In 2023, I deleted my Instagram and TikTok apps, which means that my go-to short-form video feed these days is YouTube. (It also means that I get all my memes at least six months after everyone else, and I’m fine with that!)

My algorithm is a healthy mix of crochet, workout tips, and pop culture interviews. I also subscribe to a handful of people whose lives couldn’t look less like mine: A “van life” account. A professional slackliner. An English couple that lives in a 600-year-old cottage in the mountains.

Sometimes, when these videos pop up on my iPhone, I feel that gut-punch, all-consuming, overwhelming rush of wanting to hit the reset button. What if I blew up my life? What if I dropped all my client work, sold the house, moved across the globe?

My husband and I are both intentional, careful decision-makers. We tend to make thorough pro and con lists, consider any potential life change from every angle, pray about it, talk about it, and think about it for a minute.

Even so… there are Tuesday afternoons when I picture pulling a full, abrupt, unprecedented-for-me 180. (If you excel at pulling off these kinds of life changes, I hope you have a YouTube channel—I’d love to smash that subscribe button.)

In practice, though, changing my life more often looks like small doses of curiosity and joy, and following where they lead.

If you’re like me and blowing up your life isn’t on the table anytime soon—maybe you have dependents or debt or health issues that make it hard to radically shift the conditions of your world on a dime—I hope you hear me say this: You don’t have to blow up your life to like it again.

In your work: breadcrumb trails and small experiments

Last week, I hopped on Substack Live with , who beautifully shared about how you don’t have to have a grand career epiphany to pivot. Instead, you should look for the breadcrumbs. Andjela encourages us to reflect: What are the small changes you can make or insights you can look for to shift yourself in the direction you want to go?

like your life

You don't need an epiphany to career pivot

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6 days ago · 4 likes · Amanda Jackson and Andjela writes career books

blew all of our minds with Tiny Experiments, her book and radically simple framework. Do X thing for Y period of time, and then reflect on what happened.

I also love how talks about the steps she took to create the experiences she needed for new roles over the course of her career:

There are a lot of ways to expand your career. And not all of them require making a U-turn; I’d argue that most of them don’t.

In 2026, one of my goals (I don’t usually call them resolutions) was to like my work more. It’s not a “SMART” goal—specific, measurable, attainable, etc. I’m measuring my success based on vibes. But every positive change I’ve made this year has stemmed from taking small steps to follow my curiosity:

• Making more videos for LinkedIn.

• Sending bold reachouts to people I admire or want to work with.

• Drawing more and sharing my work in public.

• Writing on Substack and rediscovering my writing spark.

I didn’t blow up my working life, but I’m starting to like it again. I’ve planted tiny seeds of hope and joy this year and made real progress toward figuring out where I want to go.

In your life: delight deposits and joy investments

You can wake up on any random day and decide to change your life.

And it doesn’t have to mean selling your stuff to hike the Appalachian Trail or pick up van life or going on a grand adventure.

I believe deeply in the power of small joys and embracing novelty. This year, falling back in love with my life through small, thoughtful choices has included:

• Picking back up creative hobbies I left behind in childhood, namely drawing!

• Taking nature, walk, or dance breaks in between working sprints instead of scrolling on my phone or LinkedIn.

• Scheduling things to look forward to on the calendar when I feel overwhelmed.

• Making a seasonal baking bucket list for the year and working my way through. (I just made the fourth and final one last week: a cardamom apple crumble!)

• Making homemade syrups that make my morning coffee or tea feel really special.

• Resetting my music taste by listening to Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Albums of all time.

• Genuinely and purposely delighting in the animals I see, from the groundhogs in our backyard to any dog I drive past sticking its head out a car window.

• Buying myself fairy earrings at the farmer’s market that genuinely bring me joy every time I wear them.

• Buying a mug from a ceramicist I follow that genuinely brings me joy every time I drink from it.

These choices don’t take a ton of time, and the purchases didn’t derail responsible budgeting. But something magical happens when you start showing up for yourself with intention in the small things, not just the big ones.

Even if you feel stuck in a season (and if blowing up your whole life isn’t exactly on the table), building rhythms of wonder and tiny giddiness into your week reminds you to take small steps toward the dreams that scare you, too—the ones you’re scared to say out loud.

Notice the delightful things. Experience your day with all five of your senses. These tiny but powerful choices bring you back to the beauty right in front of you; they remind you that you’re worth showing up for.

I’m cheering you on as you fall (back) in love with your life.

I hope a year from now (or even much, much sooner!), things look completely different, if you want them to.

Maybe you’ll have taken a massive risk, the kind that changes everything, and blown up your life. Or maybe you’ll have made a ton of tiny, thoughtful investments in yourself—in the art you consume or reflective rhythms or creative experiments.

Whichever path you take, you are worth enjoying and noticing and appreciating your days. It’s not selfish or frivolous or unnecessary. It’s all part of making the most of your own precious life, and you, my friend, deserve to love it.

The first age of a new decade always feels like some strange cross between a baby deer learning to walk on wobbly, womb-fresh legs; a new pair of jeans you’re still breaking in; and a pool whose temperature you’re easing into—which, after those first few shocking moments, you’ll never want to leave.

For the last year, I’ve felt a bit like an imposter say…

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The January after my first semester of college, I barely completed an ill-advised, undertrained marathon at Disney World. For years, I’d started the story by saying, “I’m not a runner, but…”

Eventually, enough people told me that, “If you run, you’re a runner!” to make me claim it, too. The things we do become the identities we hold.

If you paint, you’re a painter. If you write, you’re a writer. If you play music, you’re a musician.

But when it comes to creativity as a practice, there’s no qualifier or “If you…” statement required.

You are creative, whether you think you are or not. Creativity is your birthright. Just like we need to eat and move and socialize, we are made to make things.

In fact, you’re a creative being even if you don’t practice it. But I deeply hope you do practice it.

A creative practice will fill your soul and teach you about yourself and expand your view of the world and connect you to others. It will make you laugh and cry and rage and hope and feel.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve been a writer, actor, singer, comedic improviser, poet, crocheter, knitter, baker, painter, visual artist, and designer1. Creativity, in all its forms, has become a presence and a practice that I wouldn’t want to live without.

If we were sitting down for coffee and pastries, and you asked me how to adopt a creative practice… this is what I’d tell you.

(Psst! I made a Notion template for my free + paid subscribers, featuring journaling prompts and dedicated space to build the foundation for a creative practice you’ll keep up over time. Keep reading and be sure you’re subscribed to make your own copy of the Creative Practice Studio at the end of this post!)

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Step 1: Check in with yourself.

The first step in weaving creativity into the fabric of your life is to imagine what it will bring about.

Close your eyes for a moment and vividly picture your ideal creative practice and what you hope it will lead to in a year. A final product like a book or a body of work? A repeatable rhythm or the confidence to claim a hobby? Belonging with a wider community of makers?

No wrong answers here. But when you begin by uncovering your reason for creating, I find, you’re more likely to start. As in all things, “finding your why” sets you up for everything else.

Step 2: Choose your craft.

I’ve never been one to limit myself to a specific creative medium; I pick up and lay down hobbies like dumbbells at the gym.

Offline Habits

How to build a treasure trove of hobbies

“The things I don't do for income are also my work. And in many cases, they're the more important work of my life.” - Amanda Jackson…

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4 months ago · 2 likes · Emma Louise Tucker

But if I were starting a creative practice from scratch today, I’d probably start by chasing a new medium that sounded so interesting it made my stomach flip and my fingers feel sparkly.

A lot of things suck about 2026, but one of the wonders is that we have an entire YouTube at our disposal to watch countless experts teach us how to do something we’ve never done before!

So commit to learning something new if that sounds fun to you; find someone on the internet whose content you can learn from2, figure out the minimum viable investment you can make in cheap supplies, and pick them up.

To the multi-passionate people like me who usually can’t pick one thing and have tried a lot: Set up a mental (and, ideally, physical!) “studio” of the crafts you have to choose from on a given day. Compile all your necessary creative tools, and set them up somewhere you can easily see and reach them, if possible. This helps you limit your logistical load when it’s time to make something amazing.

I’d love to be a part of your creative practice. On the third Wednesday of the month, I host Hone Your Craft—an hour of creative body doubling on Google Meet. It’s free, casual, supportive, and ever-so low-pressure. I’d love to see you there today at noon ET, or at one of the other two remaining sessions in 2026:

Come craft with us!

Step 3: Find your windows.

This is where we get really practical; this is the un-sexy work of scheduling, the unflashy decision you make to show up when and how you can.

Look at your week. Where can you create in the margins? A half hour on a lunch break or 15 minutes between making your coffee and checking your email. That time block where you’re waiting in your car for yoga to start, or the hour time-block you set aside on Saturday mornings with coffee and a farmer’s market croissant.

Commit to showing up by scheduling your creativity in your calendar like your group fitness class or your catch-up call with your long-distance best friend.

And honor your energy! A creative practice you’ll keep is one that you plan for the times when you’re awake and not exhausted, full of ideas and not depleted.

Step 4: Prepare for the Muse.

Creativity is a funny fusion: It’s a discipline and an act of exploration, experimentation, and play.

Some days, you’ll wake up and know exactly what you want to make; the creative work will call to you.

But other days, you might be dragging, and it’s all you can do to sit down and reach for your tools. To prepare for those inevitable days, I proactively compile a bank of ideas to draw from when the well is dry. I call this, “making my practice hospitable for the Muse.”

Last weekend, I filled a bowl with 30ish slips of paper that have animals written on them. When I sit down to sketch, I don’t have to stay overwhelmed by ideas or grasp at straws; I have a prompt.

Pick a day when you feel creatively energized, and sit down for 15-30 minutes with as few distractions as possible. (Ideally, just pen and paper!) Then, write the longest possible list of ideas of things you want to create: chapter concepts, essay ideas, crochet projects, painting dreams.

This exercise builds creative excitement, inviting you to picture all of these projects existing. That electricity is what inspires you to begin showing up and keep showing up.

Step 5: Begin.

And now… you start showing up for yourself and your practice. Daily or weekly or “as often as you can,” whatever that means in this season.

Build a routine that entices you to come to this space:

• Create or designate a playlist; for my personal practice, this instrumental playlist my dear friend made is a go-to.

• Light a candle, or tell Alexa to turn the lights your favorite color.

