Coming Home to Creativity: What Happens When We Reclaim the Parts of Ourselves We’ve Lost

AB Dream, watercolor and ink painting by Christina Algeciras, creativity and mental health

There’s a particular kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself. It’s not the sharp kind that comes with a clear loss: a death, a breakup, a dramatic ending. It’s the slow, quiet grief of losing touch with a part of yourself that once felt essential. You don’t notice it happening. Life fills in the gaps. Years pass. And then one day you realize that something that used to feel like oxygen has been missing for a very long time.

For me, that something was making art.

I’m sharing this not as a confessional, but because I think this experience is far more common than we acknowledge, and because what I’ve learned about the relationship between creativity and mental health, both personally and clinically, has deepened how I understand the work I do with my clients every day.

The Quiet Disappearance

Creativity doesn’t usually leave in a dramatic exit. It recedes. Slowly. Under the weight of practicality, obligation, the sheer logistics of building a life. We tell ourselves we’ll get back to it. We tell ourselves it was just a hobby, just something we did when we were younger, just a phase. We minimize it because the alternative, admitting that something vital has gone dormant, feels too painful to sit with.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand, both personally and as a depth-oriented therapist: creativity isn’t a luxury or a talent reserved for artists. It’s a fundamental human capacity. It’s how we make meaning. It’s how we process what can’t be spoken. It’s how we stay in relationship with the parts of ourselves that live beneath language.

When we lose access to it, we lose more than a pastime. We lose a way of knowing ourselves. The connection between creativity and mental health runs deeper than most of us realize.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets

My path back to creativity didn’t start with picking up a paintbrush or signing up for a class. It started in the body. Through my own personal therapy, through analytic and body-centered work, I began to reconnect with something I can only describe as an inner aliveness that I’d been managing around rather than living from. After decades of cultivating a relationship with my body through yoga and breath, I thought I understood embodiment. But this was different: deeper, less controlled, more honest. Less about mastering the body and more about listening to it.

This is something I see again and again in my clinical work: the body holds what we’ve set aside. Our unlived creative impulses don’t simply vanish; they go underground. They show up as restlessness, as a vague sense that something is missing, as the persistent feeling of going through the motions of a life that looks right on paper but doesn’t quite feel like ours. In the language of depth psychology, these are the parts of ourselves that have been exiled to the shadows, not because they aren’t valuable, but because at some point, the conditions weren’t right for them to thrive.

The nervous system work is essential. So much of what keeps us from creative expression isn’t a lack of talent or time; it’s that our systems have learned to prioritize safety and productivity over play and exploration. When we’re chronically activated or shut down, creativity feels like a risk we can’t afford. Learning to regulate, to find ground, to tolerate the vulnerability of making something: that is the real foundation.

Seeking Witnesses

There was another piece that mattered enormously, and it’s one I want to name because I think we underestimate it: community.

I sought out creative community. One that has been particularly meaningful is Creative Quests, a community dedicated to developing a creativity and curiosity practice. It’s not a class with an instructor and a grade. It’s a space where people are engaged in their own creative unfolding, where the point isn’t the product but the process. Where showing up imperfectly is the whole invitation.

There’s something profoundly therapeutic about being witnessed in your becoming. Not your polished, finished self, but the messy, uncertain, reaching self. The self that doesn’t know yet what it’s making or why. This kind of witnessing is, I believe, one of the most healing experiences available to us. It says: you don’t have to be complete to be seen. You don’t have to be good at this to deserve to do it.

What Creativity Actually Is

There’s a definition of creativity that I think keeps many of us at a distance from our own creative lives. We tend to equate it with artistic output: painting, writing, music, the things that end up in galleries or on stages. And while those are beautiful expressions of creativity, they’re only part of the picture.

Creativity, at its root, is the capacity to bring something into being that didn’t exist before. It’s how you arrange your living space. It’s the way you tell a story to a friend. It’s the garden you tend, the meal you improvise, the new approach you bring to a problem you’ve been stuck on. It’s present in how you parent, how you love, how you grieve.

When I talk about reconnecting with creativity, I’m not necessarily talking about making art, though that may be part of it. I’m talking about reconnecting with the part of you that is generative, curious, and alive. The part that plays. The part that is willing to not know where something is going, and to find that interesting rather than terrifying.

What Alysa Liu Reminds Us

Like millions of people around the world, I’ve been utterly captivated by Alysa Liu. If you watched the women’s figure skating at the Winter Olympics last month, you witnessed something extraordinary, and I don’t just mean the technical athleticism. Liu, who won gold in Milan, has become a vivid example of what happens when someone allows their full self to show up in their creative expression.

Liu retired from competitive skating at 16 after the 2022 Beijing Olympics. She was one of the most technically gifted skaters in the world, but she was miserable. When she came back two years later, something had fundamentally shifted. She insisted on artistic autonomy: choosing her own music, designing her own costumes, contributing to her choreography. She began describing herself not as a skater but as an artist. She told interviewers she doesn’t feel validated by medals but by the creative process itself, by having a sheet of ice to share her ideas on.

