I set a deadline to publish my book on May 1st and my entire system has been in revolt ever since.

I’m not talking about writer’s block. The book is written. The cover is designed (about a dozen versions of it). The framework is solid, I believe in it and I’ve tested it on my own life for the better part of thirty years. There is nothing left to do except the thing I said I was going to do, which is publish it. And instead of doing that, I’ve been waking up at 3am to worry about the font on the back cover and a bunch of other shit that I have no control over and don’t want to, for that matter.

Steven Pressfield wrote a book in 2002 called The War of Art that changed how I understand what’s going on with me right now. According to Pressfield, there’s a force that he calls Resistance, with a capital R, that stands between you and the work you’re meant to do in the world. He sees it as an opponent, an opponent with intelligence and strategy and an almost supernatural ability to determine exactly where you’re weakest.

Resistance doesn’t fight fair. It doesn’t show up as a big dramatic crisis that you can rally against. It shows up as procrastination, self-doubt, hyper-focusing on other people’s problems, reorganizing your office, questioning decisions you already made, picking fights, staying up late scrolling through other people’s content and wondering why theirs looks so much more polished than yours. Resistance is the voice that says “maybe one more round of edits” when you’ve already done twelve rounds of edits and the book is as done as it’s going to get.

Pressfield says Resistance gets strongest at the finish line. It gets louder and sneakier the closer you get to shipping the thing, because shipping the thing is the moment you can’t take it back. You can revise forever. You can ask ten more people to read it. You can redesign the cover, again, and tweak the subtitle, again, and wonder whether Chapter 6 needs one more pass, again. All of that feels like diligence and professionalism, but it’s really just Resistance wearing its work ethic costume.

That’s what’s been kicking my ass for about a week now. Truth be told, that’s what’s been kicking my ass for about 25 years now. I have a friend (you know who you are), equally as familiar with The War of Art as she is with my journey, that once said she thought I had the worse case of Resistance in the history of man. Based on what’s been going on over the last several days, I think she might be right.

“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”

So what I’m afraid of?

The book is the beginning, not the end. I don’t have a large enough platform to simply release the book and watch it climb any Best Sellers list. That’s not me being humble. Between all of my social media accounts, I have about 1100 followers, which isn’t just pathetic, it’s woefully inadequate for what I’m trying to do. That means I had to come up with a different strategy for getting my work out in the world. I made the decision a couple of months ago to use the book as the means to the end, instead of the end. I decided I was going to publish it and then use it as a way to get myself in front of people… like real people, in real life, in the real world.

That necessarily means that once I publish it, I have to start reaching out to those real people and asking them to read my book and leave reviews. I have to ask other people if I can be on their podcasts. I have to pitch myself to local organizations and ask if I can come speak to their group. And if those people say yes, I have to walk into rooms full of strangers and say “I wrote a book about why creative action is the mechanism for change that most self-help gets backwards, and I think it could help you get your agency back and make your life feel like it’s more in line with who you really are.” I have to do all of that in my actual life, with my actual face, using my actual name, where I can’t blame the algorithm if nobody’s interested.

That’s what I’m Resisting, but only in every way there is to Resist it.

There’s a set of questions I wrote for the book that are designed to catch your Default Position (oldest, strongest, most debilitating belief you’ve got) in the act. I’ve been asking them to myself all week and the answers have been painfully clear. Am I pulling back because I truly want to, or because I’m trying to protect myself from finding out what happens if I go for it? Protect. Obviously. Am I building another stepping stone right now, or am I doing the thing? Stepping stone after stepping stone after stepping stone. If I didn’t care what people thought, what would I do right now?

Honestly? I’d probably just publish it and keep doing the same things I’ve always done.

That answer surprised me when I heard it in my head. I expected something more dramatic, like “I’d quit” or “I’d burn it all down and look for a job.” The honest answer, albeit a bit anticlimactic, told me everything I needed to know about where I am: I’m not trying to make the book better. I’m trying to delay the moment when I find out if anyone cares.And the thing is, most people don’t. I’m not saying that from a woe-is-me perspective. I’m saying it because it’s true and it’s actually kind of liberating when you accept it.

The people in my life who I’ve been imagining watching and judging and evaluating whether I’ve earned the right to do this, they’re not watching what I’m doing, not to the extent I think they are, anyway. They’re dealing with their own stuff, and that includes the people who are closest to me and care about me the most. My adult kids have their own lives. My husband loves me and is rooting for me and is also managing his own career and his own stress. My friends are busy. The strangers on the internet whose opinions I’ve been preemptively defending myself against don’t know I exist.

I spent years with “nobody cares about me” running like a ticker tape in the back of my mind, and I’ve written about it plenty. The thing I’m seeing now, the thing that feels newer, is that the statement is actually sort of true if you take the pain out of it and read it differently… Nobody is sitting around thinking about what Andrea Maurer is doing with her life. They’re thinking about their own lives, their own fears, their own 3am spirals. The amount of free rental space I’ve given other people’s hypothetical opinions of me in my head is staggering when I think about it honestly. I’ve been performing for an audience that was never in the room.

Pressfield talks about the difference between the amateur and the professional. “The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome.” The professional doesn’t wait for fear to leave. They sit down at the desk while fear is sitting right there next to them and they do the work anyway. There’s no promises in that. It doesn’t say the fear goes away. It doesn’t say you’ll feel confident or ready or sure. It says you do it anyway and that’s what makes you a professional.

I am bone-tired right now. I can’t put two coherent thoughts together most days and the ones I do manage to assemble tend to be about whether my subtitle is too long or whether anyone outside of my immediate family will ever read this book. That’s Resistance doing its job. It’s doing its job really well, actually, and I’d be impressed if I weren’t so annoyed.

But I’ve been here before. I’ve been in the rut enough times to know that the way out isn’t through thinking about the rut. It’s through doing something. Anything. Writing this essay is something. Sending one pitch email is something. Finishing the formatting on Chapter 8 is something. None of those things will fix the 3am wake-ups or the self-doubt or the fear of being seen doing the thing I’ve been saying I want to do. They’ll just move me forward, one ridiculously small step at a time, until the book is out in the world and I have to start taking the next set of necessary steps.

Pressfield’s word for it is ship (which he talks about in Do the Work, written in collaboration with Seth Godin): Finish the work and ship it. Don’t polish it into oblivion. Don’t wait until you feel ready. Don’t let Resistance convince you that one more revision is the responsible thing to do. The responsible thing to do is to stop hiding behind the process and let the work do what it was made to do.

May 1st.

I’m shipping it.

And then I’m going to put myself and my life’s work out there in whatever way I have to in order for it to do the most good it can for as many people as it can. Because that’s the point.

“Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

Copy that, Steven. Copy that.

Before I had a framework or a name for any of this, before I’d ever used AI for anything, I had a seven-word motto that changed my entire life. It came from my son, of all people, during a phone call on a vacation that was going sideways.

In early 2021, my husband and I came out of lockdown and promptly went to Mexico. The plan was to decompress. Sit on the beach, read books, do nothing. We’d been cooped up for a year and we were desperate for a break. Within a few hours of getting there, we were both restless and agitated and couldn’t figure out why. We’d been looking forward to the trip for months, but now that we were there, something felt off.

We called our son that afternoon and described the weird unsettled feeling. He listened and then said something that ended up changing a lot more than our vacation: “Mix things up. Don’t do what you always do. You don’t have to just sit on the beach. Do something different.”

He was right. We’d been holed up for a year. Sitting still was the last thing we needed. What we needed was to move, to shake something loose, to break the pattern that lockdown had cemented into our daily lives. We made “Do things differently. Do different things” our motto for the rest of the trip. We met and hung out with a bunch of vacation friends, went places we normally wouldn’t go and said yes to things we normally would have talked ourselves out of. It was the best vacation we’d had in years and by the end of it, the restless feeling was gone. In its place was something that felt a lot like being awake for the first time in a while.

We came home with the motto still echoing in our heads and decided to keep going. I walked into a local art gallery, introduced myself, struck up a conversation with the owners and ended up getting my art displayed in their space. A few weeks later, without putting it on the market or even intending to do so, we sold the house we’d lived in for eighteen years, the one we’d felt trapped in for most of that time. We bought a new place in a completely different area. By the end of 2021, we were living a life that barely resembled the one we’d been living twelve months earlier.

We didn’t plan any of that. We didn’t sit down with a journal and map out a vision for our future. We didn’t hire a coach or take a course or read a book about reinvention. We just started doing things differently. One thing led to another and the dominoes fell in ways we couldn’t have predicted or controlled. The motto wasn’t a strategy. It was a crack in the routine, and everything that was waiting on the other side of that routine came flooding in.

I wasn’t in crisis when all that happened. I wasn’t at rock bottom or in a deep depression or desperate for change. I was just a little stale, a little flat and a little bored after a year of lockdown and a lot of years of doing things the same way. The motto didn’t require me to overhaul my life or commit to some massive transformation. It asked me to do one thing differently today. That’s it. And then the next day, another thing. And then another. And over the course of a year, those small differences added up to a completely different life.

That’s the thing about doing things differently. It sounds so simple that it’s easy to dismiss. But when you actually do it, when you break one small pattern and pay attention to what happens, you realize how much of your life has been running on autopilot. You’ve been taking the same routes, having the same conversations, making the same choices, consuming the same content and then wondering why everything feels the same. The sameness is the problem. And the fix is almost embarrassingly straightforward.

I didn’t understand why this worked in 2021. It took me four more years, a painful family crisis, hitting actual rock bottom in 2025 and eventually using AI to map my own patterns, before the framework clicked into place and I started writing the book. The Mexico motto was the first time I experienced Transformative Creativity in action without having a name for it.

Doing things differently is creative action in its simplest form. You are what you do. When you change what you do, you change who you are. Even when the change is small. Even when it feels insignificant. Even when you’re just saying yes to lunch with someone you’d normally say no to.

So here’s what I want to offer. Two paths into the same thing.

Last week I launched Your Move, a free AI tool that walks you through mapping the patterns in your professional and creative history. The response was great. One person used it to help with a job search she just started and prep for interviews, and said it gave her more clarity in 30 minutes than she’d gotten from months of searching. Another person used it to stress-test a brand new AI platform, which wasn’t the intended use case, but the tool held up and he got useful results anyway. People are finding things in their own histories that they couldn’t see from the inside, which is the whole point.

I also heard from people who aren’t there yet. People who are curious about what I’m doing with Transformative Creativity and want to engage with it, but the idea of sitting down with an AI tool and mapping their entire life feels like a lot right now. Maybe they’re skeptical about AI. Maybe they’re overwhelmed. Maybe they just want to start smaller.

If you’re ready for a deeper dive and you’re comfortable with AI (or willing to try it), Your Move is free. It takes about 30 minutes, it maps the patterns in your professional and creative life, it surfaces possibilities you haven’t considered and it gives you a concrete starting point. Subscribe to the newsletter and you’ll get the link in your welcome email. People are getting real results from it and the feedback has been kind of amazing.

If you’re not ready for that, or if you just want to start simpler, adopt our motto. Do things differently. Do different things. Pick one thing today and do it differently than you normally would. Take a different route. Have a conversation you’ve been avoiding. Try the restaurant you always walk past. Say yes to the thing you’d usually say no to. Don’t plan it and don’t make it a project. Just interrupt one pattern and notice what happens.

You might be surprised how much was waiting on the other side of the same old routine.

Both paths lead to the same place: you, back in motion, remembering that you have more agency over your life than you’ve been exercising. One uses technology. One uses a seven-word motto from a phone call in Mexico. Take whichever one fits where you are right now.

The point is to move.

I got a call recently from a friend I’ve known for a very long time. He’s smart, funny, articulate, wildly capable, incredibly creative and completely stuck. He’s seen what I’ve been doing on social media and wanted to talk about it. We ended up on the phone for over an hour.

He told me he doesn’t know where he fits anymore. He’s looking at everything that’s happening in the world and he’s paralyzed. He talked about the political chaos, the economic uncertainty, the AI stuff, the feeling that the ground keeps shifting under his feet. He’s got all this experience and all these skills and talents and he can’t figure out what to do with any of it. He knows he’s got more to give. He just can’t see how any of the pieces connect into something that makes sense going forward.

So I told him to do what I’d done, to get on Claude or ChatGPT and start mapping everything: Every job, every side project, every creative endeavor, everything people ask for help doing, every random thing he’s tried that never went anywhere, etc. I gave him a bunch of instructions for how to have that conversation with AI so it would pull out the patterns and show him the connections. Things that look random and scattered when you’re living them usually have a clear thread running through them. You just can’t see it from the inside.

After we hung up I thought, I just rattled off a whole bunch of instructions off the top of my head that I should turn into something anyone can use without me on the phone with them.

So I did.

The thing is, he’s not the only one. I’m hearing some version of this from people across every age group right now, and it’s coming from three different directions.

There are people like my friend (and myself) who never followed the traditional recipe. Their careers are all over the map, they’ve done a little bit of everything, and from the inside it looks like a mess. It’s not a mess. It’s a just a pattern they haven’t been able to see yet because nobody’s ever helped them connect the dots.

Then there are people who did follow the recipe. They went to school, got the degree, built the career, checked the boxes. And now they’re standing in the middle of everything they were supposed to want and it doesn’t fit. The recipe worked. They just ended up with something they no longer want to eat.

And then there are younger people, my kids age, who already know the recipe is broken. They’re watching the traditional path fall apart in real time and they’re looking for a completely different approach. They don’t need to be convinced that things have changed. They need tools for figuring out what comes next.

All three groups are asking the same question: What now?

I built a free tool called Your Move. It walks you through the same kind of conversation I had with my friend, and the exact same thing I did using AI, which eventually led to the creation of Transformative Creativity. It’ll walk you through every step. You don’t need to be tech savvy. You don’t need any experience with AI. If you can copy and paste, you can do this.

It takes about 30 minutes. By the end, you’ll have a map of the patterns running through your professional and creative history, the connections between things you thought were unrelated, and a list of real possibilities based on your actual life. Not generic advice. Not a personality quiz. Not a career assessment designed by someone who’s never met you. A picture of your own patterns, built from your own story, with possibilities you probably haven’t considered.

The point of this isn’t to hand you a career plan or tell you what to do with your life. The point is to give you your agency back. When you can see your own patterns clearly, when you can see that everything you’ve done actually connects into something that makes sense, it changes how you feel about the future. You stop feeling stuck and you start getting excited about what’s possible. Trust me when I tell you that shift matters more than any plan.

And if you’ve been hearing about AI and feeling intimidated by it or unsure where to start, this is a great first experience. You’re not learning AI for the sake of learning AI. You’re using it to do something that actually matters to you. That’s the best way in, and honestly, it’s a pretty accurate representation of how I think AI should be used: as a tool for helping you see what you can’t see on your own, so you can start taking action on it.

Your Move is free. Subscribe now to start your own map now.

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Your move.

(See what I did there?)

Last Friday, I recorded a video of myself talking about everything I’m working on. (You can watch it here.) I hadn’t showered. I hadn’t brushed my teeth. I was in an old IU sweatshirt with no makeup on. But I was so excited about what I’m creating that I just hit record and started talking. Then I posted it everywhere: LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Substack Notes. The same video, the same me, the same very well-worn sweatshirt.

No big deal, right?

It was a big deal.

For years, I believed I needed to be a different person on every platform. LinkedIn Andrea was supposed to be professional and polished, flexing accomplishments and talking in the third person about her career. Instagram Andrea needed to be short, punchy and concise: post professional-level photos, don’t talk too much. Got it. Facebook Andrea was to be cool and casual; Substack Andrea the intellectual writer. Every platform had its own algorithm and its own set of rules, and I attempted to contort myself to fit each one. That’s what the experts tell you to do: Know your audience. Tailor your message. Optimize for the platform.

