After decades of creating work that documented exclusion, processed trauma, celebrated connection, and refused exploitation, I've come to understand something fundamental about the role of art and creativity in human life. We've gotten it backwards.

Art and creativity are supposed to help us be more resilient, but not as training for the battleground. Not as preparation for enduring what should never have to be endured. Not as a way to become better at tolerating intolerable conditions.

Creative resilience is about expansion, not survival. It's about growing into your full capacity for joy, meaning, beauty and connection. It's about developing the spiritual and emotional resources to meet life's genuine challenges - loss, change, uncertainty, the complexity of human relationships - with creativity instead of endurance.

This book is written for the artist who has been told they're too "difficult." For the creative who has watched their persistence reframed as aggression, their vision dismissed as unrealistic, their refusal to compromise integrity labeled as arrogance. If you've ever been pushed out of spaces that claimed to support art, if you've created work without institutional backing, if you've been told the problem is your attitude rather than the systems that exclude you, then this book is for you.