I am aware that this means that parts of the book will make you uncomfortable too, depending on what has been suppressed in your own life and expression.

Advisor that you want to be an artist or actor and chances are she gives you a tight smile and tries to steer you into a safe, known career: teacher or arts therapist. Something conservative. Careful. With a reliable pension. Overtly choosing to be a professional artist from the outset is quite rare. Few of us actively choose The Creative Way as

We can choose to ignore the man-made boundaries between ‘real work’ (work that is paid), heart-work (caring and nurturing) and soul-work (healing, ritual, sexuality and artmaking). We can do away with the artificial Western division between the spiritual and the mundane. We can merge performance with ceremony and visual art, healing with words and

In order to create, we have to find ways to be comfortable in the void. This tends to involve keeping our bodies and hands busy whilst our psyche travels through this space, doing something that requires a degree of concentration: knitting, sewing, cleaning, sorting materials, exercising, driving…tasks that novelist Kate Atkinson describes as

Through the creative process we weave new languages, new identities, new worlds from these. We create a new reality that we and, if we have the courage and platform to share it, others can inhabit alongside us.

creativity is a form of magic, one that happens unseen in the dark, in the space between the known and the unknowable.

We spend our time looking after others, attending to their needs, working hard, earning money. We do it consciously and unconsciously…not just because we have to, but because it is safer to.

We might have made space, or been given space, now we need to fully take it up.

One experience does not invalidate another, as women have so often been taught, but rather each adds richness and diversity.