When your passion is really a hiding place
I’ve been a creative person my whole life. Dance and painting weren’t hobbies—they were my lifelines. From a young age, I knew they were my calling. I trained hard, I poured myself in, I felt alive when I moved or when the brush hit the canvas.
Creativity as a Trauma Response
But here’s what I didn’t know: creativity can also be a trauma response.
No one told me that.
As I got older and started unpacking my own patterns—explosive anger, social withdrawal, people pleasing, losing my voice—I began to connect the dots. These weren’t just quirks of my personality. They were survival tactics. I’d been carrying childhood trauma in my nervous system, in my breath, in my body.
And while I thought I was healing by creating, most of the time, I was just escaping.
The Illusion of Healing Through Creativity
Here’s the tricky part: creativity is socially acceptable, even admired. You can be praised for your productivity, your talent, your passion—while completely bypassing your pain.
But just because it looks expressive doesn’t mean it’s healing.
Just because it’s beautiful doesn’t mean it’s honest.
And just because you’re doing what you love doesn’t mean you’re actually feeling what you need to feel.
Creativity, for many of us, is a temporary shelter.
A brilliant, necessary, life-saving one—but still a shelter.
When Creation Becomes Circling
Unless that activity actually opens the wound—yup, here comes the woo—unless you let it stir the energy of what’s buried and breathe it all the way out of your body, you’ll just keep spinning. Creating and coping. Channeling and circling. Healing happens when we stop using creativity to escape from ourselves and start using it to return to ourselves.
The Real Work of Healing
That means slowing down enough to let the grief rise.
That means not skipping over the discomfort.
That means not turning every hard feeling into a project or a post.
It means feeling—all the way through.
So keep dancing. Keep painting. Keep creating.
But if you really want to heal, don’t just do the thing—
let the thing do you.
~Maggie Hernandez-Knight