What strikes me most, both as a viewer and as a therapist, is how openly Liu embraces the full range of her experience. She has spoken about loving the struggle of learning and growing. She values the process, not just the product. Her coach described her as someone who transforms pressure into joy. And her teammate Amber Glenn noted that Liu’s approach demonstrates how much more successful you can be when you pursue something from a healthy, authentic place.

Liu’s gold-medal free skate wasn’t just technically excellent; it was radiant. You could feel the aliveness in it. She wasn’t performing for approval. She was sharing something real. As she said afterward, what she’s most excited about as a gold medalist is the platform it gives her to share her art with the world.

This is what becomes possible when we stop contorting ourselves to meet external expectations and start creating from a place of genuine self-expression. When we let the struggle and the joy and the uncertainty all be part of the work, rather than obstacles to it. Liu reminds us that stepping away, resting, recalibrating, listening to what we actually need, isn’t a detour from our creative path. Sometimes it’s the most important part of the journey.

Why This Matters Right Now

We’re living in a time of enormous collective unease. The news cycle is relentless. The political landscape is polarizing. There’s a pervasive sense of things being uncertain, unsteady, beyond our control. And when the outer world feels chaotic, our natural response is often to tighten: to control what we can, to be productive, to stay busy, to keep our heads down.

But creativity asks for the opposite. It asks us to loosen. To not know. To follow an impulse without demanding it justify itself first. And that loosening, that willingness to engage with something open-ended and uncertain on our own terms, can be profoundly restorative.

The science on this is becoming impossible to ignore. Professor Daisy Fancourt, a psychobiologist at University College London and director of the WHO’s Collaborating Centre on Arts and Health, has spent over a decade studying the measurable health impacts of creative engagement. Her new book, Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Transform Our Health, synthesizes thousands of studies and makes a compelling case that the arts are what she calls “the forgotten fifth pillar of health,” alongside diet, sleep, exercise, and nature.

What her research shows is that creative engagement doesn’t just make us feel better subjectively; it changes our physiology. It lowers cortisol and inflammation. It activates the brain’s reward pathways. People who engage in the arts regularly have a significantly lower risk of developing depression, and this holds true regardless of income, education, or other health behaviors. The effects extend across every major organ system, even building cognitive resilience against dementia.

What I find most meaningful about this research, both as a therapist and as someone on her own creative path, is that the benefits don’t require talent, mastery, or any particular skill level. They come from the engagement itself. From the willingness to show up and make something, however imperfect, however small.

What Becomes Possible

I want to be careful here not to suggest that this is a simple or linear process. Reconnecting with a part of yourself that’s been dormant for years can be disorienting. It can bring up grief, self-doubt, the old critical voices that told you to be practical, to stop playing, to focus on what matters. Those voices don’t disappear just because you’ve decided to start creating again.

But something does shift. Slowly, with practice and support, the creative impulse starts to feel less like a risk and more like a homecoming. You begin to tolerate imperfection. You start making things not because they’re good, but because making them makes you feel alive. And at some point, maybe after years of quiet inner work, of therapy, of nervous system regulation, of showing up in creative community, you realize you’ve crossed a threshold. Not into mastery, but into willingness. The willingness to be seen in something vulnerable and unfinished. The willingness to let your inner world take form in the outer one.

I’ve experienced this myself recently, in small but meaningful ways. And what I can tell you is that the parts of us we think we’ve lost are not actually gone. They’re waiting.

An Invitation

If you recognize yourself in any of this, if there’s a creative impulse that’s been dormant, a part of you that used to make or build or imagine or play that’s gone quiet, I want you to know that it’s still there.

You don’t need to sign up for a masterclass or commit to a grand project. You might start much smaller and closer to the body: notice what you’re drawn to. Pay attention to what makes time disappear. Give yourself permission to do something badly, with no audience, for no reason other than the aliveness of doing it.

And if the idea of that feels activating or scary or brings up grief for what you’ve lost, that’s worth being curious about. Those feelings aren’t obstacles to your creativity. They may be the doorway back to it. Sometimes the path home to the parts of ourselves we’ve set aside runs directly through the feelings we’ve been avoiding.

The parts of ourselves we set aside don’t disappear. They wait for us, patient, persistent, and remarkably forgiving, until we’re ready to come home.

Christina Algeciras is a licensed mental health counselor (LMHC, NCC, RYT) in private practice, offering depth-oriented psychotherapy in Coconut Grove and virtually throughout Florida. She works with high-functioning professionals, creatives, and intellectually curious individuals navigating identity, purpose, creative blocks, and a deeper relationship with themselves. To learn more or schedule a consultation, contact Christina here.