We explore how creativity helps consumers in crisis solve problems through practice adaptation along a life-sustaining, care-giving consumption journey. This chapter shifts the focus of consumer creativity from product alteration to practice adaptation, which provides a novel approach to consider how consumers creatively navigate situations filled with chaos and uncertainty. More specifically, we explore a complex parenting journey in which caregivers progress through uncharted waters of mental illness and suicidal ideation in adolescents. The proposed framework depicts how practice adaptation is used to encode and decode intra- and inter-communications and realign broken links between competences and meanings. In short, parents (re)codify practices that enable progression and identity evolution (through learning) along an undesirable and indefinite journey. Autoethnographic data ground the authors’ systematic analysis of lived experiences as well as personal and public discourse regarding the mental health crisis in the United States. These findings are used to validate the framework and underscore the complexity of consumption journeys, which provide important insights into how consumer creativity supports and sustains daily life and contributes to individual and collective well-being.