Many people would never describe themselves as creative, let alone artistic… that word feels reserved for the formally gifted, the visibly talented, the ones who paint or sing or sculpt or perform, those who make beauty with their hands and voices in ways that can be named and recognised. And so it becomes easy for regular Janine, with no obvious artistic output, no gallery, no stage, no applause, to quietly remove herself from that category altogether.

Except this removal is an illusion.

Because long before we ever make something with our hands, we are making something with our minds… shaping tone, meaning, orientation, expectation, memory, and desire with every thought we allow to take form. We are continually composing inner worlds that determine how we meet the outer one, layering interpretation upon experience, weaving stories around what happens to us, deciding what stays, what fades, what wounds, what teaches, what defines.

• Thought is not neutral.
• Attention is not passive.
• Perception itself is creative.

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are already artists, quietly at work, forming worlds moment by moment within the shared space we all inhabit.

And when we do not recognise this inner authorship, when we do not claim responsibility for the worlds we are shaping inside ourselves, we begin to look outward for sustenance… for stimulation, for meaning, for vitality. We search externally for what has gone unattended internally. We lean on images, on people, on achievements, on noise, on motion, hoping they will feed a hunger we cannot quite name.

John O’Donohue writes about this drift in his book Anam Cara (pronounced AH-num KAH-ra) an ancient Gaelic term meaning “soul friend,” representing a deep, spiritual bond where two people share their innermost selves without judgment. He describes the subtle addiction to the external, where the interior life begins to thin, not through catastrophe, but through neglect. The danger is not excess but imbalance… when the soul is no longer a place we dwell in, but a place we visit only in passing, if at all. A quiet hunger sets in, one that no person, possession, or performance can satisfy, because it is not an external hunger at all, but an interior one.

And so we become spectators of creativity rather than participants in it.

We admire the artistry of others… praising influencers for their courage, musicians for their expression, actors for their vulnerability, thinkers for their insight, peers for their originality, while remaining strangely ungenerous with ourselves. We honour creative risk everywhere except where it might be required of us. We withhold permission from our own inner life, dismissing it as unremarkable, unworthy, unfinished.

This is where the balance of the soul begins to falter.

John speaks of how easily generosity can flow outward without ever turning inward… how we can give and give and give, attend to others, build, produce, serve, succeed, and still quietly abandon ourselves in the process. When care moves in only one direction, depletion follows, not dramatically, but steadily, like a slow draining that leaves the inner world brittle and undernourished.

The irony, he notes, is sharp and unsettling.

The world loves power. It loves possession. It loves visibility and success as it knows how to measure them. You can be admired, respected, materially secure, surrounded by signs of achievement, and yet be profoundly lost… because without love for the self, without warmth toward one’s own inner life, without a living relationship with one’s own soul, the richest outer life becomes strangely empty.

Every human heart longs for love. Not acclaim…not productivity…not performance, but LOVE.

And love, as John reminds us, begins with attention… with presence… with a willingness to remain with oneself rather than constantly escaping outward.

This is where the image of the oblique mirror becomes important to me.

An oblique mirror does not offer a straight reflection… it does not flatter, confirm, or simplify. It reflects at an angle, asking you to move, to adjust, to linger, to participate in the act of seeing. It offers glimpses rather than conclusions, insights rather than answers, and it reveals that truth often arrives sideways rather than head-on.

I see myself as an oblique mirror.

To work with me is not to be told who you are, but to be invited into a deeper encounter with what is already forming within you… to see patterns you may have been standing too close to notice, to sense where balance has been lost, where generosity has been uneven, where creativity has been outsourced instead of embodied.

Clarity, in this way, does not come from simplification… it comes from the courage to hold complexity without abandoning oneself. From learning to remain with both light and darkness, certainty and uncertainty, strength and vulnerability, the ancient and the emerging, without collapsing into either extreme.

We are all artists… not because we make beautiful things, but because we are constantly making meaning.

The question is not whether you are creative… the question is whether you are willing to tend the inner world you are already shaping, to become conscious of it, to work with it deliberately, and to stop outsourcing your creative power to the lives and expressions of others, because how you live, choose, and show up is the art the world will ultimately make visible, allowing you to be seen in a way no other human on this planet can duplicate.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where in your life has your attention been flowing outward at the expense of your inner world… and what might change if you began offering yourself the same care, curiosity, and creative generosity you so readily give to others?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE® Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their work, identity, and results — especially when it looks like a performance issue, but the real culprit is misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or work feels “off” and you can’t quite name it, message me. One conversation often reveals what’s been hiding in plain sight — the thing you can sense, but haven’t yet found the language for.