Why I Stopped Waiting for Inspiration (And What Showed Up Instead)

For years, I thought being an artist meant having space for it. The clean, tidy house. The uninterrupted afternoon. The perfect mood where inspiration would arrive like some benevolent muse and tap me on the shoulder.

So I waited. I waited for my kids to be a bit older. I waited for the house to be cleaner. For life to settle into some mythical rhythm where I'd have big, beautiful chunks of time and space to create.

But do you know what happened while I waited? Nothing. I didn't make anything. The muse never showed up because she doesn't work on my schedule and honestly? I felt cheated, like I was less than.

Life was full— healing, work, kids, all of it. It was never tidy. The "perfect time" didn't exist. I grew restless.

So I started making the way I lived creative. The way I packed school lunches. The way I arranged books on a shelf. Everything became a small act of making; a practice of seeing beauty in the mundane of finding rhythm in the chaos.

Then I started colouring in. With my kids at first, then alone at night after everyone was asleep. Like a crazy person, filling page after page with colour just to feel my hands do something.

It wasn't precious. It wasn't art. But it was a creative practice that I committed to. I continued to show up.

Slowly, I learned that squeezing in a quick messy sketch—even a rubbish one—was better than not creating at all. It made me feel lighter. Calmer. Like I'd exhaled something I didn't know I was holding.

Then something unexpected happened.

The more I showed up without waiting for inspiration, the more often it arrived. I'd start a rough sketch with no plan and suddenly an hour would disappear. Then two hours. Soon enough I would look down and actually like what I saw.

The unfolding became addictive. The process was cathartic.

Because here's what I didn't understand when I was waiting: inspiration doesn't come before the work. It comes during it.

It shows up when your hands are already moving. When you're mid-mark and something unexpected emerges. When you stop trying to control the outcome and just let the process unfold.

Now, I don't wait. I just show up — tired, distracted, uninspired — and I make a mark anyway. Some days it's five minutes while the coffee brews. Some days it's two hours lost to flow state. Some days it's terrible and I walk away and do just about anything else at all.

But keep showing up: and that's the point. The muse doesn't reward waiting. She rewards showing up.

So if you're waiting for the perfect time, the perfect mood, the perfect conditions — stop torturing yourself. Just start. Make it messy. Make it small. Make it while the house is chaotic and the kids are loud and you only have two minutes.

Because the work doesn't care if you're inspired. It just wants you to begin.