Why Did You Stop Making Cards?

Trying to understand my creativity

I retired in 2020. I taught English at a community college. We went on the Spring Break of what was to be my last semester, and then the country shut down, and we didn’t go back. That was it. In the quiet of my small town, some friends threw me a retirement party after we had all had our vaccinations. No major celebration anywhere but at the center of my soul where my Inner Person stood up and screamed “YES WE ARE DONE WORKING!!!”

Reality started to set in pretty quickly. I began to flounder around looking for something to do with my time. Thanks to Covid, we weren’t traveling like we had planned. He was out in the yard and in the house working on projects. I was in the She Shed/Studio moving things around on my desk. In a matter of months I went from bullet journaling, to digital journaling, to art journaling, to junk journaling. I also accumulated a storage box full of journals I had absolutely no use for that appeared to have no marketable value. This was also when I started my primary hobby which was buying craft supplies.

During the early days of the pandemic, I had started meeting on Zoom with two colleagues who were into art. We called it Chat and Craft. When it felt safe to get out of our houses, we started meeting in person. My junk journaling forayed briefly into an attempt to do digital sketching and then fell into greeting cards because I already had all of the supplies, and it turned out I could donate the cards. As my colleagues went back to work, I shifted my YouTube subscriptions from junk journaling creators to paper crafting creators who proceeded to teach me everything they knew. It didn’t take long to fill the boxes that went off in the mail. I was happy.

I stayed in this blissful state for about three years. That’s an extremely long time for me to be engaged in anything. I expanded the equipment I had at the same rate I sought out new techniques. I thought I had finally found my long term calling. Then something happened. The organization I was donating to closed down. I found another organization with a similar approach which appeared to be a reasonable fix. Covid abated enough that we were able to start traveling, and life settled into what was beginning to feel like retirement: traveling, card making, projects around the house, relaxing. It was all well and good until December 2024. That’s when I turned 70.

Something about turning 70 made that Inner Person I talked about earlier clear her throat and say “excuse me…there are fewer days ahead than there are behind. Is there anything we wanted to do while we still can? Just mentioning it before, you know, it’s too late.” That Inner Person knew what I wanted to do was write. That Inner Person knew I had started a genealogy project three years ago that immediately got overwhelming, so I put the binders on the shelf for later. That Inner Person pushed me to start looking around, and knowing that whenever I start looking around, I see things that are interesting, and I start asking questions, and I decide maybe just maybe I might want to try whatever that is over there.

I’ve been trying to figure out when I started writing again. It had to be about the time I opened my Substack account in the spring of 2025. I thought I could write and craft, and for a while I did. I also got frustrated every time Life jumped in and pushed my plan off the desk. Picking it back up got tiring and something had to give. There were a lot of suggestions on Substack about how to make the pieces fit. The key element appeared to be deciding what pieces I was going to work with in relation to how much time and energy I actually had. That and, well, was I willing to be flexible. I like to think I handle change well, and that I’m adaptable, and that being able to go with it wouldn’t be that hard. It has taken more than I thought it would. I have adjusted. I am adjusting. Okay, I’m working on adjusting.

Although I have stopped making paper crafting videos, I haven’t entirely stopped making greeting cards for donation. Just because I haven’t made more than a few in the last month doesn’t mean I won’t ever make them again. I’m just not making them right now, which leads me to explain about my relationship with creativity.

Creativity is an unstructured part of who I am. It takes different forms at different times. I’ve grown from a person who hyper focused on one thing at a time to a person who allows herself to flow from one expression to the next. There is the thread of growth within that movement. I’m always reaching for something new that I can somehow attach to the growing list of techniques. I am fascinated by the way some words connect to colors, or how an image has a feeling, or how the sound of a bird carries a memory, or the simple melody of a song makes me smile.

One afternoon, when it was very peaceful outside, a rather large bird was moving thru the sky over the yard. I heard the way the air moved thru the wings, the sound of flight. It brought tears to my eyes to be in that moment. From that experience, I learned I could stop not just to smell the roses, but to hear what was being offered all around me. I have slowed down. I hear sounds I didn’t hear before because I didn’t take the time to do so. I’m realizing more and more that my relationship with my creativity has grown.

We spend so much of our time looking at what we produce and get so lost in the tangible that we forget the intangible is what has been leading us all along. All of our life experiences are giving us opportunities to accumulate the fodder that will mix in ways that we will be able to release. The relationship with our creativity is one that grows over time. I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully one with my creativity. I do know I’ll do whatever I can to stay connected to this part of my Self.