None of it worked. Not really. Mostly because I was just dipping my line into each pond to see if I got any bites. I was always sort of testing the market instead of showing up completely. I never got any real momentum because I was never really all in. I was four partial versions of myself spread across four platforms, and none of them had enough of me in them to actually connect with anyone.

The reason I held back wasn’t strategic. It was imposter syndrome. I didn’t feel like I’d earned the right to talk about what I was creating. I hadn’t finished the book yet. I hadn’t opened the studio yet. I hadn’t launched the program yet. I hadn’t crushed the metrics yet. I was waiting for some threshold of legitimacy that would give me permission to own it and that threshold kept moving. That’s what imposter syndrome does. It moves the finish line.

I did this in my personal life too, by the way. I didn’t see it until I’d blown up far too many relationships, but in retrospect the pattern was clear. I’d meet somebody and within minutes I’d be subconsciously determining what they needed from me. Then I’d become that. I’d mold myself into whatever version of Andrea I thought the relationship required and then deliver it consistently until I couldn’t anymore. Eventually the real me would start to leak out and the other person would look at me like, who in the hell is this? Which was completely fair because they hadn’t actually met me yet.

All of that has shifted for me. I’m not entirely sure why, but I stopped waiting. I stopped compartmentalizing. I stopped hiding. I’m now posting the same content on every platform, talking the same way everywhere, showing up as the same person regardless of where I am. And that’s not just happening online. I’ve also started talking openly about all of it - the book, the framework, the studio, the workshops, the mission - without watering it down or qualifying or pretending. No more “Oh, it’s just this little thing I’m working on” or “I guess we’ll see”.

Nope. This is what I’m building. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.

I’m not saying take it or leave it in a screw you if you don’t get me kind of way. I’m saying it in a I get that everyone doesn’t want or need what I’m offering kind of way. That’s how it works. I’m not chocolate. Not everyone is going to love me. Some people are living lives that feel exactly like they want them to feel. They’re good. They’re not interested in transforming their lives or some aspect of it through creative action. That’s cool.

My people are the ones saying, “You know what… I’m not living a life that feels like my own and I’m not okay with it and I’m ready to do something about it.” That’s who I’m looking for. And I can’t attract those people if I’m trying to attract everybody. I’m only going to get back what I put out.

I’m telling you this because I think a lot of people are doing some version of this, and I think it’s about to stop working for everyone, all at once.

Look around at what’s happening online right now. Scroll through any platform where people are trying to build something. You’ll see the same posts, the same formats, the same hooks, the same advice, the same tone, the same everything. People have studied what’s working for other people and replicated it, because that’s what every marketing guru and branding expert has been telling them to do. Find what works. Reverse-engineer it. Follow the recipe.

The problem is that AI knows the recipe too and it can follow it faster, cheaper and at a scale no human can. Every template, every formula, every “proven strategy” for growing your audience or building your brand is now something a machine can do in seconds. If your entire approach is based on doing what everybody else is doing, you’ve positioned yourself as a less efficient version of a robot. That’s a race you can’t win and furthermore, why would you want to?

When you do what everybody else is doing, you’re fighting for a tiny sliver of a big pie that’s getting eaten up more and more by the day. But if you create your own pie, you get the whole thing. The catch is that it has be yours… your recipe, your ingredients, your voice, your weird, specific, unmarketable, probably-won’t-go-viral version of whatever it is you want to put out in the world. That’s the stuff AI can’t replicate, because AI’s trained on what already exists. It’s the compilation of everything everyone’s already done. It can’t be you, because you - the version of you that’s evolving and becoming - haven’t happened yet.

If you aren’t presenting yourself to the world as the actual person you are, then what you’re getting back isn’t for you. It’s for the persona. The relationships, the opportunities, the validation, all of it belongs to a version of you that doesn’t actually exist. And at some point you’re going to have to either keep feeding that persona forever or let it die and deal with the fallout. I’ve chosen the fallout. It’s not easy but it’s real, and real is better.

The new algorithm isn’t something you feed or serve. It’s something you embody. It’s not something you can game or optimize or hack. It’s who you are, and who you are will attract more of who you are - more people who get you, who like you, who are on board with what you’re doing and what you’re trying to build or make better.

Maybe I’m talking into the void. That’s completely possible. But I’d rather talk into the void as myself than fill a room as someone I’m not. I’m not trying to create another transaction. I’m trying to create a community of people who want to make real change in their lives through creative action, because I believe that’s how this dysregulated world starts to heal. Too many of us have been doing things that aren’t in line with who we actually are for far too long and the world is poorer, less interesting and scarier for it.

It’s time to do things differently. It’s time to show up exactly as we are.

No makeup required.

That was 1980 and I can still see it. I had a faux marble end table that had 3 monkeys made out of coconuts on it and a groovy lamp I snagged at a garage sale. The room had wood paneling and shag carpeting, and the tweed fabric on the sofa I selected tied the whole thing together.

I loved it.

I didn’t know what I was doing then. I didn’t call it interior design and I definitely wouldn’t have called myself creative. I just knew that the room I spent most of my time in didn’t work for me, and I was determined to do something to fix that.

I’ve been doing some version of that same thing, ever since.

That sofa bed traveled a long way with me: from my first apartment in my early twenties all the way to the house my husband and I rented in Bloomington, Indiana, where we lived while he went to grad school at IU, and had our first son. Somewhere along the way I learned to sew, and made a slip cover for it and then, a couple years later, another. Over the course of 17 years, it saw a teenage girl’s bedroom, 4 apartments and 2 rental houses. Pretty good for what I’m guessing was originally a pretty inexpensive piece of furniture.

Besides the sofa bed, the other thing every single one of those places, and the three or four others that followed, have in common is that I put my own unique stamp on each one of them. I sewed curtains and pillows. I painted furniture. I taught myself to tile. I faux painted walls, bought used furniture, repurposed it and made it work, because I never once had a very big decorating or design budget and I never once let that stop me.

I fell in love with interior design when I was a teenager and I’ve never fallen out of love with it. I chose a different career path (a story I’ve told before and will probably tell again because it keeps teaching me things), and I spent years channeling that love into my own homes through DIY. There is nothing, and I mean nothing, more creatively inspiring to me than an interior design project. It’s actually why I started making art in the first place.

I wrote last week about spending fifteen years trying to become a painter before I became one, about dragging out supplies two or three times a year and putting them away again. What I didn’t say is that every single one of those attempts started the same way. I’d be working on a room and need art for it. I’d see exactly what I wanted in my head and either couldn’t find it or couldn’t afford it, so I’d try to make it. The art was always an extension of the design. The spaces I was creating were what drove me to the canvas in the first place.

That’s still true. When I have an interior design project going, the art practically makes itself. I get excited about creating pieces for a specific space and that excitement becomes a catalyst for learning new techniques, trying new things and pushing my work in directions I wouldn’t have gone otherwise. The painting fuels the room. The room fuels the painting. It’s always been the same conversation.

In last week’s essay I also talked about composition in my art, about how understanding the relationship between the objects on a canvas changed everything for me. Composition works the same way in a room - where the furniture sits, how your eye moves through the space, the relationship between color and texture and scale, the balance of the whole thing. I can walk into a room and feel when the composition is off. I can feel it in my body the same way I can feel it looking at a painting that isn’t working.

Sometimes, in other people’s homes, it takes everything I’ve got not to say, “Can we move that chair over there? Can we lower those paintings to eye level?” That’s not me being some kind of interior design snob. It’s me being affected by the environment almost physically, presuming the people who live there are too and just knowing that I could help. (For the record, I’ve never acted on this impulse. I’m not that obnoxious.)

Right now I’m in the middle of redoing our guest room. Four years ago, my husband and I bought a very expensive mattress that we hated almost from the get-go. I don’t want to name names but the brand rhymes with Stempurdedic, which is Swedish for “shoulder numbing rock bed”. Anywho, we finally bit the bullet and got a new one, but because we spent so much damn money on the old one, we’re not about to throw or give it away. So, it’s going in the guest room. Not only will that help us feel better about all the money spent on it, it will also keep guests from staying too long. Win-win.

The room before the redo was one of those rooms that just kind of happened. We threw one of our grown son’s old fullsize beds in there, added a couple of other random pieces here and there and called it a day. The room was so jam-packed that when my husband suggested we put the old king-sized mattress in there, I didn’t think it would fit. The minute we moved everything out, I realized how big the space actually was.

Per usual, I’m working on a tight budget and building the whole room around things we already had. My mom reupholstered a black and white checked wingback chair for us probably twenty years ago. That’s staying. So are the black bookcase and end table that we bought new when we first moved into this house almost 5 years ago. I ordered a bed frame and headboard, a rug, a bench and new bedding all online, for a grand total of under $500, which leaves the art.

I’d been wanting to experiment with more neutrals and earth tones, a big departure from the bright colors I normally use, and this project was a good catalyst for that. You can officially color me smitten with this series. Methinks I’ll be working on it long after the guest room is done.

While I’ve been making art for the room, I keep having the same thought. This isn’t hard. I don’t mean it’s effortless. I mean the barrier to entry is so much lower than people think. You don’t need to be an artist to make art for your own space. You need a wall that doesn’t feel like yours and a willingness to try something new. The same goes for the room itself. You don’t need to be a designer to redesign a room. You need to care enough about your environment to stop accepting “it’s fine” as an answer.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot because I’m planning a studio space where, among other things, I’ll be teaching workshops. Some of them will be about making art for your home. Some of them will be about looking at your living space the way I’ve been describing here, through the lens of whether it reflects who you actually are. Some of them will have nothing to do with art or design at all. It’ll be about meals, routines, how you spend your time, how your workspace feels when you sit down in it… Any aspect of your life where you’ve been defaulting instead of choosing is a place where creative action can wake something up.

The medium doesn’t matter as much as the desire behind it. That pull you feel toward redoing a room or making something with your hands or changing the way your mornings work, that’s not a decorating whim or an Instagram trend. It’s the same signal I’ve been writing about since I started this Substack. It’s your nervous system telling you that something in your life has stopped fitting and that you’re ready to do something about it.

In terms of interior design, I think people get stuck on this idea that changing something requires a lot of money or a professional or some kind of permission they haven’t given themselves yet. It doesn’t. It requires paying attention. It requires asking yourself what you actually want to look at every day and then start making it happen.

When I walk into other people’s homes, the first thing I register is clutter. Clutter is like static to me. If there’s a lot of it, I can’t see past it to anything else and I think the people living in it can’t either. It buries the room (just like our old guest room) and it buries the person.

Beyond that, the biggest tell is attitude. When someone loves their home, you know it immediately. They talk about it. They show you things. They’re proud of what they’ve created. When someone doesn’t, you know that too because they start apologizing before you’ve even sat down. “Oh, we’ve had all this stuff forever.” “We really need to redo this room.” “Everything’s a mess right now.” “There’s so much work we need to do on this house.” It’s an energy of resignation. It’s fine. It works. We’ll get to it eventually.

I do it too. When my house falls out of alignment with who I am and how I want to live, I stop taking care of it. Things start sliding. The disrepair isn’t random. It’s a signal, the same way boredom or restlessness or that feeling of something being off is a signal in the rest of your life.

Your living space is a creative work. You made it. Every piece of furniture you kept, every wall color you accepted, every pile of stuff you stepped over and stopped seeing, those were all choices. Most of them were unconscious, which is exactly the problem. You moved in and arranged things and then stopped paying attention, and now you’re living inside a composition you never actually chose.

This is the same thing I see in people’s lives… the career that made sense twenty years ago, the routines that turned into ruts, the relationship dynamics inherited and never questioned. It all just kind of happened and now you’re standing in the middle of it wondering why you feel flat.

Your home is a mirror.

I’m not saying you need to gut your house to feel like yourself again. I’m saying walk into your living room tonight and look at it the way you’d look at it if you were seeing it for the first time. Does it feel like yours? Does it reflect the person you are right now or the person you were five or ten or twenty years ago? Is there a piece of furniture you’ve been meaning to get rid of for three years? A wall color you’ve hated since you moved in? A room full of stuff that belongs to a version of your life that doesn’t exist anymore?

You don’t need a big budget. You don’t need a professional. You need to start paying attention to what your space is telling you about yourself and then you need to do something about it. Move one piece of furniture. Take down the art that means nothing to you. Clear one surface. See what happens when you start making your environment match who you actually are instead of who you were or who you thought you were supposed to be.

A thirteen-year-old girl in 1980 knew this. She looked at her room and said, this doesn’t work for the life I want. And then she went and found a sofa bed and some coconut monkeys, and fixed it.

It really is that simple.

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I spent about 15 years trying to become an artist before I became one. This is not a story of perseverance or the relentless pursuit of a dream, but one of desire. I wanted to paint. I just didn’t really believe I could do it. I had a bin full of art supplies that I’d drag out two or three times a year. I’d set everything up on the kitchen table, make a bunch of bad art, confirm that I was in fact not an artist and put everything away again. This cycle repeated itself for almost two decades. I’d see a painting I loved, feel the pull, buy more supplies, try again, hate the results and quit. Every time I told myself the same thing: I want this but I don’t have it. I’m not wired for it. Some people can and I can’t.

In early 2020, out of an almost desperate need for something to feed my creatively starved brain, I took two classes. The first was an in-person acrylic painting class at a local art center that covered the basics. It didn’t make me a better artist but it got me creating again and feeling better, which was the more important thing out of the gate. The second was an online abstract art class with an artist out of Australia. It was a month long, very loose, very colorful and full of exercises I’d never tried before. Somewhere in the middle of that class, something clicked and I started painting stuff that kinda sorta looked like actual art.

I didn’t know it at the time but what clicked was composition. Composition is how one thing relates to another on the canvas. It’s the visual balance of the whole piece, the way your eye moves through it, the relationship between every mark, every color, every shape and the space around them. The difference between good abstract art and bad abstract art is 100% composition, and once I understood that through the exercises in that second class, everything changed.

Turns out the thing I’d been missing was never talent. It was vision. I didn’t need to learn how to make better marks. I needed to learn how to make the marks talk to each other. I also needed to find the right genre. Abstract suits me. I’m not a technically precise painter and I doubt I ever will be. I’m open to being proven wrong on that, but right now I’m good where I am.

After 6-plus years of making art, I now have an actual process. That process starts with layers of paint, paper, mark-making and texture. I use a combination of artist-grade acrylics and house paint, hand-painted papers, tissue paper, old magazines, vintage books, maps and other printed materials, markers, pencils, paint pens, crayons, drywall mud, charcoal dust, sand, etc. I apply paint with brushes but also with sponges, sticks, scrapers and trowels. I painted some papers yesterday using some branches from the neighbors’ shrubs that had just been cut back. I’ll basically use anything that keeps me loose and free. The minute I put a paintbrush in my hand, everything gets tight and precise, which is not what I’m going for at all.

In the beginning stages, I’m just trying to build up enough material on the surface to work with, without thinking too much. That phase looks a lot like play. It is, but it’s intentional play. There’s a difference between engaging with the process seriously and just messing around. I know the difference because I do both and the results are strikingly different. When I go into my studio (by studio I mean an unfinished, cramped, dingy and very messy basement that I hope to get out of soon) and just throw things at the canvas with no real intention, the results are random. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes not so much. When I go down there and actually show up and work my process, even if I have no idea where the piece is going, the results for me are engagement and enjoyment. The art has a life of its own that I am helping to bring to fruition. Same materials, same hands, completely different energy.

