, because goodness knows there have been plenty of abandoned ideas and half-finished projects over the years. But there was generally a feeling that the creative part of me was accessible. I could reach it.

Lately, it hasn't always felt quite so simple.

Life has a habit of getting in the way of the things we think define us. There are always other things that need doing, people who need you, places you need to be and the ordinary day-to-day stuff that somehow manages to take up far more space than you thought it would. Then, somewhere along the way, menopause arrived and added another layer to everything.

I don't want to turn this into one of those posts about how menopause has ruined everything, because that isn't how I feel about it. There are enough stories out there about the doom and gloom without me adding another one. But I would be lying if I said it hasn't changed how I experience things, and creativity is definitely one of them.

These days, getting into that creative space can sometimes feel like walking through mud. The creativity is still there. I know it is. I can feel ideas bubbling away in the background, and I'll see something, or find a piece of fabric, or come across some beads and immediately start imagining what I could do with them. But actually getting from the idea to sitting down and making something can feel like a much longer journey than it used to.

There are days when my head is full of ideas, but I simply don't have the energy to do anything with them. Other days I have the time, but I can't seem to find the concentration. And then there are the days when I have all the materials in front of me and absolutely no idea what I want to do with any of them.

That can be frustrating when creativity is such a big part of how you see yourself.

I think there is a temptation, particularly when you make things for a living, to believe that you should always be creating. There should always be something new to show, another project underway, another collection being developed. Social media doesn't exactly help with that either. You see people producing beautiful things and it is very easy to forget that you're seeing the finished part of somebody else's creative life.

What you don't see is the day they didn't make anything.

You don't see the project that has been sitting in a box for six months, or the idea that never quite worked, or the afternoon spent staring at a piece of fabric wondering why on earth you thought that particular idea was going to work.

I've had to become much more comfortable with the fact that my creativity doesn't always look the way I expect it to.

Living full-time in a motorhome has probably made that even more obvious.

My workspace isn't a lovely permanent studio where everything has its own place and I can leave a project exactly where I stopped working on it. My workspace has wheels. Everything has to have a home, and when we're travelling there simply isn't the room to have half a dozen boxes of beads, threads, fabrics and tools spread across the table for days on end.

But there is another side to creating while living on the road that I hadn't really appreciated when we first started doing it. I'm constantly surrounded by new places, new landscapes, new colours and new things to notice. We can wake up somewhere completely different from where we were a few days before, and all of that inevitably finds its way into my creative thinking in one way or another.

Sometimes it is the colours in the landscape. Sometimes it is something I've seen while wandering around a town or along a beach. Sometimes it is a texture, a shell, a piece of driftwood or something else that catches my eye and makes me think about how I could use it or recreate it.

And lately, it has been gemstones.

Finding the stones for my new pendants has become a surprisingly important part of my creative process. I had no idea, when I first started looking for gemstones to work with, quite how long I would spend choosing them.

It isn't simply a case of finding a stone in the right colour and putting it in a basket.

I can spend ages looking through them.

Choosing the right stone

I'll pick one up, turn it over, look at it from different angles and hold it in different light. I'll notice a particular line running through it, or a flash of colour, or a marking that reminds me of something. Then I'll put it down and pick up another one.

Because it has to be right.

The stone is going to become the centre of the piece, so the beads need to work with it rather than compete with it. The shape matters, the markings matter, the colours matter, and sometimes there is just something about one particular stone that makes me think, yes, that's the one.

It can take a surprisingly long time to find that one.

But I actually think that searching has become part of the creativity too.

We spend so much time talking about the making of something that we forget that creativity often begins long before the needle comes out. It can begin with looking. With noticing. With being curious. With wandering somewhere new and allowing yourself to be distracted by something beautiful.

And that is one of the things I love about living on the road.

I'm not just travelling from one place to another. I'm collecting little pieces of inspiration as we go.

So I've adapted.

At the moment, I'm finding myself creating smaller things while we're travelling. I've been making wearable pieces, particularly my beaded gemstone pendants, which work surprisingly well in the motorhome. They don't need a huge amount of space, I can pick them up and work on them for a while, and when it's time to pack everything away, I haven't taken over the entire van.

And I'm actually enjoying that more than I expected.

There is something lovely about making a small piece of something beautiful and knowing that it has been created while we're travelling. It becomes part of the journey in a way. The stone might have been chosen because of something I saw somewhere, the colours might have reminded me of a landscape we've travelled through, and then the piece itself gets made around our rather unconventional little mobile studio.

Instead of needing to wait until I have the perfect conditions to be creative, I'm finding ways to create within the conditions I actually have.

My larger embroidery pieces are a different matter altogether.

Those are the projects that need me to be properly parked up. They need space, and lots of it. I need to be able to get everything out, see all the threads and beads and materials I'm working with, move things around and generally make the sort of creative mess that isn't particularly practical when you're living in a motorhome.

When I have that opportunity, I can disappear into a piece for hours.

And perhaps that's what I've been learning. I don't have to force myself to create everything, everywhere, all of the time. There are different kinds of creativity for different circumstances.

The little pieces I make on the road are still creative. They still involve colour and texture and beads and design and all the things I love about making. They aren't somehow less important because they are smaller.

And when we eventually park up somewhere for a while and I can get one of my larger pieces out, I can give that my attention too.

It feels a little bit like I've stopped trying to make my creativity fit the life I used to have and started allowing it to fit the life I actually have now.

I'm not sure why that has taken me so long to realise.

Perhaps part of it is accepting that creativity isn't a switch that is either on or off. I used to think that if I wasn't making something big and exciting, I wasn't really being creative. Now I'm beginning to think that maybe creativity is much quieter than that.

Sometimes it is a gemstone sitting in your hand while you work out which beads might bring out the colours in it.

Sometimes it is finding something unexpected while you're exploring somewhere new.

Sometimes it is an idea scribbled down because you don't want to forget it.

Sometimes it is sitting in the van with a needle and thread while the weather does whatever it is going to do outside.

And sometimes it is knowing that you have a much bigger piece waiting for you, but today isn't the day for it.

I'm still learning how to work with that.

There are definitely days when I wish I could get back to the way I used to feel, when an idea would take hold and I couldn't wait to get started. But perhaps I'm looking at it from the wrong direction. Maybe I don't need to get back to anything.

Maybe this is simply what my creativity looks like now.

It has had to squeeze itself into a different life, one where I live on the road, where space is limited and where my energy and concentration aren't always predictable. It has had to become a little more patient and a little more adaptable.

And so have I.

I don't think my creativity has gone anywhere. I think it has just become a little harder to reach sometimes. The mud is there, and some days it is deeper than others, but underneath it, the ideas are still there waiting.

So for now, I'm going to keep making the little things when I can. I'll keep collecting ideas for the bigger things. I'll keep looking for those stones that make me stop and turn them over in my hand one more time. I'll keep exploring new places and noticing the colours, textures and little details that might eventually find their way into something I make.

And I'll keep getting everything out when we are parked somewhere long enough for me to properly spread my wings.

I'll try not to judge myself too harshly in between.

Because I am still creating.

It might not always look like the creativity I imagined for myself, but perhaps that is the point. Creativity isn't supposed to stay still. Neither do we.

And if occasionally I have to wade through a bit of mud to get to it, then so be it.

I'll get there eventually.

Finding colour, inspiration and little sparks of creativity wherever the road takes me