Aligned & Awake: Creativity After Heartbreak Hits Different
Losing your creative voice inside someone else's story, and finding it again in the most chaotic way possible
Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.
Creativity after heartbreak feels different because it stops asking permission.
At least, that’s what’s happening to me.
Somewhere inside my marriage, creativity slowly stopped belonging to me. It happened gradually, the way most significant losses do. Before I got married, I was an actor. That world is where I met my husband. We were both creatives. Rehearsals, productions, late-night conversations about art and storytelling and meaning. Very insufferable theatre-kid energy, honestly. If there had been scarves and cigarettes involved, we could’ve charged admission.
Then life shifted.
He became an artistic director. His work expanded. His creativity took up more space in the room. Mine folded inward slowly, like one of those camping chairs that looks stable until suddenly you’re on the ground holding a cider, wondering what happened.
I stopped acting. I stopped writing little plays and half-finished scenes in notebooks. The creative part of me didn’t disappear — it started looking for side doors.
Furniture, weirdly enough, became one of them.
I became mildly obsessed with refinishing old pieces. I’d wander through thrift stores looking for battered side tables and chairs that looked like they’d survived several divorces and at least one smoker named Brenda. I loved it. Sanding wood. Repainting pieces. Reupholstering chairs while watching YouTube tutorials from men named Gary who definitely owned seventeen clamps and referred to oak as if it were a sacred religion.
It felt grounding and creative. It was something for me.
Dance kept finding me too. I was always dancing as a kid, always moving around the kitchen, the sitting room, anywhere with enough floor space to avoid taking out a lamp. In 2019, before the world collectively lost the plot, I took myself to New York for a weekend dance intensive with a choreographer I admired.
I remember standing in that studio feeling completely out of place. Everyone looked cool in that very specific dance-world way where they somehow appear both exhausted and intimidating at the same time. Meanwhile, I was standing there trying to remember if my hips had always made that noise.
The second the music started, something woke up in me. Something that had stopped asking how it was being perceived and just needed to come out. I’d spent a long time living in the first version of myself. This felt like the second.
COVID arrived not long after and the world shut down before I got to explore any of it further. Then heartbreak arrived with a flamethrower and took out the remaining walls.
And writing came back.
Real writing. Writing that arrived because something inside me refused to stay buried anymore. I spent years shaping myself around stability and survival and somebody else’s vision of what mattered. Then everything fell apart and underneath all the rubble was this woman holding a pen again.
She’d been there the whole time.
Now I feel creativity everywhere. In writing, in voice notes, in strange ideas at 2 am, in the way I observe people in airports and cafés like a woman accidentally training to become an emotional support documentarian.
And I’m exploring again. Really exploring. From curiosity rather than the need to become excellent at something immediately, which feels mildly revolutionary for a recovering perfectionist.
I’ve found myself sitting with tiny notebooks, doodling little sketches like an unsupervised child at a restaurant table. I’ve fallen down rabbit holes watching videos about paintings and art history, people discussing brushstrokes with the intensity of sports commentators. Recently, I somehow ended up standing in a fabric store, staring at wool and crochet needles as if they were calling to me spiritually.
One minute you’re healing. The next you’re watching a woman named Sally teach blanket stitching on YouTube while contemplating whether your entire future identity involves linen overalls and owning seventeen baskets.
I’m still deeply pulled toward writing; that’s the clearest thread running through all of this. But I also want to act again. Maybe take another dance class. Maybe make terrible art for the pure joy of making it.
That’s what this whole chapter cracked open for me. The understanding that creativity is a life force, and somewhere along the way, many of us stop feeding it.
We get practical and efficient. We answer emails and sit in meetings that could’ve been a three-line voice note and a strong cup of tea. Then one day, we look around and realize we haven’t touched the parts of ourselves that feel alive in years, because life slowly pulled us away from ourselves while we were busy surviving it.
This is actually where the P.L.A.Y. Papers came from.
Purpose. Liberation. Authenticity. You.
Something I lived my way into rather than workshopped in a notebook with colour-coded tabs. The realization that placing creativity at the centre of my life, given the same weight as everything else, changes everything about how that life feels from the inside.
I’m learning this in real time. Following sparks. Paying attention to what lights something up. The fabric store I probably shouldn’t be allowed back into unsupervised.
Sometimes creativity is simply the act of returning breath to yourself.
A story you haven’t written yet.
A version of you that’s been waiting for an invitation.
You’re still allowed to begin again and still allowed to P.L.A.Y.
And I, for one, am excited to.
Tell me…
Where does your creativity go when life gets heavy? Does it disappear, find side doors, or show up somewhere completely unexpected?
Love this, Tanya!