After all the initial layers are down, the real work begins. That real work is deciding what stays, what goes and what needs to be transformed. This is where composition takes over. I have to look at what I’ve built and start making choices. This is the hardest part and it happens with almost every painting. There’s something on the canvas that I’m in love with - a piece of hand-painted paper, a bold mark, a color - that’s also pulling the the eye in the wrong direction or throwing off the balance of the entire piece. At first, I try to save it by building around it. I start making decisions based on keeping that one thing rather than serving the piece as a whole. This might go on for an hour or a couple of days, depending on how dug in I am.

Eventually, I start to recognize the telltale signs that I’ve gone to war: the tightness, the struggle, the frustration. When I feel that, I know what needs to happen. I have to let whatever I’ve been holding onto go. Run some paint across it, lay a piece of tissue paper over it so it’s still peeking through but no longer running the show, bury it completely, whatever I have to do in the name of composition. Otherwise, that precious artifact that I’ve been protecting will end up living out its life as part of an unfinished and discarded painting that resides in my “studio” in perpetuity. The piece featured at the top of this essay is a perfect example. Here’s the before:

The other thing that trips me up is my tendency to push to the end. I am a start-to-finish, get ‘er done kind of gal. When I start something, I immediately set my gaze on the finish line and begin grinding. As you might expect, this is not a particularly good method for making good art. Done is not the same as good. So, when I notice myself pushing or rushing, I do my level best to walk away, even though it’s the last thing I want to do.

It’s taken me a very long time to get here, but every piece I now call done, I call done for one reasone: because I 100% love it. If I don’t love it, it’s not done. That’s the only metric I use. Not whether it’s technically correct or whether someone else will like it or whether it looks like anyone else’s art. Do I love it? That’s it. If the answer is no, there’s more work to do.

If you’ve been reading this Substack for any length of time you probably already see what I see in this journey and my process, which is that it mirrors almost everything I write about when it comes to life: That desire and dedication are more important than talent, that intention and engagement are both the means and the end, that the messy layers built over time are where the magic happens, that letting go is a creative act of the highest magnitude, that the overall composition is everything and that beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder, it is also, quite literally by design, completely subjective and uniquely personal.

I didn’t figure this out in reverse. I didn’t build the Transformative Creativity framework and then notice it in my art. The art came first. Painting taught me everything I needed to know about stuckness, long before I realized it. Fifteen years of dragging out supplies and putting them away was a master class in Locate, Trace and Desire. Understanding composition was the missing piece of the puzzle that connected my efforts to my Results. And, discovering my own unique process is now the Container that I can return to over and over again.

I think everyone has a version of this. A thing they keep coming back to, keep failing at, keep wanting despite the evidence. The thing that won’t leave you alone even when you’ve decided you’re not the kind of person who gets to have it. That thing is trying to teach you something. You just might not have your composition right yet.

For me, painting is the purest creative thing I do. There’s no audience while I’m doing it, no algorithm, no strategy, no brand. There’s no one to perform for and nothing to optimize. It’s just me and a canvas and a process and the question of whether I love what I’m looking at. Everything else I do, the writing, the teaching, the framework, all of it gets tangled up in outcomes and metrics and whether it’s going to amount to something. The art doesn’t carry any of that, anymore. The art is just mine. If other people like it, great. If they don’t, so be it.

When everything else feels noisy and complicated and like too much, I go downstairs and paint. Not because it fixes anything. Because it’s the one place where I don’t need anything to be fixed. And right now, most especially, I think we could all use a little more of that.

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I had a conversation last week with a friend I’ve known for 35 years. She’s one of the most capable people I know. She built her career from scratch, survived things that would have destroyed most people and has always been the person in the room who says, okay, so what are we going to do about it? She’s a pick-yourself-up, dust-yourself-off, figure-it-out kind of gal and she has the scars and the results to prove it.

She’s paralyzed right now.

She doesn’t know what to do. Not about one specific thing. About any of it. About the future, about money, about whether the systems will hold, about what to plan for and what to let go of. She’s hit a wall that hard work and grit can’t get her through, because the wall doesn’t consist of one problem to solve and there’s no clear solution to any of it.

I told her that I’ve always had this deep sense that I’m going to be okay, no matter how bad things have gotten, and that I still feel that way. That faith, if you will, has carried me through a lot and I believe it will continue to carry me. And it doesn’t just apply to me. It applies to everyone. We’re all going to be okay. I have no idea why I believe that, but I do. And when I said it to my friend, it helped. I could hear it in her voice. Something relaxed a little.

I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since, and I’m not sure I’d say it the same way today. Not because I was lying. I still think I’ll be okay. I think she will too. I’m just not so sure what okay looks like anymore. How could I?

Things that we thought were never going to happen are happening. Things we said couldn’t happen here are happening here. We’re watching things unfold that we genuinely did not believe were possible and we’re still telling ourselves that the next thing in that category won’t come to pass either. Until it does. The gap between what we thought we knew about this country and what’s actually happening keeps getting wider, and we keep falling into it.

I think most of us are cycling through about four or five different states on any given day, sometimes in a single hour, and the cycling itself is making us feel insane.

One minute you’re overwhelmed. The threats are so ubiquitous and persistent that you can’t even figure out what you’re afraid of, let alone what to do about it. The next minute you’re weirdly defiant. Like: You know what, if the whole thing is going down I might as well enjoy my life and do what I want. Then you swing into denial, which is comfortable but requires a lot of resolve to sustain. Then you get a burst of determination to do something for the cause - organize, prepare, fight, build, whatever, and that lasts until you check your phone again and the cycle starts all over.

I think some people have picked one of those states and committed to staying in it. Good for them, I guess. But I think a lot more of us are pinballing between all of them and feeling like something is wrong with us because we can’t seem to land anywhere for more than a few hours.

When you see someone in a different state than you’re in, it makes you feel crazy. You’re having a terrible day where you’re genuinely scared and confused and defeated, and then you open Instagram and someone is posting pictures of their kitchen renovation, and you think, wait, am I overreacting? Do they know something I don’t? Are things actually fine and I’m the one who’s lost it? Then two days later you’re feeling okay, you’re making dinner, you’re doing normal stuff, and you read someone’s post about how democracy is crumbling and you think, oh shit, am I in denial?

There’s no stable place to stand. Everyone is reflecting back a different version of reality and we have no way of knowing whose read is the accurate one. So we just feel wrong all the time, no matter which state we happen to be in at any given moment.

Also, maybe it’s just me, but there’s this weird sense that we’re all skating on the surface of every interaction we have. You walk into a room, a dinner party, a meeting, and you have no idea where anyone stands. Not just politically, although that’s the obvious one, but also economically, technologically and how affected they are by everything that’s going on. You don’t know what’s safe to say, so you don’t say anything real. You stay on the surface because going any deeper means you might find out something about someone that changes how you see them and you just don’t have the energy for more of that right now.

Then there are the people you do know, the ones who’ve gone somewhere you’re not. You already know where they stand and you can’t talk to them about it because, honestly, what’s the point? So you skip it. You talk about the weather. You talk about sports (my personal favorite). You let entire relationships run on autopilot because the alternative is a fight you don’t have the strength for and can’t win, mostly because their news sources and references are different than your news sources and references and you can’t have a real debate in that kind of arena.

The result is this slow, almost invisible shrinking. Your circle of people you can be honest with gets smaller and smaller, and even in that circle you have to be careful because you’re afraid that, as my son likes to say, you’ll “scare the normals”. So, you bite your tongue. You smile and nod and make small talk. You keep scrolling past that post instead of responding to it. Each one of these choices makes sense on its own. Added up they feel like isolation. We’re all slowly retreating into smaller and smaller rooms and calling it keeping the peace.

But again, maybe that’s just me.

Of course, there’s no shortage of really good advice for how to deal with all of this: Turn off the news. Practice gratitude. Go outside. Limit your screen time. Breathe. Meditate. Vote. Organize. Call your representatives. Move to Portugal. Buy gold. Stock up on canned goods.

It seems that every person with a platform has a prescription, half of them contradict each other and all of them assume that whoever is giving the advice has figured out the correct response to a situation that no one actually understands. And yes, I’m aware of the irony here. I’m one of those people. I have a framework. I teach people how to get unstuck.

But, right now, I’m sitting here telling you, I don’t know.

I don’t know what to do with all of this. I don’t have five phases for navigating a moment when the ground itself is rumbling and we have no earthly idea when it’s going to stop. I could try to package this into a lesson. I could end on something hopeful and tidy. I could tell you that creative action is the answer, which I do believe, but which feels about as useful right now as telling someone whose house is on fire that they should consider redecorating.

I lost a studio space a couple of weeks ago. I’d found the perfect place, in a location I’ve had my eye on for two years. I built a solid business plan and could see the whole thing as plain as day. It fell apart because the landlord got scared. Actually, it might have fallen apart because I wasn’t prepared for the meeting. I thought I was just going to see the space. When I walked in the door, we started chatting and before I realized she was actually interviewing me, I’d made myself sound like a starry-eyed 20-year old with delusions of grandeur. She’s an older woman who saw a late-fifties “start-up” with big ideas and decided it was a risk rather than an opportunity. I tried to salvage the whole thing after the fact. I sent her my business plan and assured her I could afford the rent regardless of how much money I made, but it was too late.

I’m so disappointed that I can barely talk about it without my voice going up an octave, which is saying something, because quiet restraint has never been my strong suit. Again, I know it’ll all be okay but it hurts.

Anyway, my point in this context is, in the aftermath of losing the space, I keep trying to figure out if it was part of the bigger mess. Would the same thing had happened if the world weren’t on fire? Is this part of the same fear that’s running everything right now, the hoarding, the contraction, the everyone-for-themselves scramble that happens when people don’t trust the future?

It’s understandable, but it feels like everywhere you look, there’s a big cash grab going on with businesses, individuals and platforms. Everyone is desperate to make and hang on to as much as they can because nobody knows what’s coming. Social media used to be a place where regular people could build something. Now X is for the conspiracy crowd, Instagram belongs to the influencers, Facebook is a wall of ads and even Substack is starting to feel like a game that’s already been won by the people who showed up with an audience.

Meanwhile, I keep trying to plan a normal life. Looking at studio spaces, writing content, thinking about my book, mapping out workshops, and then stopping mid-thought and feeling like an absolute idiot. Who starts a creative business right now? And then I think, well, what else am I supposed to do? Sit here? So I go back to planning and the cycle kicks in again and I’m right back to feeling like I’m building a sandcastle at high tide.

ARGGGHHHH!!!

Am I the only one trying to hold it all together and getting bowled over at random moments by the sheer volume of what’s happening? Am I the only one doing my best to be a normal human with a normal life, and then some piece of news hits and the whole thing cracks open again and I’m back to, what’s the point? Am I the only one who feels guilty when I feel sorry for myself, because other people have it worse and I should be grateful that bombs aren’t dropping in the city I live in?

I don’t know.

And furthermore, that’s all I know.

I guess that’ll have to be enough for now.

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For over a decade, I’ve been writing what I call Notes to Self. They’re not journal entries or morning pages or affirmations. They’re more like wake-up calls from a version of me that apparently knows things my conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet. I sit down, put my fingers on my keyboard, clear my head and wait. I don’t edit them at all. I just accumulate them in simple Word documents and then reread them when I need clarity or assurance or, more often than not, a swift kick in the ass.

They are repetitive, which I’m pretty sure speaks to my own stubbornness. Or maybe I’m just dense. Whatever the case, they seem to circle around a handful of themes: love, fear, acceptance, agency, surrender, choice, identity and trust. This week, apparently, I needed a refresher course on not one, but two subjects.

The first was how quickly I abandon myself at the first sign of difficulty. How the moment things get hard or confusing or slow, I turn tail and run back to my old patterns of letting other people tell me who to be and what I’m allowed to want. The note called me out on something I wasn’t aware of before I wrote it - that the voices I’m afraid of aren’t real people. They’re projections. They’re my own fears and insecurities wearing someone else’s face, so that I can pretend the criticism is coming from outside of me. It’s a hell of a trick when you think about it. I mentally manufactured an entire panel of judges and then spent years auditioning for their approval.

The second was about standing on an edge. It said: You can do this, you wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t, you’d be somewhere else poised on a different edge. And then it said the thing I needed to hear most: if you’re planning on waiting until you’re no longer afraid, you’re going to be waiting a long time.

When I wrote these two notes all those years ago, I had no idea what they were preparing me for. That’s the thing about this practice. The notes aren’t just advice I gave myself in the moment. They’re breadcrumbs my nervous system left behind so that future-me has something to grab onto when the shit hits the fan. Again.

This week, that involved being in the middle of something that really matters to me, something I’ve been working toward for a long time and then having a person who doesn’t know me at all, dismiss me and question my credibility. This person just basically looked at me through their own limited perspective and made assumptions based on a short and not-so-sweet conversation. Within minutes I went from excited and clear to rattled and second-guessing everything, from my plan to my commitment to myself.

The interesting part is that my reaction didn’t feel like fear. It felt like wisdom. It felt like discernment. It felt like maybe I was just being smart about recognizing a bad situation and walking away. Isn’t that what healthy people do? Isn’t that what a regulated person would choose?

Not necessarily.

I’ve written a lot about what I call the Default Position, that deep, old limiting belief that operates like an emotional home base. Mine is some version of “nobody cares about me” and it’s been running the show for most of my life. The Default Position shapes your interpretation of everything. It turns silence into evidence. It turns setbacks into confirmation. It turns neutral data into proof that your worst fear about yourself is true.

What I saw once again this week is how good it is at wearing costumes.

My Default Position almost never shows up as “nobody cares about me.” Instead it shows up as self-respect: “I don’t need to prove myself to anyone.” It shows up as strategic thinking: “This probably isn’t the right move for me right now.” It shows up as boundaries: “I’m not going to work with someone who doesn’t value me.” All of those things can be true. They can also be the Default Position in a really convincing mask.

That’s the dangerous part. The Default Position doesn’t need you to believe something overtly negative. It just needs you to quit. And it will dress up as whatever it needs to in order to get you to the exit fastest.

So, I sat with the discomfort, which is no small task for me. If my Default Position is nobody cares about me, my default mode of reacting to it is to flee, but only every single time. I stopped myself this time because, oy… if the whole thing isn’t just completely exhausting and debilitating to the extent that I’m completely sick of it. I’d prefer it to just go away, but given that I’m 58 years old and have been working on this for pretty much my entire adult life, I don’t think that’s realistic. What is realistic and honestly, pretty straightforward when you put your mind to it, is to deal with it.

So that’s what I did. I put my mind to dealing with it and I asked myself a question I never thought to ask before: Am I pulling back because I actually want to, or because I’m trying to protect myself from finding out what happens if I go for it?

Ouch. That one’s going to leave a mark.

So are the other questions that followed over the next few hours, five in total. They’re not deep, introspective, therapeutic questions. They’re simple pattern-interrupters designed to catch my Default Position, mid costume change.

I decided to share them because they worked for me, which typically means they’ll work for others too. Or so I’ve been told.

Anywho, here they are:

1. Am I pulling back because I actually want to, or because I’m trying to protect myself from finding out what happens if I go for it?

This is how you catch yourself right before the moment you do a quick 180 and sprint in the opposite direction of the one toward which you’ve been moving. The key word in this questions is “protect.” If the honest answer is yes, you’re probably looking at your Default Position wearing its self-respect (or in my case, indignant) costume.

2. Am I building another steppingstone right now, or am I doing the thing?

I have a long and well-documented history of treating everything as preparation for the thing I actually want to do. The book has to be done before the studio can open. The platform has to be bigger before the workshops can launch. The brand has to be established before I can say what I really think. Every prerequisite that stands between you and the real thing deserves this question.

