“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.” - Auguste Rodin
The Origami Earrings
To understand why creation is the cure for heartbreak, I go back to a brisk Saturday morning in April. I had woken up early during the weekend, and there aren’t many people and/or adventures I would be willing to do that for.
But today I was willing to barter sleep for exploration, because I would be attending a workshop in which I would make my new favorite pair of earrings.
It would be a souvenir, memory, form of self-expression, and conversation starter all in one.
A Saturday Morning Adventure
So I walked down to Shinagawa Station, wading through the waves of people also on their way to the bustling center of Asakusa.
I remember making coffee before I left home, and sipping it zombie-like as the stations zoomed past my eyes. It was one of those mornings where I swore my body wore its sleep-deprivation as though it were a cry for help.
But then I arrived at the tiny studio, after doubting Google Maps and frantically checking the time the entire way there.
It smelled of fresh pine, and I could see little wooden curls gathered at the feet of tourists learning how to make chopsticks.
On the other side of the room was a table covered in origami paper, speckled here and there with the artificial glow of a UV lamp drying freshly applied resin.
I was on my own today, a solo adventure I would keep recalling wistfully amidst the frenzy of end-of-semester deadlines.
Furthermore, it was one of those endeavors that had resulted not from asking what I already liked to do, but what I might like to do if I let myself be a little spontaneous.
Patiently, my instructor guided me through, helping me pick a paper and offering me a few options for what to make. I could do a key chain, a pair of earrings, or a necklace, and for any of these, I had the option of making a crane, a star, or something else (it escapes me now).
I chose what I chose, and spent the rest of the time folding an unimaginably small piece of paper into two dainty paper cranes.
Moving Through The Seasons
There is a solace in knowing that by a certain day on the calendar, you will be cured. It’s like having a cold. You might be congested now, but your body will open up and breathe freely in a week or two.
That knowledge is such a powerful source of hope as you lie in bed, exhausted but wishing you could just skip to the next day already, if at least it meant you didn’t have to dry out your mouth just to breathe.
It’s why seasons are so comforting. July will always be summer. December will always be Christmas. Summer brings heat and warmth. Winter is cold.
It’s the comfort of the school year, when you find refuge in knowing that once the summer break rolls around, you will be free of that one teacher who always catches you out.
Yet while the seasonality of time’s passage is a strong stabilizing force, there are also the places where it falls short.
We think that loss will be dulled in six months. In a year. Death will become foggy. It won’t strike you the same.
Yet there you find yourself, staggering through time too far into the future, but tethered to a singular past.
Time is not the true healer, we find. It is a separator, yes. A medium, maybe. But a healer? Well, that depends.
I Found the Cure. It Wasn't Time. It Was Making Things.
“The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists.” - Charles Dickens
It all started with mood boards.
(...And don’t all great things start that way?)
They had this magical power to dissolve any simmering melancholy burning at the back of my mind. It was in a mood board where I could crack open new potential in my imagination, and get excited again.
I would become buzzed with the sight of colors, and patterns, and potential. It was pure creative drunkenness.
Yes, I decided with a defiant sense of empowerment. I could start collecting vinyl! I’ll get a record player later.
Why not? I wondered, marveling at a picture of sparkly pink roller skates. Looks like fun.
As the images flooded into my mind, I realized with awe that I could have this life if I wanted it.
Wait a second… I was creating it.
Before I knew it, I had made 36 mood boards in a month. For any fellow nerds out there, that means I averaged more than one a day.
(There was soon an intervention from loved ones to maybe take a break from the incessant mood boarding for a bit.)
There was a Japanese record shop I was planning to visit. I was drawing, writing, and getting lost in new adventures. The world was this ravishing wonderland of “what if” questions whose answers could be actualized with surprising ease.
Something had been unlocked.
The Mechanism: Creation Externalizes Emotion.
Like most, I have maintained a fairly strong interest in long-term survival all throughout my life.
It so happens that a big part of survival in the 21st century is learning how to metabolize your feelings in a non self-destructive way.