• Grab a beloved blanket, and retreat to a favorite chair.

• Brew a tea that makes you feel cozy.

Settle in, and make the thing that’s been living in your heart exist in the world.

Step 6: Share your work generously.

Hear me: You do not need to post your work online for it to matter. (Write this on your heart over and over until you believe it.)

But I do want you to generously share your work. Send it to a cherished friend to say you’re proud of what you drew this morning. Give it away or hang it up in your work space. Reread a passage to yourself, the one you’re proudest of.

This is an important final step in your practice because it allows your work to be witnessed; maybe by only you, or maybe by someone else, too. It’s a reminder to yourself that even the creative work that doesn’t turn out as you hoped deserves to exist, too.

Your art is a gift to yourself and to the world. I hope you make it and keep making it in every season.

As promised!!! My free and paid subs can make a copy of the Creative Practice Studio below, a guided journaling resource in Notion to help you put all of these steps into action. I hope it’s incredibly useful to help you bring your art to life!

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Lately, I’ve been missing the coziness of early-2000s TV.

My family spent my elementary-school evenings watching the early seasons of Survivor and American Idol and, yes, even Fear Factor1. But I got a special rush from watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? I relished testing my own knowledge, especially back when our immediate impulse wasn’t to Google the answers on iPhones that never leave our sides.

Millionaire’s signature distinction from other knowledge shows, of course, is a trove of three “lifelines” that contestants could call on when they were uncertain.

A couple decades later, those same lifelines still offer a gentle, always-available roadmap to follow when we face our own uncertainty.

Sure, our questions are often less straightforward than “Which two actors co-starred as love interests in 50 First Dates and The Wedding Singer?”2

The questions are bigger and hairier and less easily solved queries like:

• “What should my career look like as the very meaning of work is being transformed by technology?”

• “How do I pivot from my current path when I also have significant responsibilities to a family and community?”

• “Is it worth trying to pursue what I love as an income generator, or should I let my job patronize my creativity in the margins?”

You know… softball questions like that.

Yet even though our uncertainty often feels too big to get our arms around, I submit that the game show lifelines of my youth still offer a handhold to make us even ever-so-slightly more resilient and guide us to the next step.

One of my favorite ways to respond when life feels scary and uncertain is to create something for a while—I work on a joyful creative project that has nothing to do with my income, and I make for the sake of making.

Next Wednesday, 10/21, at noon ET, I’m hosting Hone Your Craft! Bring a project and hang out with us on Google Meet. It’s (free) monthly body doubling for your personal creative practice, and we have a grand time.

Come craft with us!

Lifeline #1: Ask the Audience

Ask the Audience remains my least favorite Millionaire lifeline. The host would poll the live studio audience about their take on the question and report on the responses.

I think it’s the weakest lifeline for multiple reasons: The crowd isn’t always right, and I simply (and cynically) wouldn’t trust the average of the American populace to know the answer and reliably get it correct.

HOWEVER. As a lifeline for our own uncertainty… asking the audience can offer a lot of wisdom. When you have no idea what to do next, which job to take (or even pursue), how to make decisions, or what to dream about, look to other people’s experiences.

Yes, yes, I know: Chart your own path and be your own person. BUT! When we’re stuck in uncertainty, sometimes what we really need is someone else’s story to make us think, “Oh yeah! It is possible to build a beautiful life.” or “Right! Pivoting is actually within reach.” I’ve found that sometimes it helps to see other people charting their own paths to remind us what that can look like in our lives.

Asking the Audience could mean:

• Perusing a bunch of niche Reddit threads about career changes or moving countries

• Scrolling Business Insider to get a survey of how others have moved through uncertainty

• Interviewing someone you look up to (especially people you’re healthy jealous of!)

• Reading the memoir of someone cool or someone random who also started from a place of uncertainty and made their way to clearer direction

• Posting a Substack Note or LinkedIn post or [insert platform of choice] asking how people solved a certain problem or figured out the career they wanted to be in (as a data girlie, I love this one and often turn the results into mini data reports or just another post sharing what people said)

Who knows what these activities will surface? Who knows what ideas or inspiration or clarity you’ll find? Asking the audience can expand your pool of ideas and shake you loose from analysis paralysis, even if you don’t take the same steps others took.

When you should not use this lifeline: If you have already collected a lot of other people’s experiences for your input bank. At a certain point (and you might feel this in your gut if you pay attention), you have SO much external information that it’s time to just take action. If you’ve already asked the audience ad nauseam… it might just be time to give your final answer (AKA, take a step).

Lifeline #2: Phone a Friend

I love this lifeline. I love seeing who contestants called and hearing their banter and the heightening tension as the timer ran out. I love it all.

Phoning a friend can be a brilliant gift if you’re hitting a place of uncertainty and don’t know what to do next. These can be coworkers or clients. They might be close pals, a partner or family member, a collaborator from a project a few years ago.

The goal is to ask someone—or multiple someones—exactly what they see in you:

• Quiz them about your strengths and gifts. [NOTE: If you don’t like being praised or glazed, this will be uncomfortable for you. Embrace it!]

• Ask them for the patterns they see in how you exist in the world.

• Tell them what you’re struggling with, feeling uncertain about, or considering; invite them to brainstorm other careers, paths, or even volunteer opportunities they think you’d be a good fit for.

You don’t have to do tons of these!3 Start with a goal of one or three Phone-a-Friend conversations to see what they surface.

I’m currently in a mastermind with 50 people4, and multiple times a week—on live calls and in Slack—I’m bowled over by how helpful it can be to have other people in the room giving feedback or identifying what I’m good at… even people I’ve never met.

Lifeline #3: 50:50

There was always something so satisfying to me about the 50:50 lifeline. Watching two options just disappear off the board, and hoping for the person in the hot seat that their choice would now be clear through process of elimination.

50/50 is possibly the hardest lifeline to replicate in the vast vagueness of personal uncertainty. Instead of having four distinct answer options, the paths and possibilities are virtually limitless. While we’d love to click a button and simplify our choices down to two or even four or 10, that’s rarely, if ever, possible. (At least, not in the Millionaire sense.)

Agency is a bit of a blessing and a curse in an uncertain world, isn’t it? This is the dance of desperately wanting someone to tell us what we should do when things feel unclear, while also wanting to keep the freedom to build our own life our own way.

So here’s what I’ll submit: Pick two options. Choose just two next steps—messages you could send, people you could talk to, courses you could try, career paths you could do a mini “research project” on—that feel feasible and possible and directive.

One option is too few because it feels too final and all-encompassing. (And if you’re already feeling uncertain, the pressure of trying to choose one option is probably out of reach right now anyway.) Trying to focus on five or 10 paths is overwhelming, too, and you won’t be able to give the best of your energy or attention to all of them.

Sure, that whole universe of possibilities is still out there. Yes, things are still uncertain. But you’re setting that aside, just now, to take a couple small actions. just pick two choices5, small or big, that feel good to you. And take those steps.

Maybe you’ll learn something new. Maybe you’ll learn that you don’t want to go down either of those paths. Maybe you’ll make progress and uncover more clarity.

But you’ll almost definitely build just a tiny bit of resilience in the face of uncertainty. And you might even feel like a million bucks.

The summer after my sophomore year of college, I landed my most prestigious job title yet: SOUL.

My alma mater took its first-year orientation program very seriously, and the team of Student Orientation Undergraduate Leaders had mid-grade celebrity status on campus.

We would be paid a stipend of $3,000 for our 6 weeks of training and leading in May, June, and early July, plus another brief stint of August work. Most of my job experience till then was at fast-food restaurants and campus dining halls, so this lump sum seemed massive to me.

At least, until one of my teammates did the math. He added up the total hours we’d spend working from 7am-11pm most summer days with minimal breaks and concluded that our hourly pay was somewhere in the range of a couple bucks an hour.

This intel shocked me at first… but it didn’t mean much to me, either. I was facilitating daily diversity sessions for freshmen, touring them around campus, and hyping up the dance floor at the evening welcome gathering.

My hourly wage was the farthest thing from my mind.1

The next time I calculated my hourly rate was during my first salaried job, so I could quote a friend who recruited me for a few hours of website copywriting work. (I charged her around $30/hour.)

Then, in 2022, I quit my job to start freelancing.

As I did coffee chats with experienced folks, read countless articles and collected free workshop recordings like Pokémon, I realized that while working for myself, I would have to start charging way more for my time than I thought I would.2

As I got comfy with client work, I built a spreadsheet for monthly capacity planning. I would calculate the number of workdays left in the month, the scheduled project-work-hours I had left in queue, and how much each project would pay.

Later, I also added a formula that divided my income for the month by the hours spent on project work, giving me some semblance of my hourly rate, even as I typically charged clients a project rate.

My hourly rate number has gone up over time, and the current average is 4-5x the ~$30 I charged per hour as a fledgling freelancer during my first in-house role.

But with all of that said… I am so, so, so tired of the endless hamster wheel of trading my time for money as a business owner. If I never again had to calculate how much my time is worth, quantify my expertise, or level up my rates, that would be quite alright with me.

I know it’s the world we live in. I must pay my bills and so must we all. I choose to work for myself instead of getting a pre-determined, predictable salary. And yet.

Knowing exactly how much each of my working hours costs this month makes me feel more like the robots I’m told are going to replace me than the soft animal Mary Oliver encouraged me to be.

I just want to do interesting things and be able to pay my bills. It turns out, that’s more complicated in 2026 than I wish it was.

Substack has brought this thought process into focus for me lately because my writing and creating for this platform exist in a grey space.

I used to feel very strongly about my boundaries that work time was for work, and play time was for play, and ne’er the twain shall meet. I closed my laptop at 4pm when my husband got home, and then I focused on my “personal” creative practices.

But Substack straddles my two worlds, both because I write about work (in the abstract) and my work (the things I do to make money) and because I turned on paid subscriptions a few months ago. So it’s still a joy thing… but now, it’s also a money thing.

I got my first 2 paid subscribers in August, kind supporters who enjoyed my words and expressed that they wanted to support me personally—they didn’t indicate they were just in it for my paid subscriber “benefits” of exclusive quarterly business recaps or subscriber-only essays.