3. Am I editing myself because this isn’t right, or because I’m afraid of what happens if people actually see me?

Oof. This one stings and I mean that as a compliment to the question. There’s a real difference between refining your work and watering everything down to the point of being, well, pointless. The Default Position loves the editing phase because it can disguise itself as taste, as professionalism, as quality control. Meanwhile you’re removing every distinguishing factor that might actually make someone feel something.

4. What am I making this mean about me?

This is the fastest one. Let’s say, someone doesn’t respond to your email or a post gets no traction or someone in a position of authority treats you like you don’t belong. The Default Position loves this shit. It loves to take anything and everything it can and convert it into evidence of its assertion that you should never try anything new. This question interrupts that cycle. The email is just an email. The post is just a post. The person is just a person with their own set of hangups and fears. None of it is a verdict on anything unless you let the Default Position write the ruling.

5. If I didn’t care what people thought, what would I do right now?

Clearly, I’m not the first person to use this one. I actually might be the last. Maybe because it’s so simple. It doesn’t require me to believe anything different about myself. I don’t have to heal anything or process anything or reframe anything. I just have to act like fear doesn’t get a vote. And acting as if and then not dying or imploding or causing some kind of catastrophic chain event, even once, creates a crack in the story. The Default Position can survive being analyzed and understood. What it can’t survive is being ignored while you do the thing anyway.

That’s what I did this week. I was scared and I did it anyway. I didn’t wait for the fear to subside and confidence to show up. I didn’t lament the situation or overanalyze it (for too long). I just took action while the Default Position was still talking, and the action itself was what changed the story. Not the outcome, just the story. I don’t know what the outcome is yet, and honestly that’s not my business. My business is to keep showing up and doing what I want to do for no other reason than I want to do it, because it’s in line with who I am and how I want to live my life.

That’s enough. That’s what those old notes have been telling me. The one about edges says it just about as plainly as it gets:

You can do this. You wouldn’t be here if you couldn’t. You’d be somewhere else doing something else. You’d be poised on a different edge. This is your edge. This is your time. This is your choice. You can turn around and go back; you can stay where you are; or, you can forge ahead into the unknown. If you’re planning on waiting until you’re no longer afraid, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Of course, you’re afraid. That comes with the territory. It comes and then it goes. It goes just as soon as you do what you are afraid to do. That’s the edge. It’s the line between ideas and action. It’s the line between possibility and actualization. It’s the line between where you are now and where you want to go next. Fear is holding that line. It’s taunting you with whatifs and worst case scenarios. It’s threatening you with recurring nightmares and doomsday predictions. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to make you think; it’s supposed to make you question; it’s supposed to make you choose. Otherwise, you’d throw caution to the wind every time something shiny caught your eye. Edges are more important than that. They warrant a second look, a second thought, at least a second’s hesitation. They’re not to be taken lightly. They’re to be taken seriously and boldly and quite intentionally. So, yes, you can do this. That’s not the question. The question is: Do you really want to?

I do. I want it enough to be scared and to keep moving. My Default Position has been driving for quite long enough. It’s time for it to simply be along for the ride.

Onward.

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Instagram thinks I’m into curling wands, airwraps and those flexible thingys that you wear in your hair overnight and then take out in the car on your way to work.

I am not.

Mostly because my hair is three inches long and stick straight. And also because, even when my hair was long, I possessed zero ability to curl it in a way that didn’t make me look like an alpaca.

I have, however, been known to watch the occasional hair styling reel featuring these tools. Because they fascinate me. And so, my feed is full of them now, which necessarily means the algorithm doesn’t really know what I want. It only knows what I pay attention to. Sometimes. When I’m bored. Or tired. Or generally curious about the latest in hair styling tools, you know, just in case. And from that tiny sliver of behavior, it built an entire profile of a person who does not exist.

Your identity works the same way.

We walk around believing that who we are is something we discovered along the way. Like our identity was sitting there all along, waiting for us to stumble into it through the right combination of experiences and realizations. “This is just who I am,” we say, and it feels as solid and non-negotiable as our height or our shoe size. We say it about our careers. We say it about our temperaments. We say it about our limitations.

I’m not creative.
I’m not good with money.
I’m not the kind of person who takes risks.
I’m a people pleaser.
I’m the responsible one.
I’m bad at curling my hair.

None of that is fixed. But it sure as hell feels fixed, and the reason it feels fixed is the same reason your Instagram feed feels like an accurate portrait of your interests.

Repetition.

You did a thing. Then you did it again. Then the world noticed you doing it and started reflecting it back to you, and you took that reflection as confirmation. The thing became a pattern. The pattern became a role. The role became “who you are.” And just like Insta’s algorithm, nobody along the way stopped to ask whether any of it was actually chosen or whether you just paused on something for eight seconds when you were twenty-three and scared, and now you’re fifty and it’s apparently your whole career.

(eh em)

I have some experience with this.

I spent the better part of three decades going back to the same career every time I felt lost, and at some point the professional world decided it was my identity. LinkedIn thinks it. The job algorithms think it. People who know me think it. When I try to talk about doing something different, the conversation has a gravitational pull back toward the thing I used to do, because that’s what the data says about me.

The data is wrong.
But the data is also very loud.

Most people build their identities the way I built mine, which is to say accidentally, reactively and under duress.

You had a toddler and a mountain of debt, so you took a job with a lot of earning potential.
You got good at it because you’re smart and capable and you like being good at things.
People noticed you were good at it and gave you more of it.
You did more of it and got better at it and it started to feel like a groove.
Ten years went by.
The algorithm locked in.
Everyone, including you, agreed: this is who you are.

The whole time, though, something else was happening underneath. There was a version of you that wanted to walk through a different door. Maybe you can remember the specific moment when you chose the practical option over the one that actually interested you. Maybe you can’t because it happened in increments, one small compromise at a time, each one so reasonable and so minor that it barely registered.

Either way, those small choices accumulated. They stacked up like bricks and over time turned into a structure that looks and feels permanent. Then, everything else reinforced it - your relationships, your responsibilities, your own internal narrative - until the distance between who you became and who you might have been grew so wide that you inevitably stopped thinking about the gap at all. It just became your life.

If you’re reading this and thinking it’s depressing, hold on. I’ve got good news!

The same mechanism that built the version of you that feels stuck is the exact same mechanism that can build the next one. That’s my point.

Identity is manufactured through your choices. You’ve been doing it your entire life and the only variable that actually matters is the state you’re in when you’re doing the building. There’s a big difference between the choices you make when you’re operating from fear, obligation and the pressure to survive, and the ones you make when you’re operating from something that actually feels like it’s inline with who you really are. Those internal conditions are the raw materials you’ve used to create your identity.

When you’re building from a place of panic or indecision, which a lot of us have been doing for most of our lives, every choice carries the weight of the world. A career decision feels like it’s going to define you. A risk feels like it could destroy you. A failure confirms your worst suspicions about yourself.

The identity you construct from that place is fragile. It looks solid from the outside but it needs constant reinforcement to stay standing, which comes in the form of other people’s approval, measurable success, a steady stream of evidence that you’re not screwing it all up. The minute that reinforcement slows down, the whole thing gets wobbly.

You know this feeling. You know what it’s like to have a bad week at work and suddenly question everything about your professional life. You know what it’s like to post something you cared about, get crickets and feel your entire sense of self deflate. You know what it’s like to watch someone else doing the thing you wish you were doing and feel your confidence tank. That volatility isn’t a character flaw. It’s what happens when your identity depends on external evidence to hold itself together. The structure can’t stand on its own because it was built from materials that don’t actually belong to you.

The other way is harder to describe because it doesn’t have a recipe. It’s what happens when you do something that comes from actual engagement with what interests you, and you do it without needing it to prove anything or take you anywhere specific. It’s the thing you lose track of time doing. The conversation that motivates and inspires you. The project you’d work on even if nobody ever saw it. When you act from that place, the identity that forms is different in a way you can feel but might not be able to articulate. It’s sturdier. It doesn’t need the world to keep telling it it’s real.

I stumbled onto this accidentally every time I started doing something creative that had zero agenda attached to it. Painting, writing, learning how to day trade. There was no business plan, no monetization strategy, no outcome I was chasing. I just followed what felt interesting, for no other reason than I wanted to do it, and doing so made me feel like myself, which was disorienting because I’d spent so long being other versions, that I’d forgotten what the original felt like.

The online algorithms are easy to identity. When your feed fills up with hair styling tutorials, you know why. You know you watched a few (dozen) reels last week and the system took notes. It’s obvious when you’re looking at a screen. If you looked at your life in the same way, you’d see that algorithm as plain as day too. You’d see the pattern of choices you’ve made over the last ten or twenty years. You’d see what you kept clicking on, what you kept going back to and what you chose when you were afraid or confused or didn’t think there were any other options. The data is all there. Most of us just don’t look at it because the results are uncomfortable and because it’s a lot easier to say “this is just who I am”, than to admit that who you are is a collection of clicks.

Resetting an algorithm takes time. You can’t just decide to be different and have everything rearrange itself overnight. But you can start feeding it new data. One choice at a time. One small action based on curiosity rather than panic. One thing you do for no other reason than you want to.

The old feed won’t disappear right away. People will still reflect the old version back to you. The online algorithms will still serve you the same shit. Your own brain will still default to the familiar narrative because that’s what brains do. They protect the story they already know, even when the story is no longer serving you.

But every new input matters. Every time you choose from engagement instead of fear, you’re training the algorithm. You’re feeding the system new evidence about who you are and what you actually care about. Over time, the feed starts to shift, slowly but surely until you retrain the system and override all that old data.

I’m still in the middle of this myself. My feed is still full of stuff that belongs to a version of me that I don’t recognize anymore. Some days that’s frustrating, because I didn’t choose that person on purpose. I assembled her out of panic and financial pressure and the need to feel competent over and over again, and the world went, “Okay cool, so this is you then,” and I was too tired or overwhelmed or whatever to argue.

I’m arguing now.

I’m not the only one.

I can feel it in the conversations I’m having and others I’m seeing everywhere. There’s a restlessness, a collective sense that the lives we’ve constructed don’t quite fit who we actually are. I don’t think that timing is a coincidence. The world is wobbly, to say the least. And I think a lot of us are waking up to the fact that the identities we built on autopilot aren’t going to help us handle what’s coming. They were built for a different set of conditions. We need people who are building from something else because the ones still running on the old algorithm are contributing to the instability, whether they realize it or not.

Dysregulated people build dysregulated systems.

The reverse of that is true too. Every time you make a choice that’s actually yours, you’re not just resetting your own life. You’re putting something different out into the collective atmosphere. One person operating from a place of genuine alignment instead of panic might not sound like much, but it’s more than most people are doing right now and it’s going to add up faster and matter more sooner than we think.

You built the current version of yourself through your actions, whether you meant to or not. The next version is yours to build on purpose. And the world could really use a purposeful version of all of us right about now.

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I finished the rough draft of my book this week.

I should probably be celebrating that. And for about 24 hours, I did. I posted about it, bragged to my family about it and let myself acknowledge the fact that this thing, that I’ve been trying to accomplish for an embarrassingly long time, is actually going to happen.

It was good.

For a minute.

Then, I went back to work. Actually, I didn’t go back to work. I knew I needed to go back to work, but I hesitated just long enough to give my Default Position (oldest, fear-based bullshit story whose objective it is to keep me from doing anything “risky”) enough space to do its thing and, before I knew what had hit me, I woke up this morning feeling.. well… dysregulated, which in this case felt like a combination of wired, foggy and restless, i.e., stuck

I spent about 30 minutes beating my head against the wall and contemplating all manners of making the situation worse, before finally realizing: “Oh yeah, I just wrote a book about this.”

(Nothing gets past me, people.)

Anywho, when I remembered that I’d actually written a book about how to navigate stuckness, I also remembered the 5-phase framework that said book is based on. (Insert mind-blown emoji here.)

From there, I simply followed my own advice and started with the first phase, which is Locate. That’s a fancy way of telling you to ask yourself, “Where you at?” And, where I was at was: wired, foggy and restless. I already knew that, but naming it and putting it in the context of Locate meant acknowledging that I was dysregulated. That’s the key. Locate is about pausing, naming and accepting where you are instead of simply blindly reacting to it and making matters worse.

The next phase is Trace, which is just basically identifying how you got where you at. I’m not talking about going all the way back to the beginning of time and excavating all your childhood wounds. Ain’t nobody got time for that and furthermore, if you’re a grown adult with at least a modicum of self-awareness who has spent more than 10 minutes on the internet in the last ten years, you’re probably quite familiar with all your debilitating beliefs, fear stories and self-sabotaging behavior patterns. You’d just as soon get on with it already and go back to the business of living your life.

If that’s you, then Trace is your new best friend. Instead of psychoanalyzing yourself (again), you’re going to simply ask yourself a few straightforward questions, like: In the last day or two, when did you do something that you didn’t want to do or that you knew you really shouldn’t? What did you push through that you should have stopped? What did you say yes to that wasn’t a real yes? What have you been consuming (information, content, interaction) that’s been feeding the stuck feeling instead of calming it? What has been going on that, when you look at it retrospectively, landed you here?

The one thing that Trace and therapy have in common is that in order for either of them to work, you have to be honest. Not so that you can beat yourself up for where you are, but so that you can understand it rationally. Logic doesn’t just help you understand the dysregulation. It literally interrupts it at the neural level. When you ask “what happened in the last couple of days that led to this state,” you’re forcing a shift from emotional overwhelm into analytical pattern recognition. You’re not just gaining insight. You’re physiologically changing which networks are dominant in your brain. The tracing IS the regulation, or at least the beginning of it.

This morning, it took me about 30 seconds to figure out how I got where I was. I’ll give you a little hint: it starts with social and ends with media.

As soon as I finished the rough draft of my book, I took to the airwaves in order to shout out the news to the throngs of my adoring fans. I’m not sure how many adoring fans it takes to qualify as a throng, but I’m guessing it’s not 17 Instagram followers (on the new TC account), 142 Substack subscribers and the half dozen people the LinkedIn algorithm decided to show it to. Which means, rationally speaking, expecting a lot of fanfare in response to the announcement of the completion of the rough draft of my book, might have been just a wee bit unrealistic, if not predictable.

This is kinda what I do. I put stuff out there and then, when it doesn’t go viral I use it as proof that it stinks or that it doesn’t matter or that nobody cares about me or my work. This is classic Default Position behavior. It too is in said book. I also just wrote about it here.

And yet, even though I know this shit well enough to have written a book about it, I still fell for it hook, line and sinker. I spent too much time online looking for validation and instead found a whole bunch of really awful news about everything that’s falling apart. From there, it didn’t take long for me to start measuring my mostly unnoticed book milestone against the state of the actual world and wondering if it’s all just a big waste of time.

This is the (old) story of my life.

And as soon as I saw it and understood it, I knew I could shift out of it by asking myself the next set of questions: What does your nervous system need right now, today, to shift out of this state? What’s the smallest thing that would feel like yours? What do you really want to do?

This is Desire. It’s the third phase and, in this context, it isn’t about ambition or goals or figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. It’s about listening to what your nervous system is asking for in the moment. My answer came out before I had time to think about it: I want to clean my house.

Out of the gate, that sounded a little crazy, even for me. But then I remembered an old ebook I wrote years ago called “The Case for Creativity and Five Easy Ways to Power Yours Up, Now!” (Catchy, right?!) It was a lead magnet for one of the coaching programs I was trying to get started at the time and I gave it away for free in order to drum up interest. One of the five things I recommended in it was decluttering your physical space. I equated the process to creating a blank canvas, environment-style. I didn’t really understand why, I just knew there was no greater buzz-kill for my creativity than clutter.

