BY WENDY TOWNLEY
Click here to watch my recent presentation on resilience through creativity for CreativeMornings Omaha.
Resilience through creativity isn’t about making the hard things disappear. I’ve learned that sometimes creativity simply gives us somewhere to go while we’re carrying them.
For most of my life, creativity has shown up in different forms.
I grew up in Omaha surrounded by creative, funny people who loved to host, volunteer, and bring people together. In high school, I found my own creative home through writing and print journalism. I fell in love with storytelling and the written word, eventually working at my college’s student newspaper — and finding friends who became family.
Years later, creativity found me again. This time, it involved paper.
Our family was planning a baby shower, and my stepsister, Allison, showed up with a Cricut Maker to help us make decorations.
I thought spending $400 on a crafting machine was completely ridiculous.
Two days later, I was at Michaels, buying one for myself.
That machine opened the door to paper crafting, and eventually I found myself moving toward more analog ways of making: die cutting, scissors, glue, cardstock, scrapbooking, card-making, and gift tags.
The older I got, the more time I seemed to spend staring at screens. I wanted something different. I wanted to work with my hands.
At first, crafting was simply something I loved.
Then life got harder, and I began to understand that creativity was giving me something I hadn’t realized I needed.
When the Craft Room Became Somewhere to Go
For nearly twelve years, I served as executive director of a nonprofit organization. I loved that work, but during a period of significant transition, the job became stressful on several levels.
I started retreating to my craft room more often.
It was a break. A little bit of quiet. Something I could do when so much of the rest of life felt complicated.
Then, two days before Thanksgiving in 2023, my mom, Mary, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
She had been experiencing unidentified pain and seeing doctors and specialists. Suddenly, our family was thrown into the world of cancer treatment, appointments, questions, decisions, and responsibilities.
There were days when we’d spend six or seven hours at the hospital, answering questions for the eighth or ninth or tenth time.
I’d come home exhausted. And like many of us probably do when we’re exhausted, my instinct was to grab my iPhone and scroll.
It didn’t help.
What did help was going into my craft room.
Not because crafting could change my mom’s diagnosis. It couldn’t.
Not because making a card could somehow make everything okay. It couldn’t do that either.
But sitting down with paper, scissors, and glue gave my hands somewhere to go when my mind had nowhere left to go.
I began to recognize the comfort this hobby was offering me.
Eventually, that realization became part of the foundation for Wendy Crafts.
Creativity Doesn’t Have to Look Like Creativity
When I began talking with other creative people, I discovered I wasn’t alone.
I talked with scrapbookers and paper crafters, but also painters, sculptors, fiber artists and people working in other creative disciplines.
Again and again, I heard some version of the same thing:
We return to our creative work when we need restoration.
That’s part of why I started the Wendy Crafts podcast and why teaching became so important to me.
Many creative pursuits happen alone in our homes and studios. I wanted to make things with other people.
So I began teaching card-making and junk-journaling classes. Something unexpected happened.
People started talking.
Someone would bring a photograph to use in a junk journal. Someone else would begin writing about a memory. Two complete strangers would be standing beside each other choosing paper and suddenly sharing pieces of their lives.
I joke that I don’t intend for anyone to trauma-bond during the two hours we’re together putting crap on a page.
But there is something powerful about what happens when our hands are occupied and we give ourselves permission to create without needing to perform.
People tell me, “I’m not really crafty.”
Or, “I just needed a break from life.”
And sometimes, months later, I hear that something they discovered during that class stayed with them through a difficult season.
That’s when I remember that you don’t have to be an artist to create.
You don’t need to consider yourself an expert.
You don’t even need to be particularly good at it.
Sometimes you just need to begin.
The 33 Days That Changed Everything
On July 1, 2026, I agreed to give a talk about creativity and resilience for CreativeMornings Omaha.
Nine days later, I boarded a flight to Denver for a three-day crafting workshop.
When I landed, my phone rang.
It was my dad.
He asked me to find somewhere quiet.
And then he told me my mom had passed away.
She had been living with cancer for nearly three years and undergoing dialysis for about a year as her kidney function deteriorated. The news was a shock to my system, one I certainly wasn’t expecting considering her busy social calendar the past two weeks.
I couldn’t stop shaking, with busy travelers moving quickly all around me.
There was nothing at home that I could fix by arriving a few hours sooner.
Eventually, I made the decision to stay in Denver.
It felt strange. I felt guilty.
And it also turned out to be one of many moments during the next month when creativity gave me somewhere to put myself.
I returned home Monday. That Thursday, I taught a crafting class at our local library.
For a little while, nobody needed anything from me except for me to teach them something I loved.
The following morning, July 17, I had a breakfast meeting with the owner of a national paper-crafting company to discuss a potential collaboration — the kind of meeting I had dreamed about.
My mother’s funeral was July 22.
Two days later, I taught a junk journal workshop. And then came another loss.
Seven days after my mom’s funeral, our Westie, Teddy, suffered a massive seizure. It was the result of a growing brain tumor discovered earlier in the year.
We had to say goodbye to him on August 3.
From the day I said yes to giving a talk about resilience through creativity to the day we lost Teddy, my family experienced a stretch of grief unlike anything I had known before.
And woven through those thirty-three days were these little appointments with creativity.
Classes.
Workshops.
A meeting.
Paper.
Glue.
People.
Making.
And all of it, in little ways, saved me.
Creativity Didn’t Fix My Grief. It Gave Me a Respite From It.
Looking back, I’m profoundly grateful that those creative responsibilities were already on my calendar.
There were certainly moments when I didn’t want to go. The last thing in the world I wanted to discuss with strangers was ephemera and adhesive.
And yet I would get in the car. I’d arrive. I’d begin teaching.
For a couple of hours, I could channel my love of creativity toward somebody else.
Then I’d come home tired.
Grief itself is exhausting. Carrying it through an otherwise ordinary day takes an enormous amount of energy.
But these creative touch points gave me periods of respite.
They didn’t eliminate grief. They didn’t ask me to pretend I wasn’t hurting.
They simply gave grief some company. That distinction matters to me.
When we talk about creativity and healing, I don’t believe we need to make grand promises about what making something will do for us.
Sometimes the gift is much simpler.
For an hour, you cut paper. You sort photographs. You knit. You paint.
You make a card for someone who needs to know they’re loved.
And for that hour, you’re still carrying what you’re carrying.
But you’re also making something.
What If You Don’t Feel Like Making Anything?
One of my favorite ideas came from Buck Davis, a happiness and motivation speaker who joined me during the first season of the Wendy Crafts podcast.
He introduced me to the idea that we can experience joy not only from doing something we love, but from anticipating and preparing for it.
Think about a vacation. Part of the joy happens when you’re actually there. But some of it starts much earlier: choosing the hotel, making reservations, packing your suitcase, and imagining what’s ahead.
Creativity can work that way, too. That realization changed something for me because there are days when I don’t have the energy to make something.
But maybe I have enough energy to organize my cardstock. Maybe I can sort supplies. Maybe I can look through photographs or pull together materials for something I might make later.
Sometimes I don’t have the energy to make.
I do, however, have the energy to make a mess.
And that feels pretty good, too.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to invite you to spend a few quiet minutes today making, organizing, or preparing something creative — with no expectation that it needs to become anything more.
Looking for a creative community where you call home? Search for and connect with your local CreativeMornings group and fellow creatives, just like you.
