Care and Keeping of Queer Little Creatures
After years of my body feeling like a haunted house I needed to escape, I was desperately searching for a way to stop abandoning myself.
When you take yourself apart at the seams, examine what’s inside, get caught on the barbed wire around your heart, climb into the void of your own insecurities, discover buried treasure… You need a way of stitching yourself back together so you don’t fall to pieces when a strong wind blows by.
I first engaged with Creative Care in Shauna Kaendo’s Paper series. The practices invited us to let go, to explore, to feel. And, I fell in love.
I used to be allergic to feelings, or at least the bad ones. It’s taken a long time to undo the combined work of growing up in a household where bad feelings made you bad, and what I now suspect is a healthy dose of alexithymia.
After years of my body feeling like a haunted house I needed to escape, I was desperately searching for a way to stop abandoning myself. I wanted to feel slow, soft, and safe. I wanted to become my own sanctuary. I’d done years and years of therapy, and I was tired as shit. I had expressed all of my thoughts and didn’t have the words to explain how I felt. I didn't want to talk anymore. Creative care became a way of mapping my way through the emotions that disgusted and frightened me. I could explore new terrain without words, and without getting lost.
Creative care is now a huge part of both my personal and professional practices. Despite training as a Therapeutic Arts Practitioner, I chose to use the words creative care both because I am not a therapist and because of the harms therapeutic spaces and the medical industrial complex continue to perpetuate. I threw the words creative care around like confetti, until my friend and colleague
asked me “what is creative care?”By my own definition, creative care is inviting expansive creativity into the ways we care for one another, and ourselves. It’s togetherness as a creative act. It’s letting your heart break, because you know here’s a million creative ways to heart make, and that you won’t have to do it alone.
Surprising twist: creative care is not really a thing. Art therapy is, and therapeutic art is, but creative care isn't a commonly used term. The realisation that no one knows what the hell I’m talking about isn’t new to me. Neither is making up my own version of things when the existing options don’t quite fit. That’s what makes me a queer little creature, after all.
