The Healing Power of Creativity

I was eight years old, sitting cross-legged on the stage floor with the rest of my class. Everyone else had their bell instrument. The music teacher was talking.

I wasn't really there.

Something was happening inside me that I couldn't name. A heaviness expanding in my chest like a balloon being slowly inflated, pressing against my ribs. Thoughts I hadn't invited were spinning, weaving scenarios I couldn't stop or explain. The familiar sting of tears started building before I could do anything about it.

I knew better than to let it show. Even at eight I understood what happened when you cried in front of people. So I held myself very still and focused on keeping it all locked away, breathing carefully, willing my face to stay neutral.

I didn't hold it together.

"Why are you crying?" the music teacher asked, her voice more annoyed than curious.

I had no answer. I never had an answer for that question. I didn't know why. I couldn't trace the feeling back to a cause or put it into words that would make sense to anyone standing outside of it. The complexity of what was happening inside me had no language I could reach.

"I don't know," I whispered.

She stood up and took the bell instrument out of my hands. "Then you don't get to participate until you stop crying like a baby."

I dropped my head and let my hair fall over my face. I wanted to disappear more than I had ever wanted anything.

What that taught me

What those experiences taught me, collectively, was that my emotions were a problem. That feeling things visibly made me a target. That the safest thing I could do was get very good at keeping it all hidden, even from myself.

So I did. I got good at pushing things down before they surfaced. At staying busy enough that I didn't have to sit with anything long enough to feel it fully. At performing fine when I wasn't fine, for long enough that I sometimes couldn't tell the difference anymore.

What I didn't understand then was that suppressing emotions doesn't make them go away. It just means they build up somewhere you can't see them, until they find another way out. Usually at the worst possible moment. Usually in ways that made even less sense to the people around me than crying in a music class had.

It took a long time and an adulthood diagnosis to start understanding what had actually been happening all along.

When the diagnosis finally made sense

When I was diagnosed with alexithymia as an adult, my first reaction was surprise. Almost confusion.

Alexithymia is a condition that affects your ability to recognize, identify, and articulate your emotions. And my immediate thought was that this couldn't be right. I had always considered myself an overly emotional person. Highly sensitive. Someone who felt everything too much, not too little.

But that's the paradox of it. Alexithymia isn't about not feeling. It's about not being able to decode what you're feeling. The emotions are there. Loudly. You just can't always read them. Can't always find the right label, trace them back to a cause, or explain them to someone else in a way that makes sense.

The more I sat with the diagnosis the more things started clicking into place. The delayed processing, sometimes feeling the full weight of something days after it happened. The way I'd rather stay furiously busy than sit still long enough to figure out what I was actually feeling. The times I'd mistake anxiety for excitement or grief for exhaustion because the signals were blurred.

I'd spent years assuming I was just bad at emotions. Dramatic. Too sensitive. Not the right kind of sensitive.

It turned out I wasn't bad at feeling. I was working with a system that made translating feelings into language genuinely difficult.

What creativity gave me that nothing else did

Talking about emotions requires you to already know what you're feeling. You have to identify it, find the right word, and then translate it into language that makes sense to someone else. For someone with alexithymia, that process can feel like being asked to describe a color you've never seen.

Making something bypasses all of that.

When I draw or paint or write, I'm not starting with a feeling I've already decoded. I'm starting with my hands and seeing what comes out. The color I reach for without thinking. The pressure I put on the brush. The shapes that appear before I've consciously decided on them. Sometimes I finish something and look at it and understand for the first time what I was actually carrying.

That's not a small thing for a brain that struggles to translate emotion into language. It's a completely different route to the same destination.

Making things gave me a way to process emotions without having to understand them first. Without having to perform them or explain them or justify them to anyone including myself. The creative process became a kind of translation layer between what I felt and what I could eventually understand.

It still is.

What actually helps

These aren't generic suggestions. They're what I actually use.

Music is the one I reach for first. It has a direct line to my emotions in a way that bypasses the decoding problem entirely. I don't have to know what I'm feeling to let a song surface it.

Sometimes I'll put on something that matches a vague heaviness I can't name, and suddenly I'm crying, and I finally know what was wrong. Other times, I use it deliberately, putting on something with a driving beat when I need to move energy through my body instead of letting it sit there building pressure.

Writing slows things down in a way nothing else does. When I'm spiraling or overwhelmed or stuck in something I can't identify, putting words on a page forces a kind of order. I'm not always writing about the feeling directly. Sometimes I'm just writing anything, letting my hands move, and watching what surfaces. It's less about journaling and more about giving the static somewhere to go.

Visual art is where I go when I have no words at all. Drawing or painting when I'm completely emotionally flooded doesn't require me to know anything. I just start. The color I reach for, the marks I make, the way a piece evolves, all of it tells me something I couldn't have said out loud at the beginning. I've finished pieces and understood things about myself I hadn't been able to access any other way.

None of these are cures. They're tools. Ways of giving something that has no language yet a form it can exist in until the language catches up.

If any of this sounds familiar, you're in good company.

A lot of people in this community have spent years not having words for what was happening inside them. Feeling everything and being able to explain none of it. Making things turned out to be the route in that talking couldn't be.

That's what DIYvinci is built around. Not making things for output or productivity or proof of anything. Making things as a way back to yourself.

The DIYvinci Community is full of people figuring this out alongside each other. Neurodivergent creatives who understand what it's like to feel everything and not be able to explain any of it. It's free and it's off social media.

Come find us at community.diyvinci.com