The difficulty is learning to heal when you can have misery express-delivered to your doorstep overnight. You can open any social media app and find hundreds of people to be jealous of, angry at, disappointed in.
And that’s still excluding all the multimedia that was not generated by a human being at all, which I would say is beyond “depressing”; it’s “soul-crushing”.
Then there is the sneaky convenience of 21st century life, which manufactures an existential dread that then fuels even more self-hatred. You no longer have to cook for yourself. There is no need to go outside. Forget about socializing in person.
It’s not surprising that you feel sad and angry with such frequency. Perhaps it is just a sign reaffirming that you are a human in a world becoming incrementally less so.
But the question isn’t what’s wrong with you or the world; it’s what to do from there.
The answer is simple: you create.
Why? Because creation is the metabolic process for taking the raw emotional fuel, and using its energy to power something out there.
So healing through time is only possible insofar as that time was used to build something, create something, live something.
A lot of us, though, are caught in a dangerous web of overwhelming consumption, where the little time left over for creativity is so sparse that healing stagnates.
The Balance Between Consumption & Creation
I am always amazed at how many analogies to water fit the human condition so well. Perhaps there is something about our being made mostly of water that tethers us to it in this way.
So here, of course, I cannot help but invoke the wisdom of water.
We normally consider nutrients a positive force in the world, because it is through nutrients that we build all the biomolecules that make up life. Much the same, all the critters in the oceans and rivers of the world need nutrients to survive.
The process is simple, right? They take the nutrients from their surroundings and synthesize DNA, amino acids, proteins, and all the rest.
But what we see around the world is something you might call “too much of a good thing”.
When these systems have too much nutrients flowing into them, whether from sewage or agriculture, there is an excess of input into the system. Algae populations boom, taking all the oxygen in the water, suffocating everything that lives below, blocking out the sun, and creating massive “dead spots” where no other life can coexist.
If you are surprised that too much of something seemingly good would kill an entire system of living things, then consider what might be happening to us when we let too much in.
We stagnate, our creativity suffocates, and in the place of imagination, we are left with a “dead spot” that fills us with despair.
Like so much else, the dose makes the poison.
We are quick to blame social media, or news platforms, or streaming services. But what if the thing hindering creativity is more so a ratio than a name brand?
It’s not that you need to never tune in to hear the news. Maybe you just need to pick up a paintbrush, open a new empty doc on your laptop, or start a new side hustle.
Your Broken Heart As Raw Material: What will you build?
“To be creative is to worship. To be creative is to participate in the great process of creation- and participatin in creativity is participating in God.” - Rajneesh
We heal the world by healing ourselves; and we heal ourselves by building something new.
And then, like magic, by building something that exists outside your mind, the pain also finds a pathway out of you.
The expression frees you, lightens the burden of what energy was swirling around inside.
You stand before an empty canvas. With every brushstroke, you become more free.
Thought to Action
#1: Detach Outcome From Worth: Let experiments succeed or fail without meaning anything about you.
#2: Practice Staying in Motion: When something doesn’t work, don’t restart. Adjust and continue.
#3: Make Space for Creative Input: Commit to one hour a week where you absorb inspiration—watch a documentary, visit a museum, or read outside your field. Creativity is fueled by unexpected collisions.
#4: Track Energy, Not Interests: For one week, note what gives you energy and what drains it. Patterns reveal more than labels.
#5: Draw Your Connection Map: Write down five people or communities—old friends, classmates, mentors—you’d like to reconnect with or better understand. Choose one and take a small step (message, coffee invite, honest hello).
Sources
No external sources were used for this post.
AI Statement
Where was AI used?
SEO keyword research & optimization: This is the boring bit that has to do with aligning what I write with what search engines will put at the top of their pages. I let AI do it so I can focus on being a better writer.
Where was AI not used?
Image generation: A human being took and selected every photo used in this post.
In any writing, at any point: A human being wrote this post with her heart and brain, not her LLM friends.
Selecting ‘Thought to Action’ items: These have been remixed from past posts with related themes.