My paid subscriber count doubled again recently, and I felt invigorated to breathe new life into my paid Substack offerings, announcing the quarterly Mini Mail Club I’ve been dreaming about and promising monthly career and creativity resources (not just essays).3

Because of the money-for-time world we live in, I’m thinking about my “hourly rate” again. If/when I do the absolutely absurd task of calculating the time number—the hours I spent developing my first paid resource, the Chapter Map, or the countless minutes I’ll spend tweaking digital illustrations for my Mail Club before sending the first batch in December—compared to my Substack income… all the work wouldn’t seem worth it.

like your life

This spreadsheet helped me finish my book after 7 years.

In the fall of 2019, I was done. Fed up. Anneliese Van Der Pol-style Over It…

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a month ago · 2 likes · Amanda Jackson

Working for myself has, of necessity, placed a premium on my time. I charge my content marketing clients a pretty penny because (1) I’m good at what I do and (2) I need to pay for my life and (3) this isn’t “just-for-fun” work that I would do in my spare time. But my Substack is.

If I only did things if I could charge my “expert” hourly rate for, I would miss out on a lot of really fun, delightful things:

• I volunteer at a nonprofit reading to third-graders monthly.

• I recently became a NetGalley reader just for the exclusive thrill of reading Advanced Reader Copies of books that aren’t in the world yet. (Not because I plan on being a GoodReads influencer.)

• I spent several hours on a random Saturday evening filling out a survey about my 1 Second Everyday app for an academic study on memory a few weeks ago and received a $30 pre-paid Visa for my time.

• I host monthly “Hone Your Craft” sessions on Google Meet as a space for folks to bring whatever creative project they’re working on just for fun. It’s body doubling for that knitting project you haven’t gotten around to finishing.

• I’m self-publishing my dating memoir that I hope gets into plenty of people’s hands but don’t expect to be a dependable income stream.

I spent an hour one evening last week brainstorming an entire queue of resources I could make for my current—and, hopefully, future—paid Substack subscribers, the precious people who have raised their hands and their wallets to say, “Hey, Amanda. I see you. I support you.” And I’ll keep spending those hours over and over again, cultivating this little neighborhood of a Substack community.

At face value, the money math is not math-ing.

But I genuinely like this work. This side of my career/business/life is where I’m building bravely, doing things I’ve never done before.

I’m trusting that, actually, you can’t always put a price on the accomplishment of launching that creative project you’ve dreamed about bringing to life.

You can’t always figure out “the right rate” for deeply creative, fun, or silly work, though, in some cases, it’s worth trying.

The minutes you spend doing something you love can’t always be calculated in dollars and cents. If I’m honest, I can’t decide if that’s a price we pay or a free gift we give ourselves.

In the fall of 2019, I was done. Fed up. Anneliese Van Der Pol-style Over It.

The Orlando, Florida dating scene was dismal and despite all my best efforts, I couldn’t get a decent date to save my life1. I’d also never been in a relationship, not for lack of trying, and I was starting to wonder if the real problem here… was me. (You know, and not the countless shirtless men holding fish on Hinge!)

So… I turned my romantic frustration into creative motivation. I wrote the dang book, a dating memoir (still) affectionately called Hit Single.

And then, Dear Reader… I sat on that manuscript for seven. Freaking. Years. But no more!

As of this week, I’ve finished a beta reader round, with lots more editing to come in the next few months, followed by cover design (with my brilliant designer artist husband), layout, and all the other lovely logistics of self-publishing and bringing a book into the world.

But the hard parts of making it exist, editing it enough to begin the publishing process, and announcing what comes next are all behind me.

And I want to help you get there, too!!!

Today, I’m giving you your own copy of the Chapter Map, the exact Google Sheet resource that helped me organize, refine, and finalize my book so the entire work was ready for my beta readers. The template has separate sheets for an anthology, novel, non-fiction work, or a poetry collection, too. (I even made you a Loom video showing how I’m still using my copy to apply this recent round of feedback!)

I’m also sharing the detailed backstory of getting ready for the self-publishing process and seven of my best pieces of creative advice for this wild journey we call writing a book.

If you’re finishing a book, preparing to, or thinking you might someday… this one’s for you!

Let’s do this.

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I am outrageously, horrendously, bad with numbers.

My 5s on high school AP calculus exams would seem to make me a liar, but I’m not bad at math, necessarily. I’m bad with numbers.

I’m horrific with the “street smarts” side of numbers, as anyone who’s ever played Wits and Wagers with me can attest.1

I also can’t look at a room and tell you approximately how many people are in it, estimate the distance between two locations, or enter a giveaway based on how many jelly beans are in that jar.

I’m also pretty dreadful at guessing food volume. (Which is, actually, a shockingly important skill for people who cook a lot of their own meals at home.) I’ve often been known to get a Tupperware out of the kitchen cabinet to store a sauce or main course and start dishing leftovers into it vigorously, only to quickly find out that I have way more food than storage container allows.

In this scenario, most people would just get a different container. No big deal.

I’m not most people.

My default setting is to keep delusionally stuffing the food inside at a rapid rate, determined to only use the container I got out (and got dirty!) up to and even beyond the point when the lid doesn’t fit.

I keep pushing down my doomed mountain of food thanks to sheer stubbornness and inertia, when the obvious, silly-simple solution would be to change the container.

Sometimes in life, we need a bigger Tupperware.

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I started to realize my need for this Tupperware analogy in 2020, in one of those transitional moments between no longer and not yet that come to us in our 20s. I was considering a move across states, navigating the aftermath of a COVID layoff, watching my friend group dynamics start to shift, grappling with the instability of quarantines and testing.

Within and outside all of that, I was sensing a sea-change coming that I didn’t yet know the shape of.

And no matter how hard I tried to make things work, something felt off. Move logistics weren’t quite meshing. Best-laid plans to visit my family in Ohio weren’t coming to fruition. As everyone was navigating back then, so much agency had been taken from me—daily rhythms disrupted, planned trips and concerts cancelled—but underlying all of it was this sense that things weren’t falling into place like I wanted.

I soon got a remote job at a start-up, which offered me flexibility I’d never yet had, which at least gave me some structure and a guaranteed paycheck to fund my life, whatever came next.

As I talked to a dear friend and mentor about everything that felt unclear and uncertain and out of sorts, she helped me realize that I was trying to smoosh my life into too small a container. I was only able to see the current moment in one light; I evaluated it as pass-fail.

I had to move into a certain kind of space on a specific, set timeline.

I could only visit my parents if it was also during my transition between cities.

I would work from my kitchen because it was the most straightforward option.

But none of these were requirements, and all of them made too small of a container for this transitional moment. As it turns out, I at least had enough agency and flexibility to reimagine my Tupperware.

I could allow my move to be TBD for a little while longer.

I could conspire with my brother, drive home to surprise my parents, stay for a few weeks, and visit my best friend on the way back south.

I could work from Ohio and Atlanta, instead of just my Florida home.

Something changed when I left myself open to shifting my plan and reimagining my path forward. I gave myself the gift of a larger container for my life that summer. And it turns out that that was the decision that allowed me to serendipitously meet my now-husband.

What if I had stuck with my narrow definitions of what that season—and what my life—could be? What if I had refused to listen to that quiet but insistent voice telling me something felt off, the one that said my current view of my season was too small?

Well, everything would be very different now, wouldn’t it?

Our too-small Tupperware moments often tend to come at pivot points of uncertainty.

It starts quietly at first.

We realize we’re dissatisfied with a real problem in the world we can’t seem to leave unsolved. A current career or company feels wrong where it doesn’t used to. We realize we’re not living in line with our values of community or travel or novelty and that we’re the only one who can change that.

These observations itch at us for a while. They sound like the gnats or mosquitoes that fly around our heads in the heat of summer, so we swat them away for a bit. But eventually, we can’t ignore the buzzing anymore.

“This container is too small,” says the voice.

I don’t think it’s always a negative nudge, either. Sometimes, a too-small Tupperware feels like aspiration or wanderlust. It feels like a need to move toward instead of away from something, like a dream of going back to school or moving to a new country or starting a nonprofit to right the wrongs you see in the world.

And we can keep trying, over and over, to stuff our lives into the current container that’s just barely not big enough. I won’t blame you if you do.

That container is familiar. It’s known and comfortable. Maybe it even aligns with some arbitrary plan or rule or expectation we set for ourselves at some point, though we don’t know when.2

But if you remain on the current path—that job or that industry, this city or this friend group or this way of engaging with the headlines on the TVs at the gym—it will keep you cramped. It forces you to play small and wonder what might happen if you had more room for wonder and curiosity and play.

Have you ever been on the expansive, hopeful, wide-open precipice of your life? Gosh, can’t you breathe up there? Can’t you see for miles? Don’t you fall asleep with a smile on your face and jump out of bed first thing in the morning?

That’s what happens when you choose a bigger Tupperware. And it gives you spaciousness to love your life and uncover surprises you didn’t even know were waiting for you.

I grew up, a young millennial in the late 90s, with the friendly monsters of Sesame Street and the exuberant mail retrieval of Blue’s Clues and the literate exotic cats of Between the Lions and the sparkly shell of Dragon Tales. I twirled around my living room to every princess story Disney would animate for me and ate up chapter books about crickets at Times Square and mice on motorcycles.

I consumed these characters and stories, the ones that taught me to read voraciously and share generously, to befriend boldly and create courageously, and, maybe most importantly, to hope vividly and imagine with abandon.

And for quite a long time… I did. I made up songs in my closet and cared for my three imaginary children. (Two girls and a boy.) I picked dandelions freely and waved at strangers without worrying how they would respond. I set elementary school goals and worked toward dreams, never for a moment considering that I might not reach them.

When I imagined, it was with Ferris-wheel optimism, like I could see the whole world from way up here, all of life spread out in front of me.

It never happens all at once. That first deeply-felt disappointment comes and the world cracks just a little, but you stay determined to hope. I think most of us might blame it on middle school, when we start to notice what other kids think of us. We zip up a jacket of self-consciousness around ourselves and get a little quieter, a little less silly, a little more hesitant to share what we drew or what we wrote or what we think.

As we live more years, we learn that not everything will line up and not every competition will go how we imagine and some (many) dreams won’t go like we planned.

I lost some spelling bees and horrendously struggled to make friends in my teenage years after my fourth time changing schools. Later, in college, I would vividly manifest that orientation summer job after my freshman year and receive my first crushing, “Thanks for your application, but…” email.

