Creative Resilience Day 3: Mind map your secret interests

Excavate your past & present for buried passions

Welcome to 31 Days of Creative Resilience, a monthlong journey where we’ll gently tend to our creativity ❄️

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Today we start our first theme, Embrace the Embarrassing, where we’ll alchemize our internal barriers into opportunities for expansive reflection and creative work.

Embarrassment is a cousin of shame, but not everything we explore will be outright shameful or vulnerable. This week invites us to make room for the weird, the playful, the unserious, the untrendy—anything that might not “make sense” to others but brings us great joy.

By shining a light onto these aspects of ourselves, we make space for authentic expression to come out and play. We'll begin by excavating our present and past to uncover what truly interests and inspires us.

Today’s prompt: Mind map your secret interests

Create a mind map on a piece of paper. A mind map is a diagram to organize information, starting with a single theme in the middle of the page. Our theme today is secret interests, but you can name it whatever you’d like!

Once you have the theme written in the center, brainstorm categories of interests that come to mind—these are your spokes. From there, let your memory freely associate and branch out with specific interests. Don't overthink or judge what comes out! This is a space for honest exploration.

Here are some ideas for mind map spokes to get you going:

• Guilty pleasure media

• Internet rabbit holes

• Hobbies your family doesn’t understand

• Nostalgic obsessions

• Fandoms

• Amateur art

• Abandoned dreams

• Sentimental items

My response

While doing today’s exercise, I was reminded of a bucket list I wrote down fifteen years ago on Listography (proud to report that the website still exists!) Several of the items made their way onto the page as abandoned dreams…

Optional: Share your mind map

Paid subscribers, I invite you to share your mind map of secret interests in the comments! You're also welcome to share any reflections, surprises, or general thoughts about doing the exercise.

If you’d like to show your page, take a photo, upload it to a hosting service such as Imgur and paste the URL in your comment. Of course, you are always welcome to keep your pages private.

Lastly, some community members have been sharing their pages on Instagram. If you’d like to post your mind map on your IG story or feed, tag me at caromakes. I would love to reshare your work!