Coming Home: Creativity, Ripening and the Quiet Revolution of Becoming

Some books arrive at exactly the right moment. As a lifelong bookworm, I’ve found this increasingly to be the case.

I've been reading Ripening: Why Women Need Stories by Sharon Blackie and, every now and then, a sentence has made me put the book down, stare out of the window and simply sit with it for a while.

One idea, in particular, is staying with me.

Blackie describes "ripening" as coming home to ourselves.

I haven't been able to stop thinking about that.

Perhaps in part it's because we're approaching autumn, my favourite season. Every year, without really intending to, I become more reflective as the evenings begin to draw in. I find myself asking different questions than I do in spring.

Spring asks me what I want to grow.

Summer asks me how I will tend to it.

Autumn asks something altogether quieter.

What has this year changed in me?

What have I gathered?

What have I outgrown?

What am I ready to lay down and let go of before winter arrives?

For so much of our lives we're encouraged to think about ‘becoming’. Becoming successful. Becoming productive. Becoming a better version of ourselves. Becoming who we ‘ought’ to or ‘should’ be.

That little word...

Should.

It's remarkable how much weight it carries.

Should be more organised.

Should be happier.

Should have achieved more by now.

Should have figured life out.

But who decided those things? And perhaps more importantly, whose voice have we been listening to all these years?

Much of my work, whether through counselling, coaching or research, sits alongside people asking questions of identity. Often they arrive believing they're broken in some way, while beneath the surface something quieter is unfolding. An unsettling realisation that the identity they've carried for years no longer quite fits.

What I see though are people who have spent years trying to inhabit identities that once made sense, and now don't, or perhaps identities that never really belonged to them at all.

People grieving versions of themselves they thought they would become.

People wondering why the life they've carefully built suddenly feels too small, or not enough.

People asking, sometimes quietly, and sometimes with enormous grief,

"Who am I now?"

I think these are questions of ripening.  I recognise these questions. Because I asked these questions of myself, too. And still am, to an extent. 

Another idea from Blackie's book struck me and made me beam.

She describes creativity as something quietly revolutionary.

I loved that phrase immediately.

Some of you will know that alongside my counselling and coaching practice, I also spend a great deal of time weaving willow.

At first glance, these worlds can seem entirely separate.

One is about talking.

The other about making.

But over the last year I've begun to realise they spring from exactly the same place.

Both ask us to pay attention.

Both ask us to slow down.

Both invite us to notice what emerges rather than forcing an outcome.

Increasingly, I've stopped thinking about creativity as simply making beautiful things.

Instead, I wonder whether creativity is one of the ways we gently resist identities that no longer fit us.

Not by making grand declarations.

Not by reinventing ourselves overnight.

But by making enough space to hear our own voice again beneath years of obligation, productivity and expectation.

Perhaps every time we write, weave, plant, paint, bake, dance, mend or make, we're quietly saying,

"There is more to me than what I produce."

That feels quietly revolutionary, to me.

Incidentally, I've recently started making bread before work once or twice a week. It's become one of the most grounding parts of my week. I notice how completely present I am in the process. Five years ago I would have been focused on following the recipe perfectly. Now I'm far more interested in the feel of the dough in my hands, the waiting, the transformation.

This also brings me back to the research I've been immersed in over the last few years.

My research explored belonging and becoming, and one of the strongest threads that emerged surprised me.

Again and again, it wasn't just insight alone that changed people. 

It was belonging.

When people found spaces where they no longer had to explain themselves, defend themselves or perform a version of themselves that others expected, something shifted.

Self-compassion grew.

Confidence followed.

Identity became less something to achieve and more something that gradually unfolded.

I'm increasingly convinced that we don't fully become ourselves in isolation.

We become ourselves in relationship, in community, with others.

Communities where curiosity matters more than judgement.

Where difference doesn't have to be hidden, and so isn’t. Ever. 

Where new stories are welcomed.

Perhaps belonging doesn't happen after we've finally figured ourselves out.

Perhaps belonging is what allows us to really begin that process.

As I sat with Blackie's metaphor of ripening, another image came to mind. One that is particularly special and personal to me.

The confluence. 

A place where rivers meet.

Where they meet, but they don't lose themselves.

They don't compete.

Each river arrives carrying its own history, its own landscape, its own sediments and stories.

And together, they become something wider. Something stronger.

Perhaps coming home to ourselves isn't about returning to who we once were.

Rivers don't flow backwards.

Perhaps it's about allowing every version of ourselves, the hopeful one, the grieving one, the ambitious one, the exhausted one, the curious one, the creative one, to meet in the same place.

Without asking one to erase another.

That feels, to me, not like an ending, but equally, not really a beginning as such either. 

But maybe more so the quiet courage of becoming more fully ourselves.

As autumn approaches, I think that's the invitation I'll be carrying with me.

To gather rather than rush.

To notice rather than strive.

To create rather than perform. 

To come home.

How do people come home to themselves through belonging, story and creativity? This is the question at the heart of all I’m doing now in my professional life. 

I'd love to hear what this idea stirs in you.

What does "coming home to yourself" mean in your own life?