Creativity as Homecoming
“The point is the transformation that happens in us as we create, not just what we create.”
Perhaps you've heard this, even within yourself? It's a question I hear often, whispered with a mixture of longing and hesitation:
"When will I feel like a real artist?"
As if there's a threshold we must cross, a level of skill or productivity or recognition that will finally grant us permission to claim our creative identity.
What I've come to understand through my own practice and through witnessing a huge array of creative journeys is this: we're not trying to become something we're not. We're returning to something we've always been.
Creativity isn't a destination. It's a homecoming.
Image: A collage spread I’ve been loving making lately in my sketchbooks - using gel prints.
I love to think about it in relation to children. They don't question whether they're "real artists."
They simply create—with joy, with abandon, with absolute presence. They're not making art to hang in galleries or to impress anyone. They're creating because it's as natural as breathing. It's how they make sense of the world. It's how they express what's alive in them.
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned to doubt this innate capacity. We learned to compare, to judge, to measure our creative expression against external standards. We learned that creativity was for "talented" people, for people with training, for people who could produce work that looked a certain way.
But creativity doesn't actually belong to a special group of humans. It's our birthright. It's part of what makes us human. Every single one of us is creative—we're just creative in different ways, with different materials, at different scales.
When we approach creativity as homecoming rather than achievement, things shift.
We can stop asking "Am I good enough?" and start asking "What wants to move through me?"
We can stop trying to prove ourselves and start exploring what brings us alive.
We can stop creating for external validation and start creating because it nourishes something essential in us.
This doesn't mean skill doesn't matter or that learning techniques isn't valuable. Of course it is. But skill is in service of expression, not a prerequisite for it. You don't need to be accomplished to create. You just need to show up with your whole, tender, imperfect humanity.
Image: Holding a small artist’s book I created, in front of the shoreline of a local beach.
I think about my own journey with artists' books—nearly two decades of exploring this form. The learning never stops. The discovery never stops. And yet, I wasn't "less of" an artist in my first year than I am now. I was simply in a different part of the journey. Every stage has been valid. Every piece I've made has been part of the process of coming home to my creative self.
Creativity as homecoming means we're not trying to arrive somewhere. We're already here. We're simply deepening our relationship with what's already present. We're clearing away the conditioning that told us we weren't creative. We're recovering a capacity that was never actually lost, just covered over.
This is why process matters more than product. Because the product is just evidence of the process—it's not the point. The point is the journey of showing up, of being present with our materials, of allowing something to move through us.
The point is the transformation that happens in us as we create, not just what we create.
When you sit down to paint or write or make, you're not trying to become a painter or a writer or a maker. You're practicing being yourself, fully. You're giving your inner experience a form. You're in conversation with something larger than your everyday concerns. You're tending to a part of yourself that needs expression the way a plant needs water.
This is sacred work, even when it feels mundane. Especially when it feels mundane. Because it's in the ordinary, regular practice—the showing up when we don't feel inspired, the working small when time is limited, the being gentle when we're tired—that we're actually building a relationship with our creative self.
Your creative practice is not a test you need to pass. It's not a competition you need to win. It's not a goal you need to achieve.
It's a homecoming—a return to something true and essential in you.
You don't need permission from anyone else to create. You don't need to justify your creative time or prove its worth. You don't need to produce anything impressive or share anything publicly. Your creativity is for you first. Everything else is secondary.
Image: A second, larger artist book I made, again using gel prints, in front of the shoreline.
What would it feel like to create from this place? To stop striving and start savouring?
To release the pressure of becoming and rest in the simple truth that you already are?
This month, I invite you to come home to your creative self.
Not to some idealised version of who you think you should be, but to who you actually are right now. With your current skills, your current constraints, your current life circumstances. With your doubts and your longings and your tender hope that creativity might offer something you need.
You belong here. 🤗
Your creative expression is important—not because of what it produces, but because of what it allows to move through you.
Because of how it connects you to yourself. 🥰🎨
Because it's part of being fully, authentically human.
Welcome home.
About Nicola Newman
I'm a Creative Business Coach, Award-Winning Artist & Mentor for Creative Hearts who want to flourish, flow & prosper.
My passion is inspiring and supporting Creative Hearts to trust their inner wisdom and carve out a life that’s personally meaningful and fulfilling to them.
I share practical, evidence-based tools for Creative Hearts seeking to improve their lives or businesses. My work draws from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), mindfulness-based techniques, body-based practices, and neuroscience -- and my own creative living adventures -- among other approaches.
My mission is to support Creative Hearts to:
Dissolve creative blocks, develop a loving relationship with themselves, nurture their creativity and reframe the beliefs and patterns that keep them from following their heart and making the creative contribution they would love to make in the world.
My approach is to embrace gentleness, playfulness and self-care to navigate self-doubt and instead cultivate deep self-trust so you can truly enjoy the creative process, bring together your body of work, make money doing what you love and leave a creative legacy you’re proud of.
Let’s pour a cuppa and get to know one another, shall we? :) Read more about my story here.
