you sit down to make one thing. you look up and hours have gone. the thing is done — but nothing else is. the washing-up is where you left it. you forgot to eat. and there's that familiar drop in your stomach, the one that says you did it again. you disappeared.
from the outside, that looks like getting stuck. poor prioritising. another lost afternoon.
i want to offer a different reading.
a lot of the time, the pull to make something — when a feeling is big, when you're grieving, when your head's been running hot for days — isn't avoidance. it's the feeling finding a way out. it's your brain doing the one thing it knows how to do with something too big for words.
the feeling has to go somewhere
we talk about processing emotion as if it's a thinking task. sit with it. journal it. talk it through. and for some people, some of the time, that works.
but feeling doesn't always live in language. sometimes it's too big, or too old, or too far down to reach with a sentence. when that's true, making something gives it a route. you take what's stuck inside and you put it outside — into clay, paint, wood, a playlist, a half-written page. researchers call it externalising. once the feeling is out there, in something you can see and hold, it gets easier to carry.
here's the part i'd underline: the healing is in the making. not in whether the thing is any good. not in whether you finish it. the making is the work. the object is just where it landed.
why this hits harder for some brains
if you're neurodivergent, this is probably more true for you, not less.
big feelings tend to linger longer. they arrive louder. and if words come slowly for you — if you're dyslexic, or your auditory processing means a conversation is already hard work — then "just talk about it" was never the easy option everyone assumed it was.
making isn't a superpower and it isn't a symptom. it's a route. for a lot of us, it's the most honest one we've got.
it looks like getting stuck. it might be grief, working.
so the next time you lose an afternoon to something you didn't plan — especially after a loss, a shock, a hard week — slow down before you call it a failure.
what did the making give you? what did you let yourself feel while your hands were busy? what came out that wouldn't come out any other way?
that's not a lost afternoon. that's a brain processing something the only way it could.
what to actually do with this
i'm not going to hand you a system. you don't need one.
just two things.
let the making have its time when it shows up — within reason, with a timer if the evenings tend to run away from you. it's doing a job.
and afterwards, name the cost honestly. yes, the washing-up waited. yes, you skipped lunch. that's real, and you can plan around it. but don't let the cost rewrite what the making was for. both things are true: it took the afternoon, and it got the feeling out.
one last thing
if you've spent years being told you're too sensitive, or not sensitive enough, or that you just need to focus — this might be the first time someone's said the making was the point.
it was. it is.
if any of this is landing and you want to think it through out loud, that's what i do. there's a free walk in cardiff with my dog, baobao, whenever you're ready — no pitch, no pressure, my diary not yours. book a walk