On Healing from Artist's Block that Lasted a Decade...

My husband and I were having a tough day. We huddled together on the sofa under a blanket.

“Sometimes it’s like a door to my heart swings open and there’s only a painful darkness living there,” he said.

I rested my head on his shoulder, hoping that somehow I could send him more comfort, because I felt like any words I had to say wouldn’t be enough. As we rested there, he let out a sigh and relaxed. Then I felt myself relax too.

I drifted between being sort of awake and sort of not. Then for a moment, I caught the flash of a subconscious image.

I saw a white girl standing by a window, slightly turned as if she was considering looking out of it. Her hair was a slightly wavy brownish blonde, and she wore heavy, almost runny, black eyeliner and too much blush—in purple. She was also wearing a long striped nightgown with different doodle patterns filling each stripe with a black collar trimmed in black lace. The ends of her sleeves were trimmed in lace as well, but in white. Although her nightgown was multicolored, the color purple stood out to me the most.

I caught my breath. Unlike other images I’ve encountered in my dreams, I immediately knew that this was specifically meant to be a painting. Watercolor. I’ve rarely worked with watercolors, but I knew that’s what it had to be. The image changed some as I painted it, but that’s just how things work with projects like these.

You may have noticed that although I sign the end of my emails as an “Intuitive Writer/Artist/Creative Rebel⚡,” you’ve seen much more of my writing and creative rebellion than my art.

That’s because I’ve been suffering from severe artist’s block for over a decade.

After finishing my webcomic around 2014-ish, I was deeply burned out. But due to the financial struggles along with being newly married, I believed I had to hustle and figure out how to make money from my art. So I did Redbubble, stationary, artist’s trading cards, and custom portraits. My portraits performed the best and earned well, but they drained me the most. It was burnout on top of burnout.

Creating from burnout caused me to lose my artist’s eye. And I could feel the difference. My art flow was eventually reduced to a trickle. I quit making portraits because it was sucking the life out of me and got a job in retail.

It’s not like I haven’t created any art over the past decade. I’ve done some random floral paintings. There are hand drawn diagrams in a few of my books, and not too long ago I shared some unfinished art in a blog article. I also love drawing my own profile pics, and I’ve experimented with using art to process emotional pain.

But art created from my eye is different from art created from my mind or even my heart. The imagery doesn’t come from trying. It arises.

It appears in a moment, spontaneous, often almost fully formed. It makes creating art feel like something beyond expressing a skill—it becomes an addictive adventure. Maybe, even a romance. And when this kind of art appears, I can smoothly bring what I see into being from start to finish because it feels whole when it arrives.

When I took advanced art classes in high school, a lot of my art came from this inner seeing, usually in response to a prompt assigned to me from my teachers. Even after taking a long break from art after high school, my webcomic arrived in a similar way—within that early morning space between dreaming and waking—and pulled me into learning how to make art all over again.

But now I understand that too much stress and not being open to what appears can make me blind—for a very long time.

It was a bit startling due to the level of detail, but at the same time I was like, “Thank you. Welcome back lost piece of myself.” I can’t help wondering what I am going to see next. Along those same lines, I have a single new blog post for this month. It’s a short one:

Note-taking Apps and Organizing My Mind Palace

Not only do I share yet another crazy nocturnal dream, but in this post I also introduce two new episodes I’ve uploaded to my podcast, Random Musings on Creative Tech, about my favorite note-taking apps. I’m also still slowly updating my novel, Omnigirl.

By the way, as my husband and I sat together, I didn’t say a thing about the painting I saw in my mind’s eye. But he pointed to an older floral painting I created that’s hanging on the wall of our living room. He said to me, “Did you know that painting you made is full of faces? In fact, there’s a face that’s peeking out from in-between the vines.”

He went on to describe to me the outlines of a face, tracing the lines in the air with his finger.

“Do you see it?” he asked.

And I was like, “Yeah, I do.”

What faces do you see?

So with that, thank you so much for reading this much longer than usual email and for being here. Wishing you clarity and connection to your own inner sight.

Arcadia Page

Intuitive Writer/Artist/Creative Rebel ⚡

P.S. Here’s an invitation to support this starry-eyed writer and…artist.