Grief is heavy.
It can feel like a tidal wave that sweeps away everything you thought you knew—your energy, your sense of control, your joy.
But grief also has a strange, quiet power. It’s raw, real, and deeply human. And when we give it a place to go, it can transform into something profound—into art, into music, into writing, into something that carries both our pain and our healing.
It's no secret that my dad passed 10 years ago, and my mum last year, just a month before my little one was born. I'm still navigating the grief and creating has been an incredible help to processing it...and to take that pain and turn it into something beautiful, and potentially helpful to others feels like a real life magical alchemy. It doesn't make it better, but the transformation from sadness to joy is a powerful one.
This is how you can use grief to create something amazing—not to erase the hurt, but to honour it.
1. Accept That Creation Can Be Messy
When you’re grieving, your emotions don’t arrive in neat, manageable lines. Sometimes they’re a storm. Sometimes they’re numb silence.
Your creative process will mirror this—and that’s okay.
Let your art be unfiltered and imperfect. Tear pages. Use dark colours. Write sentences that don’t make sense. Grief is not tidy, and your creative outlet doesn’t have to be either.
Psychologists suggest that expressive writing and art help us process traumatic events by reducing rumination and giving form to intangible feelings (Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016).
When my dad passed, I wrote Volcano, a piece of short fiction. When my mum passed I found that words weren't enough and turned to pencil and paintbrush to suss that out, and my own journey into motherhood, learning how to mother whilst simultaneously learning how to live without mine,
2. Create as a Way to Remember
Turning grief into creation is a way to honour the memory of what (or who) you’ve lost.
You could paint a favourite memory. Write a letter you’ll never send. Create something inspired by the colours, shapes, or sounds that remind you of them. Every brushstroke, every line, is a conversation between you and what you miss.
This process helps integrate grief into your story—not as something to push away, but as something that has shaped who you are.
3. Use Your Hands to Help Heal Your Heart
When we’re grieving, we live in our heads—constantly replaying memories or “what ifs.” Creative acts like painting, sculpting, or even baking can help us move from the mind into the body.
Studies have shown that tactile creative activities lower stress hormones and reduce anxiety because they engage the senses and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (Kaimal et al., 2017).
Making something with your hands is a gentle reminder: you are still here, still capable of bringing something new into the world.
For me, I've found that cooking with my mums kitchenware has been a wonderful healer, especially making meals for my little one in the same things she used to cook for me. It has brought up a lot of memory, but also tied what felt like loose ends onto a new thread into the future. The first time I used her slow cooker it was really difficult. I cleaned it and found small remnants of baked on food that she had missed. She was a meticulous cleaner, but had dementia towards the end, and she had grown quite small and frail bless her. With those marks, I was taken back in time to the moment she was struggling to clean it, and had given up on it, accepting it was too much to use, pushing it in the cupboard not to be used again. It took me a long time to clean it, inbetween the floods of tears it triggered. But, it's all part of the process. I love cooking for my family with it now.
4. Transform Pain into Meaning
Grief shows us the depth of our love. And creating something from that place—whether it’s a poem, a garden, a quilt, or even a song—helps transform the raw ache into meaning.
Some of the world’s greatest works of art were born from grief. Think of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” or Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
Pain, when shared, becomes connection.
5. Let It Be Just for You
Your grief-born creation doesn’t have to be seen or shared. It can be just for you.
A private, sacred act. A way to breathe life back into places that feel empty. You can create it and keep it somewhere safe. Or, you may want to share it thinking it might help others. I've found it can trigger some really helpful conversation. For the first while it was too painful to talk about mum. But, when you can talk, talk. That's really the start of being able to process things.
Final Thought
You can’t control grief. But you can give it a voice. How to Use Grief to Create Something Amazing. And sometimes, from the darkest moments, the most beautiful and honest creations are born.
This post is a collaborative effort between AI and myself in order to work a little bit faster.
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