During the semester when I was applying for study abroad and Disney World’s college exchange program—thrilling opportunities that now make up some of my favorite memories from those years—I felt true anxiety and panic for the first time, unable to picture the best-case scenario and only overwhelmed by the dread of the present moment.

Instead of basking in the excitement ahead, I imagined myself out of control and all alone.

Even when I got my absolute ideal internship right out of college, my ecstasy was soon followed by disillusionment thanks to reorgs and toxic teams. In the decade since then, I blame much of my corporate realism and dream-job skepticism on that first experience of the working world.

My strained relationship with imagination truly came into focus in my 20s when I started dating for the first time. Having never had a boyfriend or been kissed nearly a decade after most people first reach those milestones, I held every unrequited crush very tightly and obsessed over dating app banter. I would feel immensely hopeful about a potential relationship, picture things going well in the specific way I’d scripted, and feel devastated when nothing happened.

Sometime, without me noticing, my default became not-hoping—because hope often felt too painful.

I was much quicker, in my love life and my work life and my outlook on the world, to imagine worst-case scenarios. Because if those came true, at least I could claim validation and say, if only to myself, “See?! I was right, wasn’t I?”

After noticing my tendency toward pessimism, I eventually decided that, in my dating life at least, hope was actually worth the gamble. It was worth risking hurt feelings or a few days’ worth of tears after he said he didn’t want to go on any more dates. It was worth silly things like spending a few dollars on a gag gift for a coworker crush or a tin of Icebreakers mints when I thought a date might result in my first kiss at age 23.

I saw these sparks of hope as down payments, investments in a love story I couldn’t see the end of yet. I wanted to use my imagination even if it came with a painful pang of longing in the moment and might even be painful again later if things didn’t go how I wanted. I knew that hope was a good use of imagination.

Somehow, I still haven’t figured out how to apply that imagination to uncertainty in every level of my life.

Last week, my Wednesday and Thursday were ruined because I saw, respectively, someone’s Facebook story about climate change and one of those dastardly AI headlines. The uncertainty of these massive, global-scale fears is enough to topple me in a moment. And even though I’ve been reading books like Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable, which beckons me to hopeful, constructive futures thinking in response to major change, I often find myself unable to imagine anything but the horrible outcome the clickbait headline wants me to picture.

I constantly feel the tension of uncertainty in my roles and relationships, watching friendships evolve in my 30s—most of my closest live all over the US, and even hard-won community these days always feels so different from the connections forged in the fires of roommatehood during college and shortly after. As an Enneagram 3, I have to consciously choose not to define myself and my worth by my relationship to work, which makes my ongoing mental wrestling match of “Is this an industry I should continue to contribute to?” and “Do I drop this client?” and “Am I networking right?” feel extra high stakes.

And through it all, I feel the steady drip of uncertainty within myself as I try to make art I love and am proud of, even if others’ response to said art is muted (or if I don’t share the art with anyone at all). As I wonder about what things to monetize and which to keep as joyful outlets. As I wonder if I need to change my career entirely and keep hearing a quiet voice say yes, probably. As I try to be of service to those around me and revisit my values and learn to trust my intuition.

So often—too often—I respond to uncertainty by imagining just how many ways things could go wrong. I wish the uncertainty away, longing to know now how the story will end later or, better yet, to script it myself.

When I find myself wanting that absurd, impossible, irrational level of control, I try to remember how many of my favorite stories didn’t happen according to my vision. Like Sam Smith sings on their most recent album, “Like all good things, he caught me by surprise.”

Yet even if the best things tend to exceed our wildest imaginings, I think it’s time to return to the sense of hopeful imagination we learned from our favorite stories from before we turned 10.

Sacred and truly magical things happen when we choose to imagine something amazing in response to something scary or uncertain.

We become more intuitive, learning in the process what we want to happen next. We become more creative storytellers, reshaping what we see into something more hopeful—something we might even be a part of bringing to life.

We become more resilient, willing to stand in the face of our fears and confusion and uncertainty, ready to step into whatever story comes next.

Image from Netflix’s “Anne with an E” series, sourced via IMDb

Remember when everyone’s go-to descriptor in 2020 was “unprecedented”? You couldn’t scroll, click, or change channels without hearing some company or marketer or nonprofit describe the current era as “these unprecedented times.”

And the moment was unprecedented. That degree of global disruption at every level of our lives was, till then, unheard of.

I don’t hear people use “unprecedented” quite as liberally these days, and yet… we’re still facing our fair share of things as an entire human race that we’ve never faced before.

If I put my language nerd hat on for a moment, I propose that we’ve replaced the intensity of the pandemic’s unprecedentedness with the longer-term, slower burn of uncertainty. I hear (and say) it constantly: “Everything just feels so uncertain right now.”

Housing markets, job markets, prices at the supermarket. It all feels wobbly, like there’s nothing to grab onto to make sense of it all.

Of course, no one in human history has ever been able to reliably predict the future. But today, things that used to seem stable and reliable in our own lives—or areas where optimism seemed like the default option—feel unstable and unreliable… and profoundly unpredictable.

Here’s my theory: Uncertainty feels especially urgent and prevalent now because it’s surrounding us on all sides and at every level of our lives. It’s inescapable.

So trying to make a decision about anything—Should I change careers? What steps do I take to build community? Do I move cities or states or countries? Can I afford to have kids (and do I want to)? How do I contribute to the planet in a positive way? How do I balance doing things I genuinely enjoy with rent that’s too-damn-high?—feels incredibly overwhelming.

The more I talk to people on Substack and face to face, the more convinced I am that we’re all feeling it.

I am neither a therapist nor a sociologist nor a political scientist. But I’m a writer, observer, and community-builder. And with the help of those identities, I submit that these three levels of uncertainty, taken together, are making everything feel really freaking unsteady, unstable, and unnerving.

Level One: Macro-Uncertainty

Humans have always known unrest. There have always been wars and natural disasters and irresponsible leaders and nuanced global conflict.

But there has not always been a small rectangle in our pockets and purses broadcasting the latest terrifying and heart-breaking details with headlines carefully engineered to spark fear 24/7, via just about every channel imaginable. This reality—of always-on global awareness—is a relatively new development in the course of human history. And technology shoves worldwide uncertainty in our faces non-stop.

In How To Not Know, explains, “Our devices… heighten our [uncertainty] distress by collapsing the distance between us and the world’s problems.”

Our devices also largely depend on addictive black-box algorithms that benefit from sowing division and outrage, directly acting against the supposed “social” intent of the platforms. Not only are we now aware of the uncertainty in real time, but the information is also filtered in ways that are designed to upset us.

I find myself constantly walking the fine line between wanting to know what’s going on—so I can have intelligent conversations or donate money or volunteer my time or be a mindful consumer—and needing to protect my peace by not receiving an ongoing drip of global bad news.

What’s more, much of the uncertainty that spans continents is (largely) outside my control. But that doesn’t mean macro-uncertainty doesn’t impact my life or bring me to tears or lead me to concoct vivid future scenarios in my head.

I can choose to use AI less in my day-to-day work, but that won’t change the data center contract that the city commission signed in a neighboring town.

I can compost and admire our backyard garden and the wildlife that love it, but I can’t ignore the fact that fewer and fewer fireflies show up every summer.

I can put my phone down and give more of my attention to my community and the people in front of me, but as a global citizen, I’m still conscious, if only partially, of macro-level decisions made well beyond my scope that will tangibly affect my life.

The world is uncertain, as it has been. We’re just force-fed greater awareness of it all.

Level Two: Circumstantial Uncertainty

We were built to live interconnected lives. When our connections get fractured or change dramatically, the ground shifts beneath us. Boom, uncertainty.

In those “unprecedented times,” COVID quarantine yanked us away from the normal rhythms of our lives—in-person work and happy hours with friends and family gatherings. Yet years after returning to “normal,” the relational, circumstantial uncertainty is still present in our relationships.

If you’re in your 30s like me, your friendships almost definitely look different than they did a decade ago, and most of us agree that it’s harder to make friends with age.

Maybe your family structure has shifted and now you have dependents or responsibilities that mean your work and your life don’t mesh like they used to.

If you work in-house, you’ve probably arm-wrestled with the fact that “company loyalty” isn’t the sure thing it used to be, and layoffs surely seem more arbitrary than ever. Maybe you’re like me and the industry you’ve spent years learning and growing in doesn’t feel like home anymore (if it ever did).

Circumstantial uncertainty ripples out around us. Our communities and relational structures have changed and continue to change.

Many of us find meaning and identity in the roles we fill with and for and among others: our coworkers or our neighbors or our partners. But when these interactions feel fragmented and unsteady, as they often do these days, we feel awkward at best and isolated, alone, and unknown at worst.

Level Three: Internal Uncertainty

The more I write on the internet and the more people I talk to, the more common this uncertainty seems to be. If someone seems like they have it all figured out or confidently have their future mapped out to their satisfaction… they’re probably really good at faking it or you just don’t have all the information.

Here are the stories I see a lot more often.

You picked a career path as a young adult, during or after college if you went, and… 10 to 15 years in, you don’t enjoy it as much as you used to, if you ever did. The path no longer feels right to you. You feel burnt out and bored or dissatisfied but don’t know what you want instead.

Maybe something happened—a reorg, layoff, or revelation of your leadership’s motivations—that disillusioned you, and now you no longer feel like you can contribute to your current field or company in good conscience.

Maybe you know your dream career or field (you can practically taste it), but the obstacles of going back to school or starting back at entry-level don’t fit with your current season of life.

Or maybe it’s that the ever-present circumstantial and macro-uncertainties make pivoting feel risky, if not impossible.

The uncertainty comes from knowing you want something different and better for your life or your work but not being sure what that is… or how to get there.

I think that moment comes for us all at some point.

It’s the moment when you start asking questions like, “What do I want for myself? Where do I go from here? This life or career doesn’t feel right… but what would?” And you’re the only one who can answer or act to change things.

I wish I had answers to any or all of these uncertainties. But I don’t for myself… and I definitely don’t for you. What I do know is that uncertainty is here to stay. Trying to eradicate it is a futile effort; it’s a waste of your precious, limited energy and effort and time.

I’m learning to believe that the best response to uncertainty is resilience. It’s getting more comfortable with liminal spaces and question marks.

