Make Something of It
I sometimes feel like my life has been one long exercise in recovering from heartbreak.
Not in a dramatic sense, though maybe a little in a dramatic sense.
I mean that when I look back over the past twenty years, the major turning points in my life seem to be marked less by achievement than by loss. A friendship ending. A parent disappointing me. A relationship falling apart. A dream dissolving. A version of myself reaching the end of its usefulness.
Again and again, life has arrived with a pair of scissors and cut me loose from something I thought I couldn’t live without.
Maybe that’s true for all of us.
Heartbreak is one of those experiences that sounds singular but is actually plural. We tend to reserve the word for romance, but heartbreak is everywhere.
It is embedded in growing up. In becoming who we are. In realizing our parents are human. In leaving places we love. In watching people change. In discovering that a future we spent years building toward no longer exists.
Lately, as I’ve been moving through a new course in heartbreak — bearing witness to someone I love navigating debilitating mental health challenges — I’ve found myself thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed in my own life.
The irony is that I'm writing this from the middle of heartbreak, not the far side of it. I am not sitting on a mountaintop having extracted a neat lesson from my suffering. There are still mornings when I wake up with anxiety already blooming in my chest. There are still moments when I find myself bargaining with reality, replaying conversations, imagining different outcomes.
Whatever wisdom exists in this essay has not arrived because I have figured heartbreak out. It has arrived because, once again, I am trying to live inside it.
For as much as heartbreak has hurt me, it has also been one of the greatest creative forces I’ve ever known.
This feels like a dangerous thing to admit because I don’t want to romanticize suffering. If someone offered me a button that would allow me to skip the grief, the sleepless nights, the panic, the obsessive mental loops, and the particular ache of missing someone who is still alive, I would probably press it.
Actually, that’s a lie.
I would hover my finger over it for a long time.
Because as much as I hate heartbreak, I’ve started to suspect that some of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created have emerged from the places where my life cracked open.
The novel I spent years writing began after a significant trauma. Some of my deepest friendships arrived after other relationships ended. Entire chapters of my life — career shifts, cross-country moves, creative projects, spiritual practices, communities — can be traced back to moments when something fell apart and left me standing in unfamiliar territory.
I don’t believe heartbreak makes us any more talented, though maybe. And I do not believe pain is inherently noble.
But because heartbreak has repeatedly forced me into conversations with uncertainty, I know now that creativity is what helps us uncover our most authentic next steps.
I’ve always thought of creativity as much larger than art.
Art is one expression of creativity, but creativity itself is something far more fundamental. It is the human capacity to imagine alternatives. To improvise. To generate possibilities when the map no longer matches the terrain.
And heartbreak, at its core, is a crisis of the map.
Psychologists often talk about grief as a response to loss, but increasingly researchers understand that grief is also a process of identity reconstruction.
When we lose someone or something important, we aren’t only grieving the thing itself. We are grieving the future that existed in relationship to it.
The routines.
The assumptions.
The plans.
The story.
The brain is constantly creating predictions about what comes next. It wants continuity. Coherence. A sense that the world is understandable and that tomorrow will resemble today.
Heartbreak interrupts all of that.
Suddenly, the future you had imagined disappears. The narrative you’ve been living inside no longer makes sense. You wake up in a life that looks familiar from the outside but feels completely foreign from within.
Which is why heartbreak can feel so disorienting. You’re not only mourning a person or a possibility. You’re trying to orient yourself inside a reality that no longer behaves the way you expected it to. You are now walking with a map that has been suddenly rendered useless.
And this, I think, is where creativity enters the picture.
Not as a distraction or self-improvement.
Not even as healing, at least not in the way we usually talk about healing.
Creativity enters as an act of orientation.
When the old story collapses, creativity helps us begin imagining a new one.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur believed that human beings make sense of their lives through narrative. We understand ourselves through stories. We are constantly constructing meaning from experience, weaving events into an ongoing account of who we are and where we are going.
Heartbreak doesn’t just hurt because something ends.
It hurts because the story breaks.
And once the story breaks, we are left with one of the most terrifying and liberating questions a person can face:
Who am I now?
For a while, there is no answer.
Only fragments. Confusion. Grief.
But eventually — and I think this is one of the quiet miracles of being human — the imagination begins to stir.
Not all at once.
Maybe it starts as a daydream.
A conversation.
A poem.
A business idea.
A trip.
A class.
A walk around the block where you notice something beautiful despite yourself.
Tiny moments in which the psyche begins testing new possibilities.
Not because we’re ready. We’re not.
Not because we’ve moved on. We haven’t.
But because some part of us remembers that the story is still being written.
And maybe that’s why so many artists, writers, musicians, and makers have turned to creative practice during periods of heartbreak.
The value isn’t simply in expressing emotions, though that matters too. The value is in participating in the process of becoming.
Every act of creation asks the same question:
What if?
What if this line leads somewhere?
What if I try another color?
What if I rearrange these pieces?
What if something unexpected emerges?
Heartbreak asks us those same questions, whether we want it to or not.
Creativity Doesn’t Have to Be a Solo Practice
I’ve spent much of my life believing creativity was something you did after you figured things out.
You got clarity. You healed. You found an answer.
And then you made something.
What I’ve discovered instead is that creativity is often what helps us find our way through the uncertainty itself.
The notebook isn’t where I go once I know what I think. It’s where I go to discover what I think.
The walk isn’t a reward for having my life together. It’s often how I remember that I’m alive when my life feels like it’s falling apart.
The conversation isn’t the conclusion. It’s part of the process.
Again and again, I’ve found that creative practice gives me a way to stay in relationship with myself when the future feels unclear. It helps me tolerate uncertainty. It helps me imagine possibilities I couldn’t previously see. It reminds me that I am more than the worst thing that has happened to me and larger than any single chapter of my life — thank GOD.
Which is why I’ve been creating Creative Reset Studio — an expansion of the work I do with my 1:1 clients.
It’s not a productivity program or another place to optimize yourself.
This is a weekly practice space for people who want to slow down, reconnect with themselves, and remember that creativity is not a luxury. It’s one of the healthiest ways we can navigate change.
A place for reflection, embodiment, conversation, experimentation, and community. A place to ask bigger questions. A place to get unstuck.
A place to remember that there is still more life available to you than the story you’re currently telling yourself.
Because if there’s one thing heartbreak and grief and uncertainty and disappointment and reinvention have taught me, it’s this:
The goal isn’t to avoid having your heart broken.
The goal is to keep creating, to keep allowing yourself to live, anyway.
Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Founding Membership that will be opening this summer.