It’s Not That You’re Not Creative: How Unexpressed Life Force Turns Inward

It’s Not That You’re Not Creative

How many time have you heard someone say, “I’m just not a creative person.”
They say it casually, like a settled fact - the same way you might say you don’t like olives or you’re bad at directions. You may even have said it about yourself. For a long time, I believed people when they said it. I might have even believed it about myself in certain seasons.

But over time, watching patterns in my own life and in others, I started noticing something else. 

What we call creativity isn’t a hobby or a talent or a personality trait. It isn’t something you either “have” or don’t. 

And I'm not saying talent isn’t real. It is. Skill, discipline, and craft matter deeply. Some people spend years - lifetimes - learning how to translate this energy with precision and power. They refine their language, their technique, their capacity to shape something raw into something resonant. That devotion matters.

But talent isn’t the source. It’s the channel. Creativity is the current itself. It’s something that moves through you. Talent is how clearly, skillfully, and consistently someone has learned to shape it.

We don’t all channel it the same way, and we’re not all meant to. For some, it moves through paint or language or sound. For others, it moves through problem solving, caregiving, building, teaching, or seeing connections where others don’t. Some channel so clearly it's as if their talent were from a previous life (and sometimes it is). The form differs. The force does not.

Long before it becomes a painting or a song or words on a page, it exists as raw energy - impulse, emotion, imagination, intuition, longing. It’s the same current behind desire, curiosity, grief, wonder. In many ways, it’s simply life itself, looking for expression. 

When that energy is welcomed, it flows outward. When it’s ignored, dismissed, or shamed, it doesn’t disappear - it turns inward. And that’s where things start to feel heavy, restless, compulsive, or stuck. Not because something is wrong with you, but because something alive inside you hasn’t been given a voice.

Creativity needs to be expressed because energy that moves inward must eventually move outward. This isn’t philosophy - it’s biology, psychology, and spirituality converging. When experiences, emotions, and insights have no outlet, they don’t disappear. They compress. They distort. They turn into tension in the body, looping thoughts in the mind, fixation, craving, obsession, or numbness. Expression is how the nervous system metabolizes experience. It’s how the soul stays breathable inside a human body.

At its core, creativity is how consciousness moves. It’s how inner experience finds shape. When something meaningful happens to us - love, loss, insight, awakening - it generates energy. That energy needs translation. Creativity is the language that allows what is ineffable to become tangible. Without that translation, the inner world starts to feel overcrowded, loud, or claustrophobic.

When this force is given space, it feels natural. Nourishing. Even joyful. But when it’s ignored, shamed, suppressed, or postponed for too long, it doesn’t disappear. It looks for another exit.

If you don’t give your creativity a conscious outlet, it will find one anyway.

Sometimes it shows up as obsession - looping thoughts you can’t shut off. Sometimes as limerence, fixating on a person who becomes the container for everything you haven’t expressed. Sometimes as overworking, overthinking, over consuming. Sometimes as addiction, rumination, restlessness, anxiety, or emotional spirals that feel disproportionate to what’s actually happening. The energy doesn’t vanish - it distorts.

And this is where things often get misunderstood. Creativity itself is not destructive. The problem isn’t the force - it’s the constriction. When creativity is blocked, the energy turns inward. When it’s judged or shamed, it mutates. When it’s denied expression, it leaks through whatever cracks are available.

Think of a river. When it flows freely, it nourishes everything around it. When it’s dammed, pressure builds. If there’s no controlled release, it eventually bursts through - often chaotically, sometimes violently, always unpredictably. Not because the water is bad, but because it was never meant to be contained.

Many people learned early that their expression was “too much,” “not practical,” “selfish,” “dramatic,” or unsafe. Maybe you were told to focus on what was productive. Maybe your emotional expression wasn’t welcome. Maybe creativity felt indulgent in a world that rewarded survival. So you learned to contain it. To quiet it. To be responsible instead.

This is why giving yourself permission to create - without needing it to be productive, perfect, or marketable - is not frivolous. It’s regulatory. It’s nervous system hygiene. It’s psychic integration.

Your creativity doesn’t need to be impressive.
It needs to be honest.

Even those who create darker material - the poets, painters, musicians who give form to grief, madness, death, longing - are not channeling destruction for its own sake. They’re metabolizing what would otherwise remain trapped. Edgar Allan Poe didn’t create darkness; he translated it. He gave shape to something that, left unexpressed, might have consumed him entirely. Creativity doesn’t require light themes to be healthy - it requires honesty. The difference is whether the creation is conscious or compulsive, chosen or leaking.

Instead of being acted upon by your inner world, you become a participant in shaping it. Instead of being dragged by impulses you don’t understand, you begin to listen. You give form to what’s wordless. Shape to what’s heavy. Movement to what’s stuck. You stop leaking energy through the cracks and start channeling it into meaning.

Creativity is not a luxury reserved for artists.
It’s not a hobby you earn after productivity.

It’s what happens when life moves through you and you let it.

The question was never whether you’re creative.
The question is whether you’ve been given permission - or learned to give it to yourself.

Every human being carries this current. It shows up in how you make meaning, how you solve problems, how you care, how you imagine, how you feel. Some people were encouraged to express it early. Others were taught to contain it, delay it, or dismiss it. But the force itself never leaves.

So when you say, “I’m not a creative person,” what you’re often really saying is:
I never learned where this energy was allowed to go.

In devotion to your healing, 

Jean