“The more comfortable we can become with uncertainty, the more gracefully we adapt to whatever comes our way.” — Simone Stolzoff, How To Not Know

Resilience looks like responding to scary headlines with skills like futures thinking that let us imagine (and maybe even contribute to) a better someday.

It’s understanding and co-creating our relationships and circumstances with greater intention so we can show up as our best selves.

It’s cultivating imagination and play and experimentation so that, when questions about our lives and careers pop up, we respond by exploring something new rather than staying stuck.

Maybe uncertainty doesn’t have to be what scares us; maybe it can teach us to build the life that we really, truly love, no matter what the world throws at us.

If you’re still reading, (1) thank you. (2) This might be the hardest Substack essay I’ve written yet because it’s one of those ideas that hasn’t let me go for months—which is how I know it’s important enough to share.

Lately, I’ve become and stayed obsessed with uncertainty. I’m starting to believe that my next mission (and I’m inclined to accept it) is to help all of us navigate uncertainty with greater confidence and build resilient lives, careers, and creative practices that can cope with the unknown.

If all of this resonates, I’m building something for you, so I hope you subscribe and stick around. Glad you’re here.

Photo of steps in Seattle taken by the author.

Some people’s ideas are so brilliantly simple that they make you say, “Dang… I wish I’d thought of that.” That’s usually what happens when Anthony Pierri and his consultancy, FletchPMM, roll into my LinkedIn feed. The team at Fletch has now helped hundreds of software companies with their homepage positioning, so their product marketing ideas only feel simple. They’re backed by some seriously solid thinking and the wisdom that comes with many, many reps.

Even if you don’t spend your spare time thinking about how to market software companies (it’s me, hi), Anthony has so much to teach you about clarity and owning your category.

I funneled my healthy jealousy into an outreach to Anthony, and he sat down with me to share the turns his career has taken in the last decade and why he advocates for being known for something.

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playing Mad Libs with software websites

In 2015, Anthony was pastoring at a Chicago church, feeling drained, and ready for a change. A former boss connected him to an agency that did dev, design, and product management. While working in entry-level sales there, Anthony’s cold outreach kept hitting walls.

The problem was that the agency customized each client engagement from a list of a few hundred distinct services, so outbound selling was basically impossible. He and his future co-founder Rob Kaminski wondered, “What if we standardized the offer?” Then, instead of vaguely asking potential clients, “Hey… you need anything?” they could sell a specific, repeatable process to a well-defined set of potential clients.

As Anthony and Rob learned more about positioning, they realized it was typically more of a marketing process than a product strategy one. And they doubled down on this kind of work. To start getting the word out, Anthony posted an infographic on LinkedIn—it went viral. So did his second post. His LinkedIn growth dropped off a bit after that, but they figured this was proof they were onto something.

From there, Anthony and Rob started looking at websites to try to reverse engineer their positioning strategies, which they turned into Mad Libs-style breakdowns: “We serve X company in Y industry, and we help them with Z problem.” They saw that most websites were missing the key ingredients of a positioning statement. “They were usually ridiculously hard to understand and really, really vague,” Anthony explains. Once they started posting on LinkedIn about this problem, companies reached out to them for help rewriting their sites.

As both co-founders’ followings grew on LinkedIn, FletchPMM zeroed in on a repeatable service for a specific segment: homepage positioning for B2B software companies. They’ve done over 600 of these projects so far.

the power of picking one thing

When I think of the company Yamaha, I picture a piano because I’ve played the instrument my whole life. But you might think of motorcycles or sound boards, and you’d be right, too. The same corporation makes all of them. Anthony cites Yamaha as the very, very rare example of a widely known company that’s strongly associated with multiple things.

Most of us—people and organizations—can’t get away with that. If you want to build an audience, it’s going to be a lot easier if you choose one thing to be known for. “It’s very difficult to win in multiple zones,” Anthony explains. “Can service providers like me be known and win for many different things? The answer is usually no.”

He preaches the value of picking one thing, an almost uncomfortably narrow offering that you can be known for. That’s the space where you’re more likely to win. This is why Fletch niched the way it did. While people in the software space might be able to list off a handful of folks who do “positioning,” there’s far fewer (and maybe only one well-known consultancy) with the narrower, more specialized expertise of “homepage positioning.”

It’s only natural that Fletch would nail their positioning; that’s exactly what they help their software company clients do.

Marketing vague outcomes like “boosting revenue” is claiming to solve a problem that most other companies would also claim to solve, especially your competitors. Specific and strong positioning solves something really clear that only a small handful of companies do and that the right customers can instinctively understand right away.

positioning beyond his day job

One of the things I loved about talking to Anthony is that he’s done positioning in multiple spheres of his life. He helped his brother Vincent—who was also a pastor at the time—to position himself as a public speaking coach for SaaS execs trying to nail their first conference talk, a much more targeted offering than “public speaking coach.” This Anthony-coached strategy helped grow his LinkedIn following from 0 to 30K followers in two years.

Vincent has since repositioned again into being the LinkedIn infographic expert, another small niche pool where his expertise can shine. “When you tighten so much, there are fewer competitors,” Anthony says. “Many names come to mind as ‘LinkedIn strategy people,’ but who’s the top infographic person? Maybe Vincent and one other person come to mind?”

Anthony even did a positioning sprint for Good Hangs, the band he’s in with his friends. Their first album had songs that represented several different genres, and listeners would typically only like one or two tracks: the ones from their favorite genre. “We realized that you really have to put yourself in a bucket if you want to succeed—or it’s just exponentially harder,” says Anthony.

The band members made playlists for each of the five-ish genres their debut album fell into and analyzed the hallmarks of each one to figure out where they could compete. They landed on early 2000s pop punk emo music. “A staple of that music is the singers are bad, and the joke is they’re whiny and terrible. None of us are good at singing, so we were like, ‘We could do that,’” Anthony says. Now they make music in that specific genre for a group of people they think are underserved by modern emo and pop punk music: millennials.

They’ve since taken their monthly listeners from a couple hundred to 150K; their five biggest songs have over a million streams apiece. And it’s because they weren’t content to be a small fish in a massive pond. They found the niche that would let them be a big fish in a small one.

what happens when you go all in

Before talking to Anthony, I was jealous of his really good product marketing ideas and Fletch’s 2-week Positioning Sprint offer. (Still jealous of those things.) Since our conversation, I’m also jealous of his ability to go all in.

One of my biggest struggles in my business and my creative life is having a hundred different ideas on a given Tuesday, wanting to chase them all, and never giving any of them my whole self. And while I tell myself it’s going all in, it more often feels like burning out.

So you can do all the things, if you wanna; it’s just going to be harder to find your people and have them instantly associate you with something. But when you get laser-focused on the idea or story or niche you can’t stop thinking about, the thing you’re desperate to be known for? That corner of the world is yours for the taking.

It’s not just me, right? Do you, too, have the Noah Kahan “End of August” riff stuck in your head lately? How did he so perfectly capture, in just those first six notes, the peace and nostalgia that the final days of summer bring?

How does this song tangibly embody the desperation to hold onto the warmth, the long days and expansive hours, the growth and greenery, the extra time with friends, and the magic of lightning bugs… for just a little longer?

My teacher husband went back to school last week, which is my annual signal to resume normal working hours and a harbinger of the return of sports games and dances.

I’ve always appreciated the cyclical rhythms of education, how my urge to read more thrillers and eat more cinnamon and see more orange foliage on drives through town overlaps with classes restarting and homecoming weekend and mini fall break.

My seasonal rituals greet me like an old friend every year—they’re one of the things I love about my life.

I hope you feel at home in whatever season you find yourself in today and that small joys greet you wherever you look, pumpkin-flavored or otherwise.

The start of August was the one-year anniversary of the “How’s work going?” conversation that bluntly revealed just how unhappy I was with my work—the realization that hundreds of folks have related to, commiserated with, and reposted on Substack and LinkedIn.

The bad news and the good is that I still have no idea what I’m doing… but, I’m finding, neither does almost anyone else. What whimsy there is in that. What magic that we’re all figuring life out as we go along.

This summer took me by surprise. Here’s how my business went (including a very vulnerable income reveal for the last three months), my plans for the rest of 2026, and a peek over my shoulder at the books, movies, and miscellanea that made me like my life more.

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Sometime in the late 2010s, my creative queue became… unmanageable.

Marketing was my day job, so I spent 9-5 “spinning up” copy for blog posts and website refreshes and donor emails. But at night, my brain was awash in creative potential; somehow I wasn’t spending all of my creative energy at work.

I came up with devastating poems about being single and mentally outlined a few novels. I started concepting—and scripted a few scenes for—a Bon Jovi jukebox musical with a best friend, arranged a Queen jukebox musical in a Google Doc, and, even with zero composing ability, brainstormed a dating app musical, no jukebox involved1.

That was also the season in which I did my own offbrand NaNoWriMo-style challenge that resulted in a dating memoir I’m still editing. (I’m recruiting beta readers who don’t know me IRL starting in September, so if you’re interested… hit me up!)

Seven years later, little has changed. If anything, the pile of ideas is higher than ever. Countless crochet projects in my Notes app. Illustrated book, with copy written and pages storyboarded. Sticker ideas and calendar painting concepts and jazz piano improvisation aspirations.

I cycle through them all on a weekly (or daily) basis, making slow progress on most of them but rarely finishing any.

If only I had unlimited time in the day to explore my creative pursuits!!! But I am a 30-year-old woman with a partner and a mortgage and a client here or there and dishes in the sink, so I never, ever feel like I have the margin to match my ambitions to my output.

And yet… I’d still say I’m in a creatively fulfilling season. I am making progress toward many of these dreams, and making the most of the free moments I have in a week to create. Here are five creative commandments I’m living by that let that happen.

1. accept that your queue will never be empty

I love a checklist as much as the next Type A gal. I adore the feeling of completing something, striking through text, and knowing I’ve done what I set out to do.

But if your creative brain is always coming up with new ideas, you’ll probably never be able to make it all happen—to cross every item off the ever-growing list. My sanity and my creative practice depend on my making peace with that.

The key is trusting that the ideas you actually chase and make exist were the ones that the world needed… or that you did.

