The Creative Block from a Different Angle
On Emotion as Creative Fuel
My experience these past days was full of doubts: I aspire to lean into my creator nature so badly, but I am not sure if any of my creations is really mine.
Do I like the things I think I like? Or do I like them because others like them, because I believe liking them makes me seem interesting? I hear judgment in my own voice. There is so much noise around us, it is hard to identify what opinion truly belongs to us. Which values are defined from the purity of our very own heart.
Creative block is not always “I don’t have ideas.” It can also look like “I don’t know what’s actually mine.” I wondered, where does creative fuel come from in the first place?
The Armored Amazon
Last week, I learned about “The Wounded Woman” framework. Specifically, the Armored Amazon pattern.
The Armored Amazon is a woman who responded to early wounds by building protective armor: achievement, control, perfectionism, fierce independence. She over-identifies with masculine qualities—logic, ambition, strength—while suppressing vulnerability, softness, and feelings, which she’s learned to see as dangerous weaknesses.
This armor protects her, but it also imprisons her. It’s heavy, rigid, exhausting to maintain.
And here’s what matters: when you suppress vulnerability, you don’t just suppress pain. You suppress vital parts of your personality. Playfulness, spontaneity, creative energy.
That repressed energy doesn’t disappear. It consolidates into something destructive. It becomes depression, rage, self-sabotage. The armor that was supposed to protect you ends up blocking what wants to come through you.
Our language tells us this simply, linguistically: the opposite of depression is expression. Read that again.
When you suppress emotion, it becomes destructive.
When you express emotion, when you let it move from you into something, it becomes creative.
Emotions are creative fuel.
Energy in Motion
And then a woman healer wrote in her email newsletter a few days ago: “How can we use the emotions being stirred within us as fuel for creation? As energy in motion toward a new way?”
And it made me realize that my interpretation of “energy in motion” had been limited the entire time.
I used to think emotion meant energy passing through you. Something you had to sit with, feel, open up the channel of your body for so it could move and ultimately pass. And sure, these things are true, but where does the emotion ultimately go? Into the void?
These emotions want to become something.
We all know what the best songs, paintings, poems, movies, books share: they came from the depth of emotion. Not from strategy or intellect or even skill alone. From feeling.
The Times They Are a-Changin' by Bob Dylan fueled by urgency and hope
The Scream by Edvard Munch fueled by desperation and panic
Desiderata by Max Ehrmann fueled by acceptance and groundedness
Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain by Jean-Pierre Jeunet fueled by loneliness and mischief
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts fueled by suffering and redemption
You can tell when someone created something because they had to. Because the emotion was so big it needed form. When creation is driven by emotion, it carries something the mind alone can’t manufacture. It has texture. Weight. Truth. It’s raw, human, undeniable.
And this is our biggest human gift.
We feel. Deeply, differently, uniquely. And we have the opportunity to let that feeling become something. Form, work, contribution.
That’s how we make the world richer. Not by all feeling the same things, but by creating from what we each feel. By letting our different emotional landscapes produce different expressions.
The same sunset that makes you weep might leave me unmoved. The injustice that enrages you might not register on my radar. The beauty that stops me in my tracks might pass right through you.
That’s the gift.
Because when you create from what you feel, you make something only you could make. Something that didn’t exist before. Something the world didn’t have until you gave it form.
What I’m Learning
I’m learning that my emotions aren’t just things to survive.
They’re fuel.
The confusion I’ve been sitting in? That’s material.
The rage I’ve been trying to alchemize? That’s energy waiting for form.
The grief, the joy, the restlessness, the longing? All of it. Fuel.
Not something to release and let go, something to use.
Into words. Into visuals. Into systems. Into whatever medium can hold it and give it back to the world as something new. And that’s how we make the world we share richer.
Let go & let grow.
Yours sassily,
Liz
Needed to read this today <3
Emotions need to go somewhere!
I adore this!!!!🫶🫶 you've put it all so beautifully x