The Things I Make When Everything Else Is Too Much

I have a lot of notebooks.

This is not a confession.

I am not seeking help.

I am simply stating a fact.

There are notebooks for tarot.

Notebooks for astrology.

Notebooks for runes.

Notebooks waiting patiently for the approximately seventeen other things I have decided I need to learn.

There are stories.

There are cards.

There are planners.

There are ideas for rooms and books and decks and worlds that do not technically exist anywhere except inside my head.

Yet.

I make things.

And lately I’ve started wondering if there’s a reason I make so many things.

Because something interesting happens whenever life gets particularly loud.

I create.

When work overwhelms me, I come home and write about witches.

When I don’t know what I’m doing with my future, I organize information about something ancient into neat little pages.

When the real world feels chaotic, apparently I decide what I need is an entirely new fictional world with its own history, traditions, celebrations, magic, and problems.

Which is objectively hilarious.

Real life: overwhelming.

My brain: You know what would help? A PROJECT.

Thanks, brain.

But annoyingly, it does help.

There is something comforting about starting with an empty page.

Nothing has gone wrong yet.

There are no expectations.

There is only possibility.

I can write a word.

Draw a line.

Choose a symbol.

Invent a character.

Move something around.

Erase it.

Try again.

And slowly there is something where there wasn’t something before.

Maybe that’s the part I need.

Because so much of life doesn’t work that way.

You can’t erase a conversation and rewrite it more neatly.

You can’t reorganize people into places where they make more sense.

You can’t flip three pages ahead and see how a difficult season ends.

You can’t always fix what hurts.

But you can make something.

And sometimes making something is enough to remind yourself that not everything is outside your control.

I don’t think creativity fixes everything.

I wish it did.

But I think it gives me somewhere to put things.

Curiosity.

Frustration.

Grief.

Hope.

Restlessness.

The parts of myself that don’t have anywhere else to go.

Sometimes they become characters.

Sometimes they become cards.

Sometimes they become several pages of handwritten notes about ancient symbols because apparently that is how I relax now.

And sometimes they become words on this blog.

Maybe creating isn’t what I do after I’ve dealt with everything else.

Maybe creating is one of the ways I deal with everything else.

That feels different.

It makes all those half-filled notebooks and unfinished projects feel a little less like evidence that I can’t stick with anything.

Maybe they’re evidence that I keep reaching for something.

A blank page.

A new idea.

A world I haven’t built yet.

Something that says:

You may not get to decide everything that happens next.

But you still get to make something from it.