There's a journal sitting on my table right now.

It has blue paint brushed softly across its pages — gentle washes over words I wrote in the hardest season of my life. Words about exhaustion. About not being able to do the things I loved. About feeling like I'd lost not just my dad… but somehow, myself too.

I'm not quite sure yet what I'll create over those pages. Maybe a landscape. Maybe a collage. But covering them felt like something important. Something necessary.

And as I sat with it, I realised — this journal holds more than one kind of grief.

Maybe yours does too.

Grief Has Many Faces

When we hear the word "grief," most of us think of death. Of funerals and flowers and people saying "he's in a better place now." And yes — the loss of someone we love is a profound, bone-deep grief that deserves every word ever written about it.

But grief is bigger than that. And one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves is learn to call it by its real name… even when no one has died.

Grief is the feeling of losing something that mattered to you. Something that was woven into your sense of who you are.

It might be a career you had to walk away from. A marriage that didn't survive. A version of your life you'd imagined, planned for, prayed for — that simply didn't come to pass. A moment with someone you love that you missed and can never get back.

These are real losses. And they deserve to be grieved.

"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed." — Psalm 34:18 (NLT)

The Career You Had to Leave Behind

I was a Highly Specialist Speech and Language Therapist for 34 years.

I loved it. I was good at it. And there is a shortage of speech therapists in this country — I know that, and sometimes I still feel it, this quiet pull of I could still be doing that.

But life had other plans. There came a season when everything was too much, all at once. Someone in the family struggling with their mental health. Someone else with physical health needs. A teenager navigating their own storms. A practice to run. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I was holding everyone else's pieces together while my own were quietly falling apart.

I had to make a choice. And I chose to step back.

I don't regret it. But I grieve it. I grieve the patients I didn't get to help, the work I loved, the identity I'd carried for three and a half decades. That identity doesn't just dissolve because you've moved on. Sometimes it sits quietly in the corner of your heart, asking to be acknowledged.

If you've left a career — not because you wanted to, but because life demanded it — that is grief. And it's allowed.

The Marriage That Didn't Hold

I want to speak carefully here, because I haven't lived this myself.

I've been with my husband for 37 years. I've known him longer than I've known my own parents in the full sense of knowing someone. And I can only imagine — truly only imagine — what it would feel like to discover, after 30 years of building a life together, that the foundation wasn't what you thought it was.

But I've sat with women who have lived that. Who gave everything to a marriage — their youth, their trust, their future plans — and had it end through infidelity, or the slow erosion of something they couldn't name, or a loss that came entirely out of the blue. And what I've seen on their faces isn't just sadness. It's the particular grief of I don't know who I am anymore.

Because when a marriage ends, it's not just a relationship that's lost. It's the version of yourself that existed inside it. The dreams you shared. The life you were building toward. The person you thought you'd grow old with.

That is profound, real, legitimate grief. Even if the world sometimes rushes you to "move on." Even if people say "you're better off." Even if, in time, you come to believe that yourself.

You are allowed to grieve what you lost. Not forever — but for now.

The Moments You Didn't Get to Have

And then there's the grief that doesn't have a name at all.

The trip you didn't take. The conversation you kept meaning to have. The I'll do it next year that became the year it was too late.

My dad loved Malta. My brother went with him. I didn't — because I was married, I had children, life was full and busy and there was always a reason to wait.

I can't go back and change that now.

That kind of grief is strange and silent. Nobody sends flowers for it. There's no visible loss for people to acknowledge. But it sits in you, quietly, as a kind of what if that never quite resolves.

What opportunity have you mourned in that quiet, unnamed way?

Why All of This Steals Your Creativity

Here is what I know, from years of working with people in loss and recovery, and from my own seasons of grief: creativity needs a felt sense of safety to emerge.

When you are carrying grief — any grief — your nervous system is working overtime. It is doing enormous invisible work, trying to process a world that no longer matches the one you expected. That takes energy. All of it, sometimes.

So you sit down to paint, and nothing comes. You open your journal and stare at a blank page. You watch other people creating things, living their lives, and you wonder why you feel so flat.

And then comes the guilt. The quiet, crushing sense that you shouldn't want to enjoy anything. That making something beautiful feels disloyal to the loss. So you pull back. You isolate. You stop doing the very things that might bring comfort — because receiving comfort feels, somehow, like a betrayal of what you're grieving.

If that's you right now… I want you to hear this, gently, as a friend.

Your creativity is not gone. It is resting. And God is not waiting for you to have it together before He meets you there.

What It Means to Paint Over the Pain

I didn't throw the grief journal away. I painted over it.

Blue wash, soft and gentle, over the hardest words I ever wrote. I stuck some of the pages together. I'm going to reuse it — turn it into something new. Not because the grief wasn't real. Not because any of it didn't matter.

But because I am not finished yet. And neither is the book.

That's what creative practice can be in seasons of grief. Not a performance of recovery. Not a way of pretending you're fine. But a place to arrive — honestly, gently, with whatever you're carrying — and let God meet you there.

The Spirit-Led Sketch Method I teach starts with just one word: Prepare. Simply arriving before God with what you actually have today. No pressure to make something beautiful. No agenda. Just you, a page, and permission to be real.

Sometimes the most sacred thing you can create is a page covered in blue, with "GOD" and "LOVE" still showing through underneath.

One Gentle Step for Today

Find 10 minutes. That's all.

Open a page — a journal, a scrap of paper, anything — and write one honest sentence to God about the grief you're carrying right now. Not a polished prayer. Not something that sounds right. Just the truth.

Then, if you feel drawn to it… pick one colour. One. And let your hand move however it wants. No plan. No goal. Just colour, and breath, and the quiet company of the One who is close to the brokenhearted.

That is enough for today.

The Journal Is Still a Journal

The blank pages in my grief journal? I'm going to use them. The book was never wasted.

And those painted-over pages are becoming something. I'm not sure what yet. But something holy lives in the fact that underneath the blue, the words are still there. God still knows what I wrote in the dark. And He held every word.

"He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds." — Psalm 147:3 (NLT)

Your creativity is not gone. It is resting, the way a garden rests in winter — the soil still good, the roots still there. And when you're ready… even if "ready" just means willing to try… spring has a way of coming.

A Place to Begin Again, Whenever You're Ready

Creative Sanctuary is a membership community for Christian women who are finding their way back — to themselves, to God, to the creative life they thought they'd lost. It's not about producing. It's about practising. Showing up with whatever you have today, in a community of women who understand that grief takes many forms… and that none of them disqualify you from belonging.

Every month includes guided art journaling sessions, Scripture-rooted creative prompts, and a space where you don't have to have it together to be welcome.

Your first 7 days are just $1.

If this post stirred something in you… I'd love for you to come and be with us.

👉 [Join Creative Sanctuary here — creativesoulspace.com/creative-sanctuary-page-from-jar]