This week, I chatted with Mo Akif, a ghostwriter and founder of the Guild95 community that’s helping folks in tech build their personal brand (and career insurance) on LinkedIn. I bemoaned my “founder brain” and its tendency to come up with tons of ideas—far more than I could ever take action on. He said he feels that way, too, but he takes notes in a journal about the ideas as they come to him. And the ones he can’t stop thinking about are the ones he chases. Some ideas will fade after a week or two, and he lets those go. (I want to get better at that!)

It makes me think of the writer’s maxim of “killing your darlings,” but with ideas.

To keep creating, we have to let go of many of our good ideas so we can birth our best ideas into the world.

2. give your creativity what it needs in each season

Is creativity a discipline or a practice of play? Yes. (It’s both.) In different seasons, your creative practice will and should swing between these two extremes.

In some seasons, we need to rediscover our sense of creative exploration. Our well of ideas runs dry or, if we have ideas, we simply need to free write or doodle or create in an unstructured way to get to know them better.

In other seasons, we know which ideas we want to act on; we have the novel outline or the painting concept. We just need to schedule time to sit down and write X words a day or paint for Y minutes a week.

If you start being disciplined when you actually need to just explore, you’ll probably resent the practice and struggle to create even if you sit down at a scheduled time.

But if you keep thinking you’ll “get around to” creating when you already know you just need a dedicated discipline… you also might not get anywhere.

Listen to yourself and your season. Infuse discipline and play accordingly.

3. reframe your definition of progress when needed

If your creative queue is endless like mine—from a billion Substack essay ideas to digital drawings of animals saying funny things—you might find your attention split. Which is a massively draining way to create. Whatever you work on, you might end up feeling guilty, like a parent of multiple children who can never perfectly give equal attention to everyone. (At least, I imagine so.)

Make peace with this by redefining progress.

A few weeks ago, I lamented to my husband that my illustrated book has been collecting dust all summer. “I haven’t made any progress on it since June, and I’ve been aiming to finish an illustration every week!” I said. Meanwhile, I’ve been editing my dating memoir faster than in any other season, hurtling toward my goal of self-publishing it (which is also my ultimate goal for the illustrated story).

My brilliant husband asked me, “What if, just for now, you thought about working on Hit Single as making progress on Business Bear, since it’s ultimately in service of removing that editing project from your plate?” This question rewired my brain and, ever since, I’ve kept editing the memoir and lightened the emotional burden I’ve felt about not illustrating every weekend.

He also suggested lowering my bar for minimum output as much as possible, like drawing a single line every day rather than trying to finish an entire illustration every week. That progress isn’t nothing, and it’s better than avoiding eye contact with my sketchbook altogether.

4. don’t monetize everything

Some creative endeavors need to be just for fun. If you work across multiple mediums, I deeply hope you’re able to set aside one as a space for play because those art forms refill your cup in a way nothing else does.

For me, it’s crochet. When I started learning from YouTube tutorials, I made a commitment to myself that I wouldn’t start churning out baby blankets to sell or workshopping patterns for Etsy. (For what it’s worth, it’s really hard to charge enough for crochet projects based on your time.)

I’m hoping to publish and sell my books, I’m brainstorming a sticker shop and/or mail club, and I have paid Substack subscriptions turned on. But not everything has to be part of a plan to drive income.

If you notice that your first instinct is to market and sell your work, especially with a completely new skill you just learned2, take a moment to pause and see if you can spend a few weeks or months (or longer) just doing it because it’s enjoyable and gives you life.

I promise something magical happens when you do something creative just because you love it for its own sake.

5. write your ideas down, no matter what

What we’re not going to do is think, “I have too many ideas already, so I might as well abandon this one altogether because I’ll never have time for it. I’m not going to write it down.” BZZT! Nope. We always always always write our ideas down because you literally never know how they might come back around to support and serve us later.

I’ve had Substack newsletter ideas that ended up tying into other concepts that came to me spontaneously, and I’m so glad I didn’t lose track of those threads. I’ve had high-level book ideas that I’m grateful I kept around because they inspired future essays. I have items in my creative queue that I forgot about for years, and they felt truer to me when I rediscovered them than when I first wrote them down.

Now, do I sometimes jot down an idea at 2:16am without enough context that is absolute nonsense by morning? Yup. Do some of those old creative thoughts sound completely absurd when I find the Google Doc anew? You bet.

But being your own idea archivist is critical record-keeping for your creative self. It’s validating whatever the Muse is surfacing in a given moment and trusting your own intuition enough to say, “I don’t know what this idea will or won’t become, but I believe that there’s something here that’s worth capturing. And it’s all part of the process.”

So write each idea down, every last one. In your pocket notebook, on a sticky pad, in the Notes app. At any time of day or night. Wherever in the world you are.

The ideas that are meant to exist will find their way out of your heart and into the world.

Photo from Little Women (2019 film), sourced from DailyArt Magazine

In April 2024, my book club gathered for a special session: two hours of vision boarding, facilitated by our very own Dianna. I wasn’t new to the concept, but I mess with almost any creative project—and I love a collage.

I snipped 20-or-so scraps from lifestyle and women’s health magazines and laid them out in messy sections. At the end of our time together, we explained what and why we had collaged (and “envisioned”), laughing together at accidental subliminal messages and unintended patterns in the boards.

Before we went home, Dianna advised us to put the vision board somewhere we’d see it every day to remember what we’d set out as an intention and remind us to keep shifting our lives in the direction of these dreams. And I took the advice… sort of.

I left the card stock at the top of a miscellaneous box in my office closet. I’d technically see it most days when I swapped out my purse for my gym bag or grabbed my favorite canvas tote to carry my library haul.

But I rarely noticed it and, what’s worse, as I put more random items in the box over time, the vision board drifted to the bottom, seldom to be thought of.

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two and a half years later…

Just yesterday, I was listening to Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast during a brutal leg day after a six-month hiatus.

His guest was Ron Funches, a jovial and vulnerable comedian my husband and I have been referencing and impersonating more than usual lately. Ron hosts vision boarding parties with his friends, and in one of his specials, he even tells the story of how he put buying a house for his son on a vision board. He held the next vision boarding gathering in that exact house.

Another win for the vision board!

As I endured the self-induced torture of the leg press machine, Ron’s story reminded me of that slightly crumbled vision board in my closet. I wondered how the board from a couple years ago stacked up to my life today.

Compared to 2024, my work is largely the same, though I’m working to change it these days. I live in the same small town. While I’ve picked up a few new hobbies, most of them are the same activities I’ve enjoyed for a long time.

But after I got home from the gym, I stared at the vision board anew.

• Like in Ron’s story, the left corner of my board was an homage to my homeownership hopes. At the time, we had been touring houses for a few months and had a couple offers turned down. Just six months after vision boarding night, we moved into a home of our own. I even included photos of a bathtub and a coffee tray; last Friday, I took my first bath in our house, and I spend every morning at the drink station in the kitchen.

• I snipped and pasted lots of plant and garden imagery. Today, my husband has a wildflower and potato patch in the backyard; the combo is half accidental, half on purpose. Indoors, I dutifully care for a strawberry plant, some budding basil, a Christmas cactus, a lavender plant, and an offic begonia.

• The right quarter of the board is distinctly autumnal, with an orange sweater and a small patch of fall foliage. The word “style” is there as a way to recognize my desire to find out which clothes I feel best in and embrace my season. Since then, I’ve crocheted several sweaters and vests for myself in dark greens and browns which are, decidedly, my colors.

• The word “women” prominently shows up at the bottom of the board, and the last two years have deepened some of my local female friendships. I gasped aloud when I realized that I had even achieved my goal of seeing all five of my bridesmaids, scattered across the US, within the same year after making the vision board.

• The word “travel” shows up, complete with an image of a person on a beach, underneath a palm tree. 2025 was a year of unexpected trips to Cleveland and Orlando, on top of our Seattle summer rhythm. And my husband and I spent a delightful day (you guessed it!) on the beach during a weekend visit to Sarasota for a wedding.

• The dog in the bottom right-hand corner wasn’t me wishing to own a dog but to meet many more strangers’ dogs in the course of life. And I’d say that’s happened, too.

My 2026 life isn’t a perfect recreation of the collage. While I’ve made progress toward the voiced goal of stillness and “keeping it simple,” I have a long way to go. The image of legs in flight was my attempt to get my knees back in running shape, and my 30-year-old body still starts protesting at the mile mark… although I’ve been doing sprint workouts lately that my joints haven’t grumbled about much.

But all in all, my life looks different in some small (and big!) intentional ways that make me feel more like myself and more like the person I want to become.

a vision for every part of yourself

I’ve written before about how I don’t have one big dream for my life and career. I had one as a teenager, lived it in my early 20s, and I’m just now, a decade later, realizing I want to set a new one.

While the all-consuming dream has felt elusive to me, the idea of collaging a vision board really appeals to me because it lets you set distinct goals for different facets.

You can cut out images or words for how you want things to feel, as vaguely or specifically as you want. You can vision board your relationship, your work, your friendships, your travel, your creativity.

I’m not ashamed of my multi-facetedness, but I do see the appeal of niching and being known for one thing. Vision boarding is an avenue to dream variously and vividly, in living color, for all the sections of yourself and then, to witness and remember over time exactly what you want. It’s a line in the sand, signifying what you want to work toward.

And now, I actually get why Dianna wanted me to see my vision board every day. It’s not just “woo-woo.” It’s a reminder of who you want to be and a way to recognize the progress you’re making as you make it.

tell someone else about your vision

Ron and Mike finished the vision boarding part of their podcast conversation by acknowledging the power of being able to verbalize your dream. “If you have a dream, you should be able to say it out loud... saying ‘I want this,’ there’s a power to that,” Ron says. There’s an intentionality to articulating the dream, and it gives you something to reach for.

There’s also a magic that can happen when you start telling your dream(s) to others. “If you share your dream with other people,...it’s more likely that some of those people, or even one of those people, is gonna do something to help you get to the dream,” Mike says.

And look, I get it: Telling others your dream is freaking vulnerable. It’s scary, and it feels like opening your chest to share some private corner of your heart with another person. For me, it feels like raising the stakes, too; what if I tell them I want this and then I fail? In public?!

But I’m taking Mike’s advice anyway. As I learn to dream again, I’ll let you in on a few of mine:

• Someday, I want to walk into a bookstore and see a calendar that I painted on the shelf.

• I want to be a TEDx speaker.

• I want to narrate an audiobook.