Turns out there’s actual science to back this up. Neuroscientists found that visual clutter competes with the brain’s ability to pay attention and tires out cognitive functions over time. Brain imaging studies have shown that the more objects in the visual field, the harder the brain has to work to filter them out, causing it to tire over time and reducing its ability to function. (Sabine Kastner, Princeton University)

I didn’t know any of this back then. I didn’t know about polyvagal theory or dysregulation loops or the neuroscience of why physical action shifts internal states. But I was already practicing and writing about the principles. This keeps happening… moments when the old stuff circles around and catches up to the new stuff. Or maybe it’s vice versa, I don’t know. At any rate it’s pretty cool. I keep running into TC in earlier forms. The ebook is one. The face paintings and the stories I wrote about them in 2022 are another. My entire history of following creative breadcrumbs from one thing to the next, which I spent years categorizing as being flaky and flighty, was actually my nervous system doing exactly what it needed to do to stay regulated and me taking notes.

Anyway, the point is that I started cleaning. Not necessarily because my house is cluttered, but because I’m starting to understand that whatever shows up as Desire, not matter how random or crazy, is exactly what you need to do in order to feel better and get moving again. This time was no exception. Within twenty minutes, my brain came back online. The fog lifted and I started seeing exactly what I need to do to finish the book.

This is aligned action in, well, action. I didn’t journal about it. I didn’t meditate or do breathwork or recite affirmations. I picked up a sponge and started wiping down counters and my brain returned to normal, which for me is definitely a relative term.

If you’re wondering about the other two phases, the cleaning itself was the Container (phase four) which is just a defined space where something can shift without overwhelming the system. The fifth phase is Result. In this case, this essay with all its insights and connections, is a pretty easy one to identify, making today a master class in TC.

Here’s the thing that I say on repeat that today also proved in practice: Creative action doesn’t have to look like art. It doesn’t require a canvas or a keyboard or a stage. It requires taking action on an idea. Sometimes that looks like painting a portrait. Sometimes it looks like writing a New York Times Best Seller or an ebook with a really catchy title. And sometimes it looks like cleaning your damn house on a random Thursday, because you accidentally doom-scrolled yourself into the rut again and you’re the only one that can get yourself out.

Onward.

There’s a scene in The Shawshank Redemption (one of my favorite movies of all time) where Red, played by Morgan Freeman, says “Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” He’s issuing a warning to Andy Dufresne, the wrongfully convicted banker who refuses to let prison break him. Red has watched plenty of men cling to hope and then shatter when it doesn’t save them, and he doens’t want his friend to suffer that same fate.

But Red’s understanding of hope is fundamentally different from Andy’s. For Red, hope is passive. It’s the belief that circumstances beyond your control will eventually change. It’s waiting for something external to shift so you can finally start living. And he’s right to be cynical about that kind of hope. That version keeps you trapped in a cycle of waiting and disappointment.

Andy sees hope completely differently. For him, hope isn’t about waiting. It’s not having blind optimism about the future. It’s about exercising agency in the present.

While Red keeps his dead down and runs his own business getting things from the outside world for his fellow inmates, Andy builds a library, helps to bring music and culture into the prison and tutors other inmates. For most of the movie it looks like he’s resigned to his fate and simply making the best of a bad situation. What we don’t see is that he’s also building an escape route.

Night after night, with a rock hammer hidden behind a poster, he chips away at the wall of his cell. Year after year, inch by inch, one handful of rubble at a time. He’s not fooled by the system. He understands it completely. He knows he’s not going to be released, just because he’s a model prisoner or because he builds a nice library.

So he does both. He creates meaning within his constraints and he creates an exit strategy, just in case. For Andy, the question was never: how do I simply survive this? The question was always: how do I stay alive inside this place? How do I maintain agency, meaning and purpose? Building the library, making sure the other prisoners had access to music and culture and tutoring Tommy gave him that.

The turning point comes when it’s discovered that Tommy has information that could exonerate Andy. The prison warden then has him shot and killed to keep Andy trapped, so that he can continue to help line the warden’s pockets with tax payer dollars. That’s when Andy realizes he can no longer maintain the status quo. Not because he’s given up, but because he sees clearly that the system is so corrupt that staying would mean choosing passive hope over active agency.

As he says to Red in the prison yard on the day of his escape, “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living or get busy dying”. Red mistakes this as Andy’s resignation. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

I think a lot of us are stuck in Red’s version of hope right now, waiting for conditions to improve so that we can finally start or go back to living the way we want to live. But what if the shift we need to make is Andy’s shift, from passive hope to active agency?

I started writing this series on January 14th. Since then, the amount of stuff that’s happened in the world is the amount that usually takes place in a year. Laws are being bent or broken, accepted norms are being challenged or abandoned, and safety nets and systems that used to feel permanent are disappearing before our eyes. It doesn’t matter which side of any issue you’re on, the perception is the same: the rules don’t apply anymore.

If you’re like me, you keep moving the goal post. You tell yourself you won’t panic until X happens. Then X happens and you move the goal post again. This isn’t denial, exactly. It’s the kind of hope that Red talked about in the beginning of the movie. It’s waiting passively for conditions to improve, when all signs are pointing toward the opposite. And yes, that kind of hope is both dangerous and maddening.

In the earlier essays of this series, I tried to walk you through how to stay regulated inside the conditions we’re in. We looked at how we got here, how attention works and why it matters, and how meaningful contribution doesn’t have to look like being on the front lines. All of that was about maintaining your capacity, understanding the system and finding sustainable ways to engage.

That’s been the hope within the system phase, the keeping-yourself-human phase, the doing what you can, with what you have, from where you are phase.

This essay is the pivot.

The question stops being “How do I cope inside these conditions?” and becomes “Given that these are the conditions, what am I going to build my life around now?”

The shift I’m talking about is not about achievement. It’s not about finally reaching some destination where everything makes sense, you’re safe and the world has calmed down. The shift is that you stop organizing your life around waiting for conditions to improve and start organizing it around living in a way that’s true to you anyway.

You stop asking “Is this the right time?” and start asking “Is this what I want?” You stop waiting for permission or proof or certainty and start taking small actions toward the things that make you feel alive. You stop trying to optimize yourself for a world that keeps changing the rules and start building a life that works with how you’re actually wired.

None of this is going to look like the recipes we’ve been sold. None of it will scale or make you famous or rich or even particularly impressive to people watching from the outside. Honestly it feels like, among others, that ship has sailed. If you aren’t already rich, famous or impressive, it might be time to accept that you never will be.

However, if the world really is going to hell in a handbasket and there’s no way to predict or control what’s going to happen next, isn’t that the perfect time to start living in a way that’s true to who you are? If not now, when? And, if there really aren’t any rules anymore, doesn’t that mean that the old constraints, the ones that kept you playing it safe or waiting for the right time or proving yourself worthy, are dissolving too?

Getting busy living is going to look different for different people. For some, it’s going to mean starting or continuing to step up within the system. Finding ways to create meaning, building libraries, bringing music back into places that have gone silent. In other words, doing what they can, from where they are, with what they have.

For others, it’s going to mean recognizing that they can no longer live within certain systems, that staying would mean choosing to go numb, to give up agency, to let themselves die inside. Those people will need to take the tunnel, leave jobs that are killing them, stop participating in things that require them to abandon themselves and build lives that look nothing like what they were told they should.

The question isn’t which path you choose. The question is whether you’re choosing at all.

Because the third option, the one Red warned Andy about, is to keep waiting, to keep hoping in the passive sense, to keep believing that if you just endure long enough, conditions will improve and you’ll finally be allowed to start living. That version of hope is the dangerous kind. It keeps you trapped and makes you complicit in your own captivity.

Choosing nothing is still a choice. Drifting is a direction. Staying in situations that deplete you is contributing to that outcome. Waiting shapes a life just as much as action does.

The reality is that the world is not going to settle down anytime soon and give us permission. The conditions are not going to improve enough for us to feel safe. The rules are not going to stabilize so that can figure out how to play by them again.

We can keep waiting. We can keep moving the goal post every time something else falls apart. We can keep hoping in the passive sense that eventually things will get better and we’ll finally be allowed to start living.

Or we can make the choice Andy made.

We can accept that these are the conditions and then decide to build our lives around what matters to us anyway. We can start chipping away at our own version of the tunnel. We can take small repetitive actions in the direction of living, whatever that means for each of us.

This is not about blind optimism or about pretending everything is fine. In fact, quite the opposite. This is about recognizing that waiting for conditions to improve before you start living is its own kind of death.

When Red finally gets paroled, he’s an old man, institutionalized and terrified of the world outside the prison walls. He gets a menial job, lives in the same apartment where his friend Brooks hung himself and starts going through the motions of his parole.

Then he remembers what Andy said about hope and for the first time, he understands exactly what he meant. Right before he leaves that apartment and sets out on a journey to find his friend in Mexico, he says it out loud:

“Get busy living or get busy dying…”

“That’s goddamn right.”

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When I started writing this series, that one line, not everyone goes to war, kept running through my mind on repeat. I kept thinking about generations before us that had to deal with upheaval and all the different ways they found to meet those challenges. Specifically, the period during World War II came to mind and how people contributed to the war effort without actually fighting.

People stepped up in a variety of different ways. They grew the victory gardens, organized scrap drives, volunteered as air raid wardens, worked in factories and cared for children whose parents were deployed. They wrote letters and rolled bandages and managed rationing programs and otherwise kept their communities functioning, while the soldiers were overseas. The war didn’t just happen on battlefields. It happened in kitchens and neighborhoods and factories and everywhere else people had to do what they could with what they had.

Not everyone was built to fight, but everyone found a way to help in ways that matched who they were and what they were capable of doing. That’s what I keep coming back to. Not the heroics or the sacrifice, but the sheer practicality of it. The recognition that meaningful contribution doesn’t have to look like being on the front lines.

We’re not at war, per se, but we are facing a plethora of uniquely complicated and difficult circumstances: the information overload, the economic instability, the threat to entire industries and populations, the proliferating and compounding technological advances, the political polarization, the elimination of services, the constant work of figuring out what’s true and what isn’t. It’s relentless and the implicit message seems to be that if you’re not protesting or organizing or speaking out or fighting directly on social media, then you’re complicit or, at minimum, part of the problem.

But that’s not true and, more importantly, it’s not sustainable for most people. Action that doesn’t align with who you are and what your nervous system can actually handle becomes its own kind of problem and ends up making things worse, not better.

So I’ve been asking myself what service looks like when it works with your system instead of against it. What does it mean to show up in ways that don’t require you to become someone you’re not or abandon yourself in the process? What does meaningful action look like when you’re already maxed out with simply trying to keep your own train on the tracks.

I don’t have definitive answers to these questions. I’m figuring it out as I go, same as everyone else. But I’ve noticed some things that might be useful and my hope is that by offering some suggestions, more people will feel more empowered and capable.

Starting In Your Own Backyard

There’s a difference between the things you think you should care about and the things you actually do care about. Often the ones you care about are the ones that keep showing up in your own backyard, so to speak. It’s the issues that keep appearing in your daily life and the problems that you consistently have to deal with, even if they’re not necessarily your own.

One of the things in my own backyard is watching my parents struggle with technology. They’re in their eighties. They’re functional, they live independently and they’re managing their lives just fine. But every interaction with their phones, computers, streaming services or any of the systems that now require digital literacy, is like watching someone try to learn a foreign language with no dictionary. Every time I help them with something (which is frequently), I think about how many other people must be dealing with this.

Lately, another thought has followed that one: Someone (that isn’t me!) should do something about this. That kind of work is not really in my wheelhouse. But someone who has those skills could organize volunteers to help elderly people with their devices or create simplified interfaces specifically designed for that population or publish easier-to-understand instructions or hold regular tech support sessions at libraries or community centers.

I’m not saying this because I think it’s the most important problem or because everyone should care about it. I’m saying it because it’s one that keeps coming up for me, and there’s guidance in that.

Everyone’s backyard is different. The things that show up repeatedly in your world might have nothing to do with mine. Maybe you keep running into people confused or scared of the news. Maybe you notice your neighbors struggling to afford groceries. Maybe you see elderly people who never have visitors. Maybe you know teenagers who are overwhelmed by anxiety. Whatever keeps showing up in your immediate vicinity, that’s your backyard. That’s where your attention is already going, so that’s the place to start.

Making It Work For You

Once you start noticing what’s in your world that needs addressed, the next question is how to engage with it in a way that doesn’t burn you out. This is where most well-intentioned efforts fall apart. We start strong, fueled by urgency or genuine care or the sense that we have to do something. From there, we tend to overcommit. We jump in with both feet and try to solve the entire problem at once. Then we crash, the work stops and we feel like failures. The real issue was that we tried to do too much too fast with no structure to hold it or support to sustain it.

During World War II, those victory gardens weren’t one-time efforts. They were ongoing. People didn’t try to grow every vegetable or solve every food shortage. They grew what they could grow in the space they had, in a way that worked with the rest of their lives. In other words, it was sustainable. So what does that look like now? I think it starts with being honest about what you can actually handle. Not what you wish you could handle or what you think you should be able to handle, but what’s true right now given everything else you’re managing.

Because here’s the thing: if you’re already at capacity just keeping yourself regulated and functional, adding more without adjusting something else isn’t a viable option. It just isn’t. That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. It means you might need to do less than you think you should, or do it differently than you’d imagined, or build in more support and structure than you might expect.

Start smaller than makes sense. If you want to do something related to technology, don’t try to launch a whole program. Help one person - your neighbor, your parents (you can borrow mine to get started), or someone at your church. See what doing it is actually going to require. Notice what comes up. Learn what works and what doesn’t before you try to scale up. Then, make it repeatable. Pick a time that works with your life and stick to it, once a week, second Saturday of the month, whatever.

Set actual boundaries and then protect them. Decide in advance how much time, energy or money you can give without resentment building up, and then hold that line even when it’s hard.

Some Possibilities Worth Considering

It helps to see concrete examples, so I’ve been thinking about different ways to contribute and making note of them for the last several weeks. They’re just ideas to get you thinking and brainstorming for yourself. Take what works and make it your own.

Tech Help

· Monthly device help sessions at the library

· Student volunteers paired with seniors who need tech support

· Simplified setup service for new smartphone users

· Translation of tech instructions into plain language

News and Information

· Community workshops on spotting reliable sources

· Discussion groups that practice fact-checking together

· Simple guides for evaluating what you read online

Money and Resources

· Time banks (trade services instead of paying cash)

· Tool libraries (share lawn mowers, drills, etc.)

· Repair cafes (learn to fix instead of replace)

· Neighborhood buying clubs for groceries

Connection

· Regular potlucks or game nights

· Letter-writing or visits to people in nursing homes

· Check-in networks for isolated neighbors

· Storytelling projects across generations

Civic Stuff

· Buddy systems for attending meetings or protests

· Plain-language voter guides

· Small community forums on local issues

· Support for local newspapers and reporters

These are just starting points. The specifics matter less than the principle: meaningful action doesn’t have to be grand or all-consuming. It just has to be something you can do repeatedly without overtaxing yourself in the process.

I’ve seen a lot of examples on Substack this week of different and creative ways to make a difference. Check out this one.

What I’m Learning

I’m learning that contribution doesn’t have to look like saving the world, completely fixing broken systems or solving entire problems. Sometimes it just looks like showing up for one person in front of you, creating a small space where something good can happen or doing one thing well and repeating that, instead of trying to do everything at once.

