Hoe for Hobbies: On Creativity, Blocks, and Whatever I'm Rhinestoning This Week

I am not a jack-of-all-trades. But I am, as the internet has so eloquently put it, a hoe for hobbies.

If you've spent any time on the creative side of social media, you know the type. We are legion. We are glitter-dusted and slightly behind on our seventeen current projects. What I've noticed, though, the thread that actually connects the spinning fire and the burlesque costuming and the writing and the visual art and whatever I'm rhinestoning this week, is creativity. Not talent. Not discipline. Not even passion, exactly. Creativity. The impulse to make something out of something else. To transform.

Which is why it's always a little jarring when it stops.

Creative blocks are not glamorous. Procrastination doesn't look like a tortured artist staring out a rain-streaked window.  It looks like me doomscrolling at 11pm, fully aware that I'm doomscrolling, narrating my own avoidance in real time. The detachment from motivation is its own particular flavor of awful. You know what you want to make. You care about it. And yet….

I've spent a lot of time asking myself: is it a muse? Is it my own toxicity? Is Mercury in lemonade? Sometimes, honestly… yes to all three.

But the frame that's actually helped me most is simpler than any of that– Meaning. When something feels meaningful, motivation tends to follow. Not always immediately. Not always easily. But the work that pulls me back, again and again, is the work that feels like it matters — to me, in my body, in my life. The rest is noise.

What a creativity practice actually looks like (for me)

I was listening to my meditation app introduce creativity as making space. Creating the conditions for a free flow, rather than forcing one. So when I'm stuck, I try to sit with a few questions rather than immediately reaching for my phone or my to-do list:

What is something I'd like to create? What feeling do I associate with it? How do I visualize the work? How do I visualize myself in relation to it?

That second question is the one that gets me. Because sometimes the block isn't about the work at all. It's about where I'm placing myself in the frame.

A recent example: Rhinestones

Rhinestones are, objectively, incredible. They take something ordinary and make it catch the light. They elevate without complication. You apply them, one by one, and the thing becomes more itself — shinier, more deliberate, more there.

I have a maximalist decor streak that rhinestones feed perfectly. The space around me reflects how I want to feel, and right now I want to feel adorned – as if every rhinestone object in my orbit is a small argument that beauty is worth the effort.. So I'm making things that do that.

It also keeps my hands busy while my brain decompresses. Which is sometimes exactly what a block needs — not a breakthrough, just a lower-stakes entry point back into making.