I’m saying them out loud for the internet to see and hear, knowing there are more dreams to come and that these are just some of the things I want to capture on my next vision board, which is now loading.

I don’t know what my life will look like in two and half years, but I’m absolutely up for the challenge of envisioning it.

Last night, I spent 30 minutes staring out the back window of our three-bedroom house. I put away dishes and brushed my teeth during that time, too, but my attention was fixed on backyard wildlife.

If you’re one of my friends on the FaceTime catch-up rotation, you’ll hear about my career ennui, the challenges my husband faces teaching the youth, and our two-week summer trip to Seattle. After covering those critical bases, I’ll likely turn the conversation to Beeg Yoshi, the groundhog who lives under our shed—or rather, the concept of a groundhog.

At this point, we’re convinced there are at least two in our yard, and my fascination kicked in yesterday because I was positive that “Beeg Yoshi” looked smaller than normal. (My husband agreed.) Thus, I was seeing either (1) a baby (which we’ve thought might be in play for months now), or (2) an imposter, trying to sneak into the established den or at least get a nice meal.

In a half hour of watching the critter snack on dandelions and clover, I never saw the confrontation I hoped would confirm the groundhog’s relationship to our resident furry friend.

But after I stopped watching, I texted multiple paragraphs of “field notes from the Jackson Groundhog Sanctuary” to my dad, ending the message with, “Homeownership has made me a very exciting, intriguing person. 😉”

And even though I was being facetious… I actually believe that, I think?

I have a suspicion that many of the macro problems that plague us these days could be solved if everyone took 20 minutes every now and then to watch wildlife or pick flowers or listen to music without multitasking.

We’re drowning in our busyness and notifications and hustle when our bodies and spirits really, desperately need some peace and quiet and some nature.

the wonder of the small

I spent the first half of my 20s chasing bigness.

Moving across the country from Ohio to Florida twice. Traveling to New Zealand for a summer, watching sunrise and sunset from the top of the same mountain in a day, going to a concert every month in 2018. After a Cincinnati suburbs upbringing, it made sense for me to crave the opposite of what I’d known. New experiences and new places and constant excitement, every weekend immensely Instagram-worthy.

When I met my husband in 2020 and unexpectedly moved back to Ohio—to an even smaller, more quaint town than before—life became quiet. (Not the least because of COVID.) Life grew quieter still, following several chaotic months of paint and paperwork, when we were blessed to buy a house in 2024.

Some dormant domestic instinct kicked in around that time. I rushed to buy crochet supplies, restarted my baking kick, and became obsessed with our backyard composter.

Over the past two years, we (but mostly my husband) planted native wildflowers next to the fence, gleefully welcoming pollinators. Watching the fireflies turn their lights on at dusk became a near-nightly summer ritual for me. Tim recently “opened the borders,” which meant removing some of the bricks previous owners had tried to use to keep creatures out, and our reward has been near-daily bunny sightings and rarer skunk and opossum tourism.

I love it all.

Around the time when we moved into this house, I remember thinking that my sense of wonder had pulled a complete U-turn. I’d spent college and the years after breathlessly amazed by the bigness of the world, seeking out the grandest experiences I could.

Now, I’m more often awed by small things: a flower I didn’t know existed, the tiny strawberry I cultivated from a plant indoors, the monarch my spouse stops everything to point out.

The smallness of the world inspires me; it takes my breath away that so much of our existence only happens because of millions of tiny beings that we so easily take for granted.

And I don’t think those small, quiet things are any less important than what our social media feeds, with their not-so-hidden agendas of consumption, teach us we should value.

loving this quiet little life

When I remember the pace of my early 20s and my young-urban-professional life, all I feel is exhaustion. Every night was a social commitment or an outing, every weekend was full to the brim with activities I could film and photograph and share.

I wouldn’t take any of it back, of course. I learned to host well and throw immaculately themed birthday parties. I saw bands like Journey and Hall and Oates so I can swap one-upping concert stories with my 70-something in-laws. I learned a ton about myself through countless hours spent swiping on dating apps which, incidentally, did lead somewhere. It was fullness and busyness and, again, bigness.

My life is much, much quieter now.

I consider an evening where I investigate a groundhog mystery and read over half of a fantasy book to be an eminently enjoyable one. My husband and I walk a loop that passes the school where he works, and I count the lawn geese along the way, making note of which ones are wearing new outfits.

I’m proud of things like my loose-leaf tea haul, a cotton candy-colored mug from my favorite ceramicist, my new plant-patterned Kavu wallet (picked up in Seattle), and homemade fries.

Most people would probably call these “little things.” And they probably are!

But feeling in touch with our small corner of the planet, prioritizing time for cozy creative hobbies, and peeling myself away from the relentless pace of the serially online, comparison-driven world even for just a moment? Those feel like very big things, indeed.

All photos were taken by the author or her husband, and all words were written by me, a bona fide human.

I first learned about St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at age 12 from a fundraising magazine the nonprofit mailed to us. I can still picture the smiling, resilient little girl playing with blocks on the front cover.

After reading her story, I made a decision: My dream was to be a pediatric oncologist at St. Jude when I grew up.

…that is, until I started taking high school biology and chemistry three years later and realized that the sciences were not my gifting.

It wasn’t long before a new dream started to take shape: to work at Disney this time. After a trip to Walt Disney World, multiple “magical” cruises, and countless hours spent watching The Little Mermaid and Oliver & Company, I associated the castle with some of my favorite memories and fondest nostalgia.

So for the next six years of high school and college, I was “the Disney girl,” and I did everything I could to direct the compass of my life toward Orlando, Florida. And I got there! At age 20, I spent a carefree semester taking photos of sweat-laden tourists at Epcot; less than a year later, I started a six-month internal communications internship for Walt Disney World. I loved it.

Career dream? Check. Done. Accomplished.

But after witnessing a reorg and layoffs that disillusioned me and sent me looking for other full-time and salaried opportunities after my internship… I was now living in a world where I’d gotten my career dream.

And as I reflect on my career nearly 10 years later, I’ve realized that I never really replaced that fulfilled dream with a new one to reach for.

I’ve been dreamless for a decade. And I’m more and more certain that it’s the primary source of the career dread I can’t seem to kick.

So, you lived the dream. Now what?

I’ve always hated the idea of “peaking early.” I associate it with sitcom stereotypes of “Uncle Ricos,” the once-high school quarterbacks now in their forties or fifties, still reminiscing on the best time of their lives. I picture long-ago prom queens who’ve been dissatisfied with the path of their life since.

Peaking early means your life did mean something when you were 16 or so, but nothing since then has ever quite felt the same.

I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if those who reach their childhood dreams of being professional ballet dancers or NFL players—which are highly physical, athletic roles that can come crashing down due to injury or age—experience this, too. For the first couple decades of their lives, they work tirelessly toward a goal with an expiration date. And when that expiration date arrives, I would hazard it carries with it a powerful sense of… now what?

I’ve heard or imagined Saturday Night Live alums feel the same way. They start their careers hustling as writers or standups. They ascend to the comedy mecca for a few years. Then, unless the show catapults them to superstardom, they’re forced to reckon with a crucial question: Where do you go after you’ve been to the top of the career mountain?

What dreams do you set after you’ve lived the one you had the longest?

Sensible next steps or the dream after the dream?

All of this is where I find myself today, though the realization feels admittedly… delayed? Instead of still being in my early 20s, reflecting on what dreams to chase after finishing the disheartening dream internship, I’m now 30. And I’m looking back at the last decade realizing that, after I achieved my biggest goal, I didn’t really ever set a new one.

Here’s what happened instead: I moved into a natural neighboring field, shifting from hospitality at Disney to a hospitality tech start-up. That job set me up for a couple marketing roles in software-as-a-service, followed by freelance writing in the same field. All perfectly natural, sensical career choices. And while I found moments of meaning and achievement—my time at Habitat for Humanity and affirmation from “big names” in my niche—none of it gave me the same sense of satisfaction or giddy relief as a living a long-held dream.

None of my career steps has felt quite as good as being able to say, “I can’t believe I finally got to do something I’d hoped for and imagined for a long time.”

And that means it’s long past time to dream again.

setting new dreams

I’m well aware of the countless arguments about how work should “feel” because I’ve seen them as aggressively received replies to some of my Notes here on Substack. “Work isn’t supposed to be fun; if it was fun, companies wouldn’t pay us for it.” (Frankly, I don’t have time or desire to unpack that idea which, in my opinion, is patently broken.)

But I’m enough of a hopeless career romantic to believe that work can be satisfying and enjoyable. I believe that there’s a place for setting an aspiration—call it a dream or a goal or a manifestation—and working hard to reach it.

I think it’s the ideal career path, actually.

In the interest of full disclosure, though… I have no idea how to set those life-changing, all-consuming, sleep-losing-in-a-good-way goals! (The last time I set one, I was 15, and now I’m twice that.)

I feel trapped in aspirational purgatory with somehow too many little dreams that feel random and scattershot, and not enough big “tentpole” dreams that I can hang my hat on and throw all of my being into.

I’ve got books in progress and hobbies to chase and big ideas like “helping others navigate career uncertainty.” I’ve got inklings of inclinations to be put on a sketchy mental vision board that I struggle to describe to people.

I collect countless Substack essays and LinkedIn posts that share bold ideas for how to reach out to people to make your dreams happen… but very few resources that tell me how to choose and decide those dreams in the first place.

So here’s where I’m starting:

1. Listening to my young self. What did she like and want and treasure, beyond a donor marketing magazine and a company I trust to make movies less and less with each passing year? How can I tap into her love of reading or, say, picking flowers, within and outside my career?

2. Slowing the heck down. I’m grateful for the last 10 years of my working life, but I’ve also largely spent them doing what “made sense next.” I don’t know about you, but “making sense” isn’t something I’d attribute to the working world or job market lately. So my current plan is to stop stumbling into more of the same and begin choosing my path and next dream with great intention.

3. Doing it scared. In the last few days of my summer month off, I admitted to my husband that I was really nervous to come back. I told him a little about some of the ideas I’ve had, what I’ve written about on Substack that seemed to land, and the thing I’m scared I might be supposed to build. Angel that he is, he reminded me to do it anyway. So even when I’m frightened of sending the DM or naming the thing or hosting the event or being seen trying, I’m going to anyway.