I’m learning that not everyone is built to be on the front lines, and that’s not only okay, it’s necessary. Because while some people are fighting the battles, other people need to be growing the gardens and organizing the resources and, yes, helping the oldsters keep their TVs on. All of it matters. None of it is less important than any other part.

I’m learning that when action aligns with who you actually are and what your nervous system can actually handle, it doesn’t make you feel like you’re abandoning yourself to do it. And in a world that’s showing every indication that we’re going to have to be engaged for the long haul, that distinction matters more than I think we realize. That world needs people who can stay present and capable and human while they do the work.

Not everyone goes to war. Most people take care of their friends and neighbors, fix the broken things and keep the lights on.

That work has always held the world together. It still does.

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First things first…

As I’m finishing up this post on Saturday, the latest horrific news out of Minnesota is still unfolding and many of us are once again feeling an all too familiar mix of fear, anger, grief and utter disbelief.

Nothing in this essay is meant to explain away what’s happening or ask you to rise above it. It is simply an exploration of one of the things that shapes how moments like this affect us individually and as a culture: attention.

You can read it now, skim it, save it for later or skip it altogether.

Just do what’s best for you. These are trying times. Take care.

I recently listened to a podcast interview with Mel Robbins and neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha, who studies attention. About halfway through, I stopped taking notes and just listened, because what she was describing started sounding rather familiar.

Attention, according to the neuroscience, is not a individual strength or weakness, nor is it a productivity skill. It’s a core nervous system function. Its job is to help us sort reality so we’re not overwhelmed by it. If you think about the amount of information that we’re constantly exposed to as humans living in the world, it’s easy to understand that we can’t possibly process or make sense of it all.

Attention decides what gets let in, what gets prioritized and what gets filtered out. When it’s doing its job, it works like a really good bouncer at the door of your experience. When it’s overloaded, the doors get kicked in, everything pours in and your brain starts to feel like a crowded bar with too many loud conversations going on at the same time.

One way attention does its sorting is by scanning for a few basic concerns, almost automatically.

First, it looks for threat. This is where danger, instability and uncertainty live. A steady stream of alarming news, political chaos and high-stakes discourse keeps this process running hot. The nervous system stays on high alert, preparing for what could go wrong next. Even if your actual life is pretty low-key and your body is technically safe, your system doesn’t register that distinction.

Second, attention tracks fear and lack. This is the part of us that notices what needs fixing, improving, buying, achieving or becoming. When we’re constantly shown everything we’re behind on, attention stays glued to what we don’t have yet and what we might lose ground on if we slow down, even for a minute.

Only after those two are managed. the third area - what feels meaningful or interesting to us - get its turn.

The problem is when we’re constantly feeding the first two, the third barely gets airtime. And when it does, it’s often distorted by whatever noise we’ve been tuning into. Desire stops feeling personal and starts looking suspiciously like whatever we’ve been consuming. In that case, you’re not choosing what you want, you’re absorbing it.

What makes this tricky is that it isn’t only happening within our individual nervous systems. When a lot of people are living this way, the culture starts to reflect it back. Conversations get tight. Nuance disappears. Everything becomes polarized because complexity takes sustained attention, and most of us don’t have much of that left. People swing between being outraged and checked out, and between being certain and confused. When you look at it that way, our collective mood starts making some sense.

The podcast also talked about multitasking, which we still like to think of as a strength. It makes us feel like we’re capable and efficient, but what’s actually happening is rapid task switching. Attention bounces from one thing to the next and each switch drains a little energy. Attention is a finite resource that naturally diminishes as we get older. The way we’re living now is accelerating that process.

Phones are a big part of this. Our attention has been running at a different speed for a long time now. Being on our phones is a bit like constantly revving an engine. Something is always flashing, pinging or demanding a response. After a while, that level of stimulation starts to feel normal. When we step back into real life, which moves more like a walk than a sprint, it can feel strangely underwhelming and even unsettling.

Ever gone on vacation with the intention of relaxing only to find yourself unnerved by the experienced? This is why. Your nervous system is used to more input. The phone matches that tempo. It feels familiar and comforting in a weird way, so you reach for it. It’s no wonder real life can start to feel dull or unsatisfying. It’s competing with a manufactured fantasy delivered at a speed and intensity that real relationships, real work and real joy can’t match.

When most of your attention stays pointed outward toward the news, the feed, the discourse, the next update, etc, your life starts to feel like it exists somewhere ahead of you. You find yourself waiting for something “out there” to happen that will finally make things clear enough for you to act. You wait for the situation to change. You wait for certainty. You wait for the right idea, the right opportunity or the right version of yourself to arrive.

Over time, that waiting becomes a loop. The more you look outward for the thing that will finally get you moving, the more disconnected you become from what’s already happening inside you. That’s when chasing takes over… the next thing to buy, the next thing to try, the next belief to adopt, the next version of yourself you’re supposed to become.

This isn’t accidental. Attention is valuable. The longer eyes stay on screens, the more money gets made. The algorithm is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is to keep you watching, scrolling and reacting.

Self-help has its own version of this system. It promises transformation by offering a future you who’s more healed, productive, confident and evolved. There’s always another layer to work on. For many people, this has led to real growth. It’s also trained us to keep looking out and ahead instead of listening inward. If you’re not where you want to be yet, it means there’s still something left to fix. Over time, that can make you feel like you’re don’t know who you really are anymore.

The Shift

We know more about neuroplasticity and identity than we used to. We aren’t fixed. We’re shaped by what we repeatedly engage with and practice. There’s real value in looking outward sometimes. Inspiration and curiosity matter. Letting the world show you what’s possible can open real doors. The difference shows up in how it feels.

Being inspired and being pulled are two completely different things. When something genuinely resonates with you, the feeling is usually calm and energizing at the same time. There’s a sense of expansion, motivation and interest. It feels like an invitation, not a demand. You don’t feel behind or deficient. You feel inspired in a grounded way.

That’s very different from the desperate longing that comes from lack. That kind of wanting feels urgent and anxious. It’s charged with comparison and fear. It tells you that you need to hurry up, catch up or become someone else in order to be okay. When attention is dysregulated, everything starts to feel like that, even things that might otherwise be a good fit.

What I’m noticing in myself and others around me, is that dysregulation has become the default and in many ways we’re addicted to it. There are payoffs to being dysregulated, just like there are payoffs to any other addiction. Dysregulation creates stimulation. It provides distraction. It gives us something to react to. It can make us feel alive, relevant or engaged, even when it’s exhausting us.

Repairing attention is the first step toward changing that. There’s no instant solution, but there is something surprisingly simple. Dr. Jha recommends attention-based meditation for about thirteen minutes a day, five days a week. The goal isn’t permanent calm. It’s noticing where your attention goes and then bringing it back when it wanders. Over time, that skill starts to show up everywhere else as well.

With more regulated attention, you can look at the world without getting swallowed up by it. You can notice what resonates and let it guide your next step without abandoning yourself. Action becomes more intentional and productive, and growth starts feeling like actual growth again. That shift alone changes how the world feels. It stops being something you’re constantly chasing and becomes a field of information you can engage with selectively. In other words, instead of organizing your life around external algorithms, you begin feeding your own.

Your nervous system has patterns. Your attention does too. Whatever you consistently and intentionally engage with becomes your life over time. Whatever you keep reacting to continues highjacking your energy and making you feel scattered and shaky.

In the context of this series, the most important thing to say is this: you don’t need to wait until your attention is fully repaired to respond meaningfully to what’s happening in the world. You just need enough space to choose where your energy goes next. From there you get to respond to what’s happening around you in ways that are resonant, grounded and future-focused.

That’s what the next essay’s about: What happens when you stop asking what you should be doing and start asking what you’re actually built to do. In times like these, meaningful response don’t look the same for everyone. They shouldn’t. The range of responses needs to match the range of needs.

That’s where we’re going next.

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If this moment feels uniquely challenging and overwhelming, you’re not imagining it. It didn’t come out of nowhere, but it is definitely starting to reach a crescendo, to say the least.

What we’re living inside of right now is the cumulative effect of decades of conditions that steadily eroded our capacity to regulate, focus and recover. None of it happened overnight. In fact most of it happened slowly enough that we adapted without fully realizing what it was costing us.

That’s why this isn’t a story about a sudden crash or one central villain. It’s a story about capacity and what happens when external events begin to exceed what human nervous systems were designed to carry.

For me, this story starts in the mid to late 1990s.

I got married in 1994, when I was 26 and my husband was 29. We had a plan that felt exciting, solid and pretty reasonable at the time. He would become a college professor; I would stay home with our four kids. We moved to Bloomington, Indiana so he could work toward his PhD at IU, with the assumption that if we did everything “right,” the math would work out.

It didn’t.

After three years, the financial pressure to keep up became impossible to ignore. We left Bloomington and went back to the Indianapolis area. We became a two-income family. My husband took a “good job with a good company and good prospects for the future”. I was offered two jobs with a local new home builder: one inline with my passion for interior design, the other with the greater potential for making the most money. I chose the latter. We had two kids instead of four. We moved to the burbs instead of back to the city. We compromised everything.

At the time, we chalked it all up to having become parents (we had our first son while in Bloomington) and making the responsible decision to let go of our own idealistic dreams in lieu of pragmatism and practicality. Looking back, it was an early sign of what was happening on a much larger scale.

In the mid to late 1990s, the pace had already accelerated. Technology and globalization had increased efficiency and opportunity, but they also raised the bar in terms of what we expected our daily lives to look and feel like. The financial landscape expanded exponentially and the margin for error shrank. Speed and productivity became badges of honor and rest started to feel optional.

Then came the early 2000s.

I was pregnant with our second son on September 11th. In the days that followed, I spent hours watching the 24/7 news cycle on repeat. The same images, the same commentary, over and over again.

Months later, I stopped watching the news entirely because I could feel it affecting my mental health and my life in very real ways. What I noticed, after my self-imposed news diet went into effect, was that I still didn’t miss a thing. Between the early forms of social media and everyday conversations, I was never out of the loop. The information followed me anyway.

By 2008, I was still working in real estate. When it became clear that the housing bubble had been manufactured and that the collapse had not only been predicted, but profited from, by those who knew exactly what was happening, something broke for me.

It felt like the third strike against the American Dream. First, we learned that one income wasn’t enough. Then our sense of safety evaporated. Then something as fundamental as buying a home became tainted by greed and nearly destroyed through intentional manipulation.

Uncertainty stopped feeling temporary.
Trust stopped feeling rational.

Between 2010 and 2016, I went all in on social media. I spent the better part of seven years trying to “go viral” as a coach, writer and consultant. I was drawn in by the promise of working from home, balancing family life and doing something meaningful and authentic.

In reality, there was no balance. There wasn’t even much work. There was just content creation. I was online constantly. It felt real, but most of it wasn’t. My attention was scattered and my sense of self became increasingly externalized.

Around the same time, political discourse took a turn that felt different than anything I’d experienced before. My husband and I were used to feeling like we were in the minority politically, but this wasn’t about party lines anymore. There was something deeper and more fundamental. The shock of realizing what other people, family and close friends among them, actually believed was disorienting and isolating.

Having a high school student during this period added another layer of stress. Active shooter drills, sexting, bullying, vaping, hidden online worlds… It was all too much.

Then Covid hit.

Ironically, 2020 was a good year for me personally. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. At the end of 2019, I was working in new home sales again and feeling the familiar mental tug of war between material success and creative starvation. In a last-ditch effort to restore some balance, I took a couple of painting classes and something lit back up in me.

When Covid hit, I assumed it was going to be 2008 all over again. So did everyone else I knew, including the experts, which was yet another indication of how unpredictable things had become. After I contracted Covid and spent a month recovering, I quit my job, leery about putting myself or my aging parents at risk and completely convinced the market was about to collapse.

I was dead wrong about that. But spending those months painting were some of the most peaceful and rewarding times of my life. For the first time in years, my nervous system got some relief.

The period from 2020 to now has been marked by an extremely difficult and complicated family situation that came to a heartbreaking head last March. Combined with the economic, political, environmental and technological upheaval happening everywhere, I found myself completely lost and disoriented by Fall. I didn’t just feel confused. I felt like I didn’t know who I was anymore.

That was the ground Transformative Creativity grew out of.

Why retracing matters

There’s a reason it’s important to slow down and actually retrace how we got here.

When you can see the conditions clearly, something powerful happens. Blame and shame start to loosen their grip. Your nervous system relaxes a little and fear subsides a bit. You stop interpreting your experience as a personal failure and start seeing it as a flawed but predictable response to a very specific set of circumstances.

When you can look at your life or the world and say, It’s no wonder, you feel a little freer to give yourself some grace and some space to try again.

This doesn’t mean we’re not responsible at all. Of course we are, to a certain extent. We made choices. We participated. But it’s also true that the last thirty years have been a psychological and cultural tsunami. The speed, the uncertainty, the information overload, the constant low-grade threat… Very few people were taught how to surf that wave, let alone given the tools to do it well.

Most of us did the best we could with the capacity we had at the time.

Also, just to be clear, if you experienced relative ease, comfort or happiness during this period, that doesn’t make you shallow, selfish or asleep at the wheel. I had plenty of good times and rewarding experiences along the way too. Life is rarely lived at the extremes. Most of us spend most of our time somewhere in the middle, loving our people, working, laughing and building lives. That’s just being human.

At the same time, it’s possible for things to look good on the outside while feeling increasingly misaligned on the inside.

The forces that accelerated advances and expanded possibilities produced real, tangible results. Careers advanced. Homes were bought. Lifestyles expanded. On paper, many of us were doing just fine. For me personally, that meant reaching a level of attainment and achievement that I never thought possible. That was part of the problem. I kept looking around at what looked like a dream come true, telling myself that I should be happy and wondering what was wrong with me.

Material stability, professional success and comfort aren’t problems in and of themselves. They only become problematic when they’re pursued out of fear or misalignment rather than desire, or when the cost of maintaining them quietly steals your sense of well-being, agency or authenticity.

Identifying and naming these gaps matters, not to judge the choices we made, but to understand them. When you can see how external momentum and internal misalignment grew side by side, it becomes easier to course-correct without shame.

Admitting that you were mostly okay over the last thirty years doesn’t negate the fact that the ground has shifted under our feet. It doesn’t mean the conditions we’re living inside now don’t require a different level of awareness and adjustment than they used to. It just means many of us kept moving forward while something inside us was gradually falling out of sync.

Yes, there has been joy, meaning and connection. And also, the world we’re navigating now is fundamentally different than the one many of us grew up expecting.

That’s what I believe this moment is asking for, a recalibration. An honest look at what it’s been costing us to keep up, and whether it’s still worth it.

Acknowledging both (or many) truths at the same time is something that’s very difficult for humans to do, but it will become even more essential as the world becomes more and more paradoxical and multi-faceted moving forward.

When you’re living inside conditions like these, certainty can’t be the goal. Regulation has to be. A dysregulated nervous system narrows options and reinforces fear-based loops. A regulated one makes creativity, discernment, empathy and resiliency possible.

That’s what the rest of this series is about, not fixing what’s broken or predicting what comes next, but identifying what genuinely helps you stay oriented and feel capable inside. That necessarily starts with getting clear on what doesn’t. Because once you see that pattern clearly, something shifts. You stop interpreting your exhaustion as failure. You stop waiting for external conditions to improve. You start asking a more useful question:

What can I do, right now, that will help me stay steady, engaged, helpful and responsive?

That’s where movement begins again.

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About 10 days ago, I wrote a short piece about entering the new year without the sense of reset we so often hope for. The calendar changed, but the world didn’t. The familiar pressure, chaos and confusion followed us across the line into January.

