Creativity in a Time of Isolation

Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash

10 useful tools and attitudes for keeping your creativity functioning

As more and more countries and cities shut down over the current Covid 19 outbreak, artists and creatives around the world are isolated at home like the rest of our friends and neighbors. Besides the difficult looming question of how to survive the financial implications of this time, there looms another question.

How do we hold onto our creativity while watching our personal worlds suddenly contract to the space of our own homes and at most a handful of people in that space?

While many of us creatives may be introverts, perfectly happy to stay to ourselves for extended periods of time, many are not. And even introverts may find it intimidating to have their isolation enforced by circumstances outside their control.

Staying creative and mentally active through this confusing and stressful time is important to us and to the people around us. It will help keep us aware, functioning, and mentally healthy. It will help make the world a brighter place.

I write this article with a strange sense of the ironies of life. Here are my credentials for telling you how to remain creative in a time of unusual isolation.

I have lived through, not months, but years of intense isolation.

I spent most of my life essentially alone without any helpful outside contacts. I’ve navigated months at a time at home, leaving for only the most basic shopping needs. This wasn’t by my choice. But I’ve done it, and I managed to hold onto my creativity throughout.

I was raised by a mother with serious antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). I was forced to live with her for more than half a lifetime. My lifetime. She was able to control this much of my life thanks to doing a lot of intense brainwashing, gaslighting and other forms of abuse when I was young. Eventually, I managed to think my way out of her psychopathic mind-bending. But by this time she had gained complete financial control over me. She also had control over other family members that I loved…