So whether you’re still working toward your dream, or you reached it and you’re trying to find a new one… please know that I’m right there with you, cheering you on so big as you go.

Photo sourced from Shaylyn via Unsplash.

Billions of dollars are made every year based on the premise that something is wrong with you: your hair, your size, those crow’s feet by your eyes.

So on every platform, brands bombard you with messaging subtly or overtly telling you that (1) you don’t (or shouldn’t) like yourself right now, and (2) you’ll like yourself if you buy their product. This will be the thing that fixes it all.

The problem is that, our whole lives, we’ve all been sold the story that we’re not enough. (Thank goodness we can buy enoughness on sale this Prime Day!) They suggest that we will finally like ourselves if we just make this one purchase that will fix our entire self-esteem. But said purchase will not fix our entire self-esteem, so long as we believe that it can.

Many, many people have made many, many dollars convincing you not to like yourself in a hundred small and large ways so that you can spend money in an endless, fruitless pursuit of liking yourself. It’s easy to forget that it’s happening, but it’s so, so sinister.

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the magic of being good with yourself

My husband and I watched Pamela Adlon’s series Better Things in June; we borderline binged it. It’s a slice of life, for-the-girls family dramedy, and FX genuinely never misses so, of course, I loved it. (It made me like my life more, truly.)

Beyond a few inside references my husband and I now swap every other day, two scenes stuck with me most.

Toward the end of the show, one of the teenage side characters is imploring her friend to make peace with her body and herself. In the process, Pepper says, “I’m good with myself.”

Out of the mouth of a teenager, it’s striking. That’s the time of life when we’re figuring ourselves out for the first of many times, maybe experiencing body dysmorphia or our first wave of romantic feelings. So the idea of being satisfied and at peace with yourself at 16 is radical.

Something similar happens in one of the final scenes of the show. (**Sweeping character development spoiler ahead, in case you plan to watch… and you should!) On the phone with her mother, we watch Pamela Adlon’s character Sam Fox realize and verbalize that she’s at peace with herself and her life. She likes where and who she is, she doesn’t need a relationship to complete her in her fifties, and she’s okay with how it all turned out.

She likes herself.

liking yourself is a decision, and you get to make it.

No matter how old you are, liking yourself is revolutionary. It’s the Jenga block you can pull to send the whole tower of “buy this one thing to fix your whole life” tumbling down.

And when your home base is liking yourself... you’re freed up to like your life, too.

When you like yourself, you start to make decisions, large and small, that you stand by. You’re less likely to subject yourself to that miserable job (if you can help it) because you wouldn’t ever wish it on your friends, whom you love. And you’re starting to see yourself as a friend, too.

When you know and like yourself, you can go out of your way to choose activities and outfits and foods and friends that fit within your vision for your life.

When you’re becoming someone you’re proud of, you like who you see in the mirror. You don’t need to buy whatever the Instagram ads tell you will complete you.

You’re okay with yourself as you are today... and that’s a pretty strong signal that you like your life already, too.

So please make choices that encourage you to like yourself more. If that means exercising because it gives you endorphins (something something about happy people not killing their husbands), then by all means, do that.

If certain foods (or drinks fermented in a particular way) encourage you to become someone you don’t love—grumpy, short-tempered, or with poor self-control—then steer clear of those things.

If your current career path is turning you into someone you don’t like, then it’s probably time to chase something else.

But!!! Don’t buy into the lie that you can’t like yourself just as you are today. The idea that one more habit or rhythm or even *gasp* Substack essay will turn you into someone you like isn’t that far off from the idea that you need to buy something to become The Better You.

It starts with a decision, an internal announcement: I like myself already. Even if I didn’t change anything else, I’m a cool person who deserves to take up space. I’m fundamentally lovable and loved, and the world’s better because I’m in it.

When you know and truly believe all of that, then you can keep following that thread and making choices—for your media and your media and your outfit and your career path—that you genuinely like.

And you can trust yourself to keep making choices that contribute to a life you genuinely love.

Thanks to my friend for reminding me of how important it is for your business and brand and everything else to start with liking yourself… and how related it is to liking your life, too.

The year is 2018.

I’ve just started my first real full-time, 8-hours-a-day-seated-in-a-cubicle job. My commute is an hour each way on a good day, through congested Orlando-area toll roads and, on some days, driving rain.

But the one thing about my young adult life that is going undeniably right is the music. Armed with a Spotify subscription and an incessant urge to make monthly playlists to capture the specific feeling of this season, I curate deep cuts based on my Discover Weekly, artist obsession du jour, and recommendations from friends.

This is the Golden Era of my Playlist-Making. In addition to documenting this early-20s season of my life through songs, I think up niche themes like a “fifty nifty” roundup of tunes named after each of the United States and a roy g biv list of color-themed songs.

This is when I start to really internalize that the right playlist can genuinely turn around your whole day.

Today, my Spotify is a veritable labyrinth of playlists for any and every mood. Heartsick or hopeful. Ambitious or absent-minded. Overjoyed or over it all.

Need a playlist? I gotchu. Here are 10 of my best recommendations and the (highly specific) vibe they conjure.

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1. flower crowns

Descriptors: light-hearted + rejuvenated

Feels like: frolicking through a meadow on the first warm day of the year, going on a coffee date with your bestie, lovingly caring for a garden in your backyard

The visual vibe:

Listen here

2. cuz I loved this place

Descriptors: complicated, liminal

Feels like: running your hands along the banister of your childhood home, watching raindrops crawl down your car window, closing the trunk of the U-Haul and driving to your new adventure

The visual vibe:

Listen here

3. old soul

Descriptors: rooted and wistful and sepia-toned

Feels like: swinging on a bench by a pond/lake/river, flipping through a photo album, antique shopping

The visual vibe:

Listen here

4. step into your power

Descriptors: capable and ambitious

Feels like: getting a “yes” to your bold pitch, putting on an outfit in one of your power colors, getting a new personal best at the gym

The visual vibe:

Listen here

5. mellow-dramatic

Descriptors: in your feelings

Feels like: writing in your journal after a rejection, watching your favorite sad movie to get a good cry out of your system

The visual vibe:

Listen here

6. romance score

Descriptors: floaty, twirly, hopeful

Feels like: eavesdropping on two strangers’ first date that sounds like it’s going well, exchanging flirty texts with your crush, holding your favorite person’s hand, daydreaming about a meetcute in a silly, unique, or treasured place

The visual vibe:

Listen here

7. decide what to be and go be it

Descriptors: purposeful, resilient, reflective

Feels like: vision boarding, calling a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while, paying for the coffee of the person behind you at the café

Listen here

8. on those days

Descriptors: hurt, heavy, disheartened… but known and loved

Feels like: going back to your day job after a morning therapy session, reminding yourself things will be okay when it doesn’t feel like it, taking a slow breakfast when the winter greys have been around for a while

Listen here

9. hone your craft

Descriptors: creative and groovy

Feels like: spending an hour making stuff for its own sake, dancing around the house in funky socks while you do chores

Listen here

10. gravity falls vibes

Descriptors: mysterious and suspenseful… distinctly autumn vibes here!

Feels like: that first annual sip of a pumpkin drink (if that’s your thing), getting the chunky-knit sweaters out of your closet, taking a walk to enjoy the chill in the air

The visual vibe:

Listen here

Happy listening! I hope at least one of these playlists meets you right where you are and that you like your day a little more as a result.

In a flash, I remembered that those had been my most coveted junior-high-cafeteria treat, reserved for the rarest of occasions. (I usually packed a sandwich and a thermos of V8 for the “full serving” of fruits and vegetables, so lunch room purchases were highly unusual.)

The frozen cookies-and-cream confection purchase was the latest in a series of thought experiments I’ve been conducting lately.

As often as I can, I pause to think, “What would my younger self think?” or “What would she do in this situation?” or “How could I make a choice that would make her proud of me?”

For months, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a mail club that prominently features prints and/or stickers with animals I’ve drawn. I’m realizing it’s time to stop toying and begin acting, in great part because I think that the younger versions of myself would strongly approve.

I’ve also half-joked about pursuing audiobook narration on and off for a while. But sitting in my therapist’s lobby last week, I remembered that a very young Amanda recorded cassette tapes of herself reading a Bailey School Kids book on her M&M’s branded CD player sometime around 2002. I’m inclined to believe that she’d be very much on board with an actual, good-faith pursuit of recording audiobooks for the world to enjoy.

The more I interrogate what my younger selves would want or do or think in a given situation, the more I realize that, I must confess… I’m a bit jealous of them.

I wouldn’t trade places with any of them wholesale.

But they all carry pieces of me that I cherish. They hold qualities I want to emulate, or they dreamed even bigger than I do, at times. I’m healthy jealous of their innocence, their openness, their freshness, their hope. While I can’t be them again (and wouldn’t want to), I can sit with them, look deep into their eyes, and reach back through time to give every one of them a big hug.

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1996 Amanda had arrived on earth for the first time about a year ago, eyes wide open to the world. She had never had hands or feet before, and she hadn’t quite figured out how to turn feelings into language.

I’m jealous that the world was hers to explore and experience with no obligation but to exist and eat and be held. I’m also jealous of how many hours per day she slept.

Late-90s Amanda had cooler accessories than I have ever had since. Her personality was massive compared to her small stature, friendliness bursting out of her at every turn. She greeted total strangers loudly and picked flowers and babbled effervescently and with little pause.

I’m jealous of my young-childhood self and her open unabashedness, her compulsion to explore and connect without limits. She was cared for and loved and ready to know anyone she encountered. In her innocence, the world was ever so uncomplicated.

She rode her tricycle around a cul-de-sac singing the 70s songs her parents played in the car at the top of her lungs and with absolutely incorrect lyrics. She was untouchable.

Early-elementary-school Amanda had tasted the sweetness of affirmation for her achievements: the presence of extended family at her first piano recital and the affection of her teachers for paying attention, studying hard, and answering correctly.

She wanted to do well for the adults in her life. But left to her own devices, she made up songs based on the Ramona chapter books and saved up allowance money for an American Girl doll and found her new favorite movie in Ella Enchanted.

This is the Amanda who first learned that life would often be out of her control when a parent’s job mandated a move two states away the summer after third grade. She witnessed and internalized the emotions of those around her through the transition, another way she could subtly please and placate the grownups.

She had insomnia, and her mom would play soothing instrumental music to help her quiet her mind