I wrote that piece as a way of acknowledging the disappointment I felt when I realized that this year, in all likelihood, isn’t going to be much different for us humans than last. Per usual, I was operating from the assumption that I wasn’t alone in that disappointment. I was also starting to think about how I could use the principles and framework of Transformative Creativity to help others that are struggling to find a way to make a difference, in a way that feels not only true to who they are, but also meaningful and potentially effective.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since, mostly because what it pointed to has only become more pronounced. The world feels increasingly unstable, tumultuous, frightening and unpredictable in ways that are hard to ignore or rationalize away. The pace is relentless, the volume is high and, for many of us, staying grounded and focused inside our own lives is starting to feel like work.

This series starts there.

It isn’t an attempt to explain current events or add to the discourse. I’m not interested in offering commentary, analysis or prescriptions for how anyone should respond to what’s happening. What I am interested in is something more foundational: the internal conditions required to stay capable, grounded and human when the external world feels volatile, which is truly what Transformative Creativity is all about.

Developing this concept and writing this book is one of the most creatively fulfilling and compelling processes I’ve ever taken on. Not only is it the culmination of 2+ decades lived research in the relationship between creativity, desire and personal transformation, it’s validation of what I intuitively knew to be true, but didn’t feel confident enough or qualified to own. In other words, I had to prove it to myself. The hard way.

Now that I have and am going about the business of documenting my findings and organizing it into a method that others can benefit from, I’m almost systematically seeing all the areas in which the framework can be applied to help people make things better for themselves and others. It’s a connectivity exercise that is both fascinating and gratifying. It’s also ongoing, which is to say this is an organic process, and if I’ve learned anything in the last 25 years, it is that going with the flow is everything, in terms of living a life that feels like your own.

There’s another layer to this that feels important for me to name honestly. Ever since I rolled out this concept, I’ve noticed my own discomfort about launching it in the midst of all this upheaval. At times it hasn’t felt relevant or even appropriate, much like I felt when I was trying to sell art during the Pandemic.

Uh huh… just like that.

It feels like burying your head in the sand, or closing your eyes while sticking your fingers in your ears and chanting, “Lalalalalalalalala”.

But here’s thing, Transformative Creativity isn’t meant to be a distraction from reality. It isn’t about bypassing what’s happening or retreating into art projects while everything burns. In fact, what’s actually becoming clearer to me everyday is that making the connection between Transformative Creativity and what’s actually happening, and using it as a way to help people manage fear, instability and uncertainty isn’t a detour from what matters, it is what matters.

The Question Beneath the Noise

Most conversations about what’s going on right now focus on what’s wrong: with systems, with institutions, with other people. But seen through the lens of Transformative Creativity, I think we need to start with a couple of different questions: How did we get here? And, perhaps more importantly, what have we been asking our nervous systems to handle for far too long?

Unrelenting speed.
Unexamined uncertainty.
Unregulated information.
Unmitigated threat exposure.

When those conditions persist long enough, certain patterns become predictable. Reactivity increases. Attention narrows. Certainty gets simplified. Complexity becomes a luxury you can no longer afford.

This isn’t a moral failure. It’s a capacity issue.

And when enough individuals lose access to regulation and agency, the systems they participate in begin to reflect that loss. Culture doesn’t just shape us. It mirrors us.

If more information or better arguments were enough to restore stability, we’d already be there. Many of us aren’t uninformed, we’re saturated. We aren’t disengaged, we’re overwhelmed.

Trying to think your way through prolonged uncertainty often backfires. The mind keeps scanning for resolution that never arrives. Planning becomes a form of bracing. Waiting for clarity becomes its own kind of paralysis.

I don’t have to prove to this you. Just think back to a time when you felt lost or confused or stuck, personally. Isn’t the way you felt about your life then the exact same way you feel about the world now?

Transformative Creativity emerged from a simple but persistent observation: clarity doesn’t come first. Capacity does.

Again and again, I’ve seen that when people try to think their way out of overwhelm or stuckness, they become more boxed-in and exhausted. But when they act creatively, imperfectly and without certainty, something shifts. Energy surges. Perspective expands. Self-trust returns.

Transformative Creativity isn’t about making art or producing outcomes. It’s a process for restoring agency and regulation through action, especially when conditions are uncertain or destabilizing.

A regulated nervous system gives us access to our full range of capacities: creativity, discernment, empathy, adaptability. A dysregulated one keeps us stuck in fear stories and reaction loops.

If that’s true (and I’m 100% certain it is), then the goal can’t be certainty. It has to be regulation. And, unfortunately, that regulation has to happen while living in a world that’s probably not going to stabilize on a timeline that will make us feel safe. There’s no prescribed response to that, but throughout this series I’m going to introduce a few core principles:

Action before clarity: how movement precedes insight
Agency over identity: intentionality instead of reactivity
Capacity before certainty: regulation before resolution
Embodied meaning-making: understanding through experience
Engagement over withdrawal: staying present without abandoning

These aren’t ideals to live up to. They’re ways to meet reality without losing yourself.

One important clarification before we go any further:

This work doesn’t start by looking outside yourself to figure out what you should do. It starts by getting in touch with what feels resonant to you and acting from there.

Not everyone is built to protest.

Not everyone is built to advocate or organize or fight for change in visible ways.

There are many ways to make a difference in an environment like this. The most important thing is that whatever you choose to do is something you actually want to and feel capable of doing, something that aligns with who you are and how you’re built.

Alignment creates sustainability.

Pressure and obligation create burnout.

Who This Series Is For

This series is for people who are ready to do something other than doomscroll, vent or brace themselves for the next shocking event.

For people who don’t want to check out, but also don’t want to lose themselves.

For people who are ready to do what they can, with what they have, from where they are, in line with who they are.

That’s it. That’s the only requirement.

What’s Ahead

In the essays that follow, I’ll trace how we arrived at this moment, how the last few decades of speed, instability, attention fragmentation and chronic stress have shaped us not just as individuals, but as a culture. I’ll explore why polarization, reactivity and exhaustion aren’t surprising outcomes, but predictable ones.

Alongside that, I’ll keep returning to the same grounded question: What helps us stay regulated, engaged and capable in the midst of uncertainty?

Not to control the future.

Not to fix the world.

But to stay human inside it.

Waiting for clarity has never been what helps me show up best.

What helps is movement. Engagement. Intentional action.

This series is my way of doing just that.

Each Sunday, for the next 5 weeks, I’ll post an essay and we’ll go from there.

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For a lot of people, the hardest part of creativity is getting started - letting yourself want something, admitting that it matters and then taking the risk of trying or making something and putting yourself or it out there.

That was never my issue.

I’ve never had any problem jumping in. I’ll write the thing. Paint the thing. Share the thing. Send the email. Post the idea. Put a big piece of my heart on the internet like it’s no big deal. The leap itself doesn’t usually stop me.

What stops me is what happens next.

The moment you let yourself want something and then act on that wanting and put it out in the world in some way, you expose yourself to vulnerability and uncertainty. You open the door to other people’s responses or to the distinct possibility that you’ll get no response at all. That’s when things get… interesting, at least for me.

For a long time, I didn’t understand everything I was experiencing. I just knew that every time I made something that actually mattered to me and shared it, it felt like I was walking toward a familiar emotional ledge. It wasn’t about whether the work was good or bad. It was about what it would mean if it either “went viral” or vanished into the ethers.

The pattern was consistent enough that it eventually became impossible to ignore. I’d take a leap, share something personal or honest or unfinished, and then wait with baited breath. More often than not, what came back was silence. In other words, crickets.

Everyone experiences crickets at some point in their lives. That part’s normal. What wasn’t normal was how I interpreted them. I didn’t experience silence as disappointing. I experienced it as confirmation. Silence didn’t mean “no response yet” or “the timing just isn’t right” or “that damn algorithm clearly hates me”…

(eh hem)

It meant, See? This is what happens.

At this point, something I call the Default Position quietly took over. Your Default Position isn’t the worst thing you think about yourself. It’s the most automatic one. It’s the story you fall back to when you feel emotionally exposed, uncertain or even hopeful.

It’s something that forms early, long before you have the tools or perspective to question it, and it’s been narrating your reactions ever since. What makes it especially convincing is that it doesn’t sound like fear. It sounds like realism, like acceptance, like how things actually work, which means it rarely gets questioned.

For me, that story was this: Nobody cares about me.

It wasn’t dramatic or self-pitying. It didn’t feel like a gaping wound or a sob story. It felt like a fact, the way gravity feels like a fact. I wasn’t even completely conscious of it. For most of my life, it just sort of ran in the background, unchecked and largely unnoticed.

Like all Default Positions there was some truth in it.

My biological mother left when I was four and didn’t reappear until I was in my twenties. The household I grew up in, in the aftermath of that, was one in which I learned quickly how to read the room, anticipate needs and take responsibility beyond my years. When you’re a child in that position, you don’t arrive at rational conclusions. You internalize. You assume what happened means something about you.

This is where the Default Position begins. From there it becomes the story you use to explain everything. It’s the voice beneath the voice, the narrator beneath your thoughts, the assumption that hardens into the way you orient yourself in the world and the default setting you return to whenever you don’t know what’s going to happen next. It becomes the lens through which you view your relationships, your opportunities, your disappointments, your desires, your risks, your failures, and yes, your creative endeavors.

That’s why I could take bold creative action and still end up stuck. Because the moment something didn’t land the way I hoped, my Default Position hijacked the meaning. Silence stopped being silence. It became evidence.

What made this especially exhausting was the double role the Default Position plays. On one hand, it wants to prove itself right, because certainty, even painful certainty, feels safer than vulnerability. On the other hand, it wants to prove itself wrong, because part of you still hopes for something different. You end up suspended between wanting affirmation and bracing for what it will mean if you don’t get it.

Living inside that tension is exhausting. It creates a form of creative stagnation that has nothing to do with discipline, consistency or talent. It comes from the emotional toll of repeatedly putting yourself out there and then narrating every ambiguous outcome as proof that what you created wasn’t good enough in some way.

Over time, this distorts how you see yourself. You discount progress. You miss evidence that doesn’t fit the story you’re expecting. You can be capable, talented and deeply engaged with your work and still fail to recognize what’s actually unfolding because your Default Position has already decided what it means.

What shifted things for me wasn’t learning how to grow thicker skin or be more strategic. It was realizing that the story I returned to after the fact was doing as much, if not more, damage as the fear I felt beforehand. Once I could see that pattern clearly, it stopped feeling like truth and started feeling like a habit I could break.

That recognition didn’t guarantee better outcomes. It did something quieter and far more useful. It created space: space between what happened and what I decided it meant, space to take another small step instead of immediately retreating into the familiar ending, space to follow the creative breadcrumbs and let them lead me forward.

The power isn’t in making the Default Position go away. The power is in no longer treating it as a reliable narrator. You don’t need to debate it, analyze it or replace it with something more positive. You only need to recognize that it’s speaking. That recognition doesn’t create movement or restore desire. What it does is remove the assumption that the story is true and give you the freedom to choose what you do from there.

Transformative Creativity doesn’t begin by trying to silence fear or rewrite your past. It begins by recognizing how much of your inner life has been shaped by a story that feels true because it has been rehearsed for a long time.

That recognition is everything.

We do this every year.

We cross the threshold into January carrying a quiet hope that something will reset. That the calendar will do some of the work for us. That the new year will feel lighter, clearer, more stable than the one before it.

And then it doesn’t.

The headlines continue. The uncertainty remains. The same worries and stress follow us across the line into the new year. The world doesn’t stabilize just because we turned the page.

This can be deeply disorienting and disappointing. We expect momentum and opportunity to arrive with the date change, and when it doesn’t, it can be really hard to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get moving again. We tell ourselves we should feel more optimistic and hopeful, but reality seems deadset on convincing us otherwise.

The truth is that hope that depends on circumstances is fragile.

What Transformative Creativity offers instead is a different kind of hope. Not the kind that waits for conditions to improve, but the kind that is generated through engagement. Hope that comes from staying in motion even when the path ahead is unclear. Optimism that is built, not just proclaimed.

Entering a new year does not guarantee a new phase or era. Action does.

This is why the work doesn’t start with resolutions or grand plans. It starts with continuity, with choosing not to abandon yourself or your projects just because the future remains uncertain, with staying connected to what matters to you, even when the larger story feels unwritten.

The new year doesn’t have to bring something different in order for you to be different inside it. You can meet what’s already here from a place of trust in yourself.

That’s not false optimism. That’s earned hope.

The problem is that most of us were taught to respond to uncertainty by trying to control it. We plan harder. We think more. We scan for signs that things are about to settle down so we can finally move forward.

But what if they don’t?

What if the world doesn’t stabilize on a timeline that makes us feel safe. What if certainty remains out of reach. What if waiting becomes its own kind of trap.

This is where Transformative Creativity stops being an abstract idea and starts functioning as a way to live.

When the world is unpredictable, the goal can’t be certainty. The goal has to be regulation. A regulated nervous system gives us an opportunity to bring our best and most capable selves to bear. A dysregulated one keeps us stuck in our fear stories.

We are living in a world that’s not just stressful or busy anymore. It’s fundamentally unstable. The future feels foggy, at best. Systems feel unreliable, to say the least. Making long terms plans feels foolish, if not naive.

One of the problems is that we tend to mirror what we’re immersed in. When everything around us feels uncertain, our thoughts become scattered. When the world feels reactive and dysregulated, our nervous systems do too. When the future feels unclear, we start to feel unclear, as well. This isn’t weakness. It’s how we’re wired.

In chaotic environments, the mind moves toward imitation. We unconsciously mirror the volatility around us. Fog outside creates fog inside. Noise outside creates noise inside.

The reverse of that is true too.

The world mirrors us as much as we mirror it. Our frantic pace and racing thoughts contribute to the overall vibe. Our reactivity feeds the atmosphere. Our attention shapes what gains momentum. In other words, we are not neutral parties. We’re active participants.

Creative action interrupts this mirroring.

Not creativity as performance or expression. Creativity as action taken on an idea: Small actions, ordinary actions, intentional actions.

When you take an idea and do something with it, your system receives a different signal than the one it’s getting from the world. It receives evidence that you’re able to do more than just react emotionally to the problems you see, and that through movement and action you really can be at cause and not just effect.

If there’s one thing that seems pretty certain right now, it’s that we can’t control the future. We can’t control the actions of others that may impact our lives or the lives of the people we love and care about. We can’t plan our way into relative safety or security anymore. But we can choose where our energy goes today.

When you do that, when you stay engaged with what matters to you even in small ways, you create a counterbalance to the chaos. You stop mirroring craziness and start generating sanity. Not by pretending things are fine, but by giving yourself a way to do “what you can, with what you have, where you are” (Teddy Roosevelt).

This is why people who stay creatively engaged tend to adapt better under pressure. They’re not calmer because their world is calm. They’re calmer because they have a way to metabolize what the world is throwing at them.

Thriving in uncertainty doesn’t mean being optimistic all the time. It doesn’t mean having a five-year plan. It doesn’t mean ignoring fear or responsibility.

It means staying true to yourself while the future unfolds. It means choosing actions that regulate rather than escalate. It means noticing when you’re absorbing the world’s dysregulation and then adjusting accordingly.

Transformative Creativity isn’t about controlling outcomes. It’s about maintaining capacity in conditions where external control is limited. It’s about staying engaged enough to respond rather than freeze, adapt rather than collapse and move with reality instead of fighting it.

What I keep coming back to is this…

In times like these, the most meaningful form of creativity is not self-expression for its own sake. It’s responsiveness. It’s doing something in service of something larger than your own fear.

Transformative Creativity is not about creating more. It’s about creating differently. It’s about orienting creative energy toward being puposeful and useful and caring, in a world that feels volatile and frightening.

That might look like giving people a soft place to land or a safe place to express what they’re really feeling, or providing moments of connection or comic relief. It’s not about fixing everything, but rather simply contributing what’s available to you right now.

This is the direction I am trying to move in.

As the world continues to feel more and more unpredictable, I’m paying closer attention to how Transformative Creativity can be used in service of others, not as a solution to uncertainty, but as a way of staying human in the face of it.

I don’t know what the future holds. I don’t think any of us do. But I do know that waiting for clarity has never been what helps me show up best.

What helps is movement, engagement and intential action.

Doing what I can.
From where I am.
With what I have.

Which is all there ever really is, anyway.

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Confession: I hate this time of year, this space between Christmas and New Years when we’re all but forced to slow down and wait… for whatever the hell we think the New Year is going to bring.

I’m not good at waiting. Yes, that means I’m impatient. It also means I’ve got a lot of creative energy that has the potential to eat me alive if I don’t give it something constructive on which to expend itself. And no, that does not include cleaning up the monumental mess that is my house, putting decorations away or returning all the gifts that missed their mark.

I used to spend this time between the holidays feeling like a caged animal, mostly because I bought into all the messages about cocooning and holing myself up. In the aftermath, I wouldn’t emerge rejuvenated and ready for what’s next. I’d emerge foggy-headed, confused and disoriented, unable to recapture the energy of what I’d been working on beforehand and having to go back to Square One creatively.

Here’s what I’ve learned: momentum is everything. And in order to sustain it, you actually have to sustain it. This requires making what matters to you a priority, even when the world insists it’s time to pause, reflect and “just be.”

I’ve come to realize that not all of us are wired for the same kind of rest.

For some people, slowing down restores energy. For others, especially those of us with active, creative minds, forced stillness does the opposite. It doesn’t soothe. It stagnates. And stagnation has a way of turning into anxiety, irritability and that low-grade sense that something you can’t quite name is off.

We’re told this is the season for reflection, for going inward, for waiting patiently until January 1st magically delivers clarity, motivation and a fresh start. But creativity doesn’t work on a calendar. And neither does emotional regulation.

When I stop engaging with the things that matter to me - writing, thinking, developing, learning - my energy doesn’t disappear. It turns inward. It starts chewing on itself. And what could have been momentum becomes rumination.

So I stopped trying to cocoon.

Instead, I started treating this in-between time as a continuation, not a pause. That doesn’t mean pushing harder or ignoring the season. It means giving my creative energy somewhere to go so it doesn’t turn destructive. It means staying engaged with the ideas, questions and projects that already have my attention. It means taking small, deliberate actions that keep the thread intact.

Not because I’m afraid of rest.

But because I’ve learned the difference between rest and disconnection.

For me, rest looks like gentler engagement, not total withdrawal. It looks like curiosity without pressure. It looks like movement without expectations. This is one of the quieter truths at the heart of Transformative Creativity: creative action isn’t something you do after you feel better. It’s often the thing that helps you feel better in the first place.

So if this time of year leaves you feeling restless, impatient or oddly unsettled, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It may just mean your system is asking for engagement, not waiting.

Momentum doesn’t require hustle.

It requires continuity.

And sometimes the most generous thing you can do for yourself in this strange, suspended week between the holidays is to keep going, intentionally and on your own terms.

Back in the 1900s, in the middle of my freshman year at Indiana University (GO HOOSIERS!), my dad gave me a checkbook cover that said, “I can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks”.

For the youngsters in the crowd, a checkbook is a book of paper checks from your bank that you carried with you at all times and used to purchase things with the available funds you had in your bank account. These were dark times, before the proliferation of debit cards and other forms of electronic payments. We were expected to… get this… keep track of how much money we had in accounts, so as to not overdrawn them and go in the red.

What am I, Dad? An accountant? No. I am not. I’m a barely 18 year-old girl who likes pretty things and beer…

(eh em)

Things haven’t changed that much. I still like pretty things and beer, and I’m still not that great with money.

So, recently, when I decided to learn about day trading and try my hand at it, let’s just say there were some skeptics in the crowd.

Allow me to explain.

This story starts where most of my stories start: in The Rut.

I’d just come out of a very long and personally challenging period in my life and once again found myself asking, What’s next? When the answer to that question didn’t immediately make itself clear internally, I started trying to find it externally.

I started looking for work but nothing felt right or sparked my interest or made me think, YES, This is it! Mostly it made me think, I’d rather lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling.

That’s usually a sign.

So, instead of continuing to scroll job boards in a low-grade existential fog, I went old school.

Years ago, I created and launched a 90-day coaching program called The 90-Day Revolution or The 90-Day Power Play or The 90-Day Power Play Revolution…. I don’t know. Something like that. I ran a few different versions of the same thing and they all lasted 90 days. They also all started with the same step: Identify what you want.

It seems like such a simple thing, doesn’t it? Just name something you want and then create a plan for making it happen. Boom. Coaching genius, here.

Um no…

As I write in the Introduction to Transformative Creativity, on the topic of naming what you want:

The problem is that most people don’t feel allowed to want anything, beyond what society and culture define as “normal”. Not really. We resist desire for countless reasons - age, money, fear, who we think we are and what we believe we deserve, circumstances, the belief that what we want is selfish or unrealistic, the belief that it’s too late, the belief that wanting more makes us ungrateful or malcontented…

Subscribe for free to read said Intro now

In other words, when you ask people to name something that they REALLY want, not what they think they SHOULD want, they struggle. Most often you’ve got to help them along a little.

So, when I hit the wall and landed hard in The Rut, I did what I’ve suggested for years to clients, unsuspecting friends and family members and, of course, myself: I stopped asking for answers and started looking for signals.

Because true desire doesn’t usually show up as a fully formed plan. It doesn’t arrive with a PowerPoint and a budget. It shows up sideways.

It shows up as images you keep returning to for no obvious reason.
As moments of relief when you imagine something changing.
As curiosity that won’t leave you alone.
As a subtle sense of energy.
Or as resistance, which is often just desire wearing body armor.

When this happens, instead of asking myself, What should I do next? I ask a different set of questions. Sneakier ones. The kind that don’t send your Inner Lizard (the oldest part of your brain in charge of security; a bit of an alarmist; thinks everything is a threat) pulling all the alarms in your head and running for cover.

What would a genuinely good day look like right now, if nothing else in my life changed?
What would feel better than this?
Not amazing. Not perfect. Just better.
And if I didn’t have to explain it to anyone or justify it or turn it into a responsible adult decision… what would I quietly admit I want?

That’s when it showed up.

The freedom to travel extensively.
And a lake house.

You know. Reasonable things.

Now, if I were a normal person, I would have done what most normal people would do in this situation: dismiss this crazy shit as crazy and go back to looking for a job.

But I’m not normal.

I’m “different”.

When crazy shit shows up, I don’t turn tail and move in the opposite direction, I lean in. Not because I’m delusional, but because I know there’s more here than meets the eye, no more so than when we’re talking about desires. Often, you don’t actually want the thing you think you want; you want the feeling state that you think the thing you want will deliver. Knowing that makes it easier to let yourself want it. It takes the pressure off a bit and gets the Lizard to lower the threat level from Defcon 1 to 2 or even 3, if you’re lucky.

Anyway, when I leaned into the extensive travel and lake house fantasy without judgement, the next logical step became figuring out a way to pay for those things. I mean, I’m not THAT bad with money. I know it takes having some to buy stuff.

And, since I’d been looking for work and nothing was lighting me up, my brain did what it always does when I let myself want something.

It started problem solving.

And somehow, through a series of mental leaps that I still don’t quite understand, I landed on day trading.

Yes. I know.

I am an artist. A writer. A coach. A person whose checkbook cover from 1985 tells you all you need to know about my financial prowess…

But here’s the thing I tend to forget about myself. I actually like systems. I like patterns. I like understanding how things work. And more than anything, I like learning new stuff. Granted, I don’t usually like uber analytical, finance-related tech bro stuff, but I was pretty motivated by the super cool trips and weeks on end with friends and family at my new lake house that I had begun planning in my head.

So, instead of overthinking it, I asked AI to build me a simple thirty-day plan to learn how to day trade. No pressure. No expectation that it would lead anywhere. Just an experiment. Just curiosity.

And almost the minute I started working that plan, something inside me woke up. My brain lit up, my synapses started firing again and I felt better. I was learning. I was focused. I was interested. I was me again.

Not because I had solved my life.
Not because I had found the answer.
But because I was engaged.

Which is when something really important clicked.

I hadn’t been stuck because I didn’t know what I wanted.
I had been stuck because I wasn’t letting myself engage with anything that genuinely interested me.

As I learned about trading, creative ideas started coming back online. Not stock market-related ideas, ideas I hadn’t had in a very long time. First, I started imagining a coaching program called How to Change Your Life in 30 Days. Then, I started making connections between curiosity, action, emotional regulation and identity. One thing led to another, Transformative Creativity started to take shape and the rest, as they say, is history.

The stock market, it turns out, was just a scenic route. (Although, just as a side note, I completed my training and am planning to start paper trading on a simulator after the first of the year. Shocking as it is to everyone, myself included, I both like it and get it. I have chosen a strategy and am going to dip my toe and see what happens.)

When I started working on Transformative Creativity and began writing and creating with a purpose again, I put a bright pink sticky note on the windowsill in front of my desk, right at eye level that says: Enjoy the process.

That’s it. That’s everything. That’s the lesson to end all lessons for me. The one that I had to, apparently, learn the hard way…

Allowing yourself to pursue the things you want to pursue, to whatever extent you can, for no other reason than you want to is everything.

Not as a strategy.
Not as a means to an end.
Not because they will lead somewhere impressive or productive or profitable.

Because they light you up.
Because something comes alive when you do them.
Because they make you feel more like YOU.

I thought there was a right way to do life. A right way to grow. A right way to use creativity. A right sequence of insights that would eventually lead me me to the answer I hadn’t found yet, a breakthrough that would finally make everything make sense. That belief cost me a lot of time, energy and mental anguish.

What I see now is that I was caught inside what I call the Promised Land Myth.

The belief that if you just do enough work on yourself and find the last missing piece of the puzzle, you’ll eventually arrive at a place where everything clicks into place. A place where desire stops being a moving target, doubt disappears and you finally feel settled and certain and complete.

That myth turns life into a waiting room.

You keep telling yourself that you will start living once you are healed enough, confident enough, clear enough, ready enough. You keep postponing the very experiences that would bring you back to life because you believe they are supposed to come later.

I lived like that for an emberassingly long time.

And here is what I wish I had understood sooner…

There is no Promised Land.

There is only action.
There is only engagement.
There is only the creative adventure unfolding one step at a time.

A life well lived is not a life that arrives somewhere permanent. It is a life spent doing things that light you up. Things that draw you forward. Things that give your inner world a pathway to expressing itself in the outer world.

This is what Transformative Creativity is really about.

It’s about permission.

Permission to follow your curiosity even when it doesn’t make sense.
Permission to engage with what interests you without needing to justify it.
Permission to let desire be the reason.

Which is how a woman who wanted a trip to Europe and a lake house ended up learning about day trading and accidentally found her way home.

Not bad for a detour.

I say this a lot, and I want to be clear about why…

I’m not a therapist.

I’m also not a neuroscientist, a psychologist or a clinician. I don’t have a degree hanging on the wall that gives me institutional authority over the human psyche.

What I am is a lifelong student of the human experience.

And I’m finally ready to stop minimizing what that actually means.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been paying very close attention to how people operate. Not in an abstract way. In a lived, embodied, sometimes painfully personal way.

How people get stuck.
How they lose touch with what they want.
How fear disguises itself as logic.
How desire goes quiet.
How identity calcifies.
How change actually happens.
And why it so often doesn’t.

Long before Transformative Creativity had a name, this was the research project I was running. Not in a lab. In my own life. In my relationships. In my work. In my writing. In the quiet patterns that repeat themselves if you’re willing to look.

I’ve written nearly 800 blog posts over the years. I’ve filled more journals than I care to count. I’ve started and abandoned more versions of a book than is probably normal. I’ve created ebooks, programs, workshops, retreats, coaching platforms and training methods that all circled the same core questions.

Why do people stay in lives that don’t fit them anymore?
Why does wanting feel dangerous?
Why does clarity disappear right when it matters most?
Why does action change people more than insight ever does?

I didn’t set out to become an expert. I set out to understand.

And understanding takes time.

Along the way, I have worked with people. I’ve created and run coaching programs. I’ve trained sales teams. I’ve sat across from people who were terrified to name what they wanted and watched what happened when they finally did. That work mattered and it taught me a lot.

But if I’m being honest, that’s not where my deepest authority comes from.

My authority comes from pattern recognition.

From living inside the questions long enough that they stop being theoretical. From watching the same emotional mechanics show up again and again, across different people, different ages, different circumstances, different seasons of life.

The Flitter as Researcher

There’s another piece of this story that matters.

For most of my life, I thought my inability to choose one thing and stick with it was a flaw. I called it flitting. I wore it like a scarlet letter. Why can’t you just decide? Why can’t you settle? Why are you so flaky?

What I see now is that flitting was never the problem. It was the method.

Every time I moved on to something new, I was collecting data. About systems. About people. About motivation. About money. About creativity. About fear. About how humans actually change.

Finance, sales, real estate, design, corporate training, marketing, coaching, government, art, writing. None of it was random. Each experience added another piece to the puzzle.

I wasn’t failing to choose an identity.

I was refusing to shrink myself into one.

A friend once told me that my real gift was in “taking information, tossing it into my magical, analytical/creative machine of a mind and presenting a new and better product or concept.”

Transformative Creativity is the product of that machine. It’s the synthesis of decades of lived experimentation, observation, comparison and pattern recognition. It’s what happens when you stop trying to be one thing and instead let yourself become an inquisitor.

What once looked like inconsistency was actually coherence unfolding over time.

That’s what Transformative Creativity is.

It is not borrowed wholesale from any one discipline. It is not a repackaging of someone else’s method. It is a synthesis.

It is the result of decades of paying attention to the emotional architecture underneath our lives. To the stories we inherit. The beliefs we absorb. The patterns we repeat. The way the nervous system reacts to growth. The way creative action reorganizes identity.

When I say I’m not a therapist, I’m not disqualifying myself. I’m locating myself accurately.

What I offer is not diagnosis or treatment. It’s a map.

A way of understanding why you feel the way you feel when you’re stuck. Why fear gets loud when you’re close to something true. Why small actions create disproportionate change. Why the so-called answers you keep waiting for never arrive until you start moving.

For a long time, I hid behind humility. I made jokes at my own expense. I downplayed what I knew because I didn’t want to sound arrogant or overstate my authority.

But humility without clarity becomes self-erasure.

And clarity matters.

Transformative Creativity didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a sustained, long-term, deeply personal inquiry into how humans change. How they don’t. And what actually helps.

The book, the work, the movement, is not the result of a sudden insight. It is the culmination of a lifetime of noticing, questioning, documenting, testing, discarding, refining and paying attention again.

That's expertise.

Not because it fits neatly into a category.

But because it’s been earned the long way around.

I’m not here to tell you who to be or how to fix yourself. I’m here to offer a framework that helps you see what’s already happening inside you, so you can move with it instead of fighting it.

This has never been about having the answers.

It has been about asking better questions, staying curious and following the patterns all the way to their source.

That’s the work I’ve been doing my whole life.

And that’s the work Transformative Creativity invites you into now.