Finding My Way Back to Creativity

A few months ago, I wrote about Hurricane Helene (you can read it here) and the strange, heavy depression that followed. I was in survival mode, stripped down to the basics of functioning.

Since then, life hasn’t exactly smoothed out. I spent several months in a small, conservative town outside of Asheville, North Carolina, a place that eventually pushed me into a big cross-country move (my second in three years) back to Los Angeles. LA felt like a respite in many ways, but I still felt largely untethered. Loved ones and new friends kept asking, “So…are you going to move back to California permanently? Where do you want to live?” My idle time was often spent looping on those questions, wondering where my future would unfold.

After six months in LA, my girlfriend and I packed up her Subaru (named Ruth) and took three weeks to drive north to Montana. We mostly lived out of the car, rock climbing, visiting friends, soaking in hot springs, and scouting out potential places to set roots on the West Coast. Strangely, it wasn’t until I left California that I began to miss Western North Carolina. I found myself longing for my friends, my jiu jitsu community, my furniture (especially my beloved green couch), and the way the mountains buzz with aliveness in the summertime, filled with cicadas and thunderstorms.

Since June, I’ve been living in Whitefish, Montana, with my family. It’s been a kind of in-between place: not fully mine, and I’m still living out of a suitcase nearly ten months later, but it’s familiar, safe, and comfortable. It’s also the first place where I’ve truly felt like I could exhale since Hurricane Helene hit on September 27, 2024.

And somewhere in that exhale, creativity began to return.

At first, it showed up in the kitchen…trying out new recipes, riffing on old ones, letting myself play. Then it began to flow into my work. I dreamed up a mentorship group offering for new therapists, something that had been simmering in me for awhile, and it’s now halfway through its first round. My wheels are turning in ways they haven’t in a long time. It feels like me again. And that feels exciting.

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Creativity as a Sign of Regulation

When I talk to clients about the Window of Tolerance, I often describe it as the zone where you can think and feel at the same time, where connection and reflection are possible. What I’d add now, from my own experience, is this: creativity lives here, too.

When we’re in survival mode, creativity feels far away. But when we start to come back into our window, creativity is often one of the first signs of aliveness returning.

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A Gentle Reminder

If you’re in a season where you feel cut off from your creativity, I want to offer this: it’s not gone forever. It may just be waiting for your body to feel a little safer, your system to feel a little steadier.

And when it does return…even in small ways, like the urge to cook a new dish or doodle in the margins of a notebook, it can be a sign that you’re finding your way back to yourself.

I still have hard days, and I know more storms (literal and metaphorical) will likely come. But for now, I’m cooking, I’m creating, I’m imagining. And that feels worth acknowledging and celebrating.

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A Few Things I’m Excited to Share

In Practice: The Reading Series
I’m offering the first round of this new book-based reflection and integration group for therapists. Enrollment will open soon. You can learn more and join the waitlist here.

In Practice Mentorship (Fall Cohort)
Enrollment for the next mentorship series for emerging therapists will begin soon. Learn more here.

Moonshadow Transforming Trauma Retreat
Taking place in Whitefish, Montana, October 2025 & May 2026. Led by the skilled therapist Jeneane Nicodemus, this retreat looks like it will be both transformative and gorgeous. You can learn more here.

Stillpoint Therapy Collective
Our team currently has openings for new clients. If you live in California and you’ve been thinking about starting therapy, you can learn more about our therapists here.

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In the next edition of The Integration (for paid subscribers), I’ll be sharing journal prompts and somatic exercises to help you explore your own relationship with creativity, what supports its flow, what blocks it, and how you might gently widen your Window of Tolerance to make more space for play, expression, and imagination.

Think of it as a companion practice to this post - a chance to deepen, reflect, and reconnect with the part of you that longs to make, move, and bring something new into the world.

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May your days and week be filled with whatever you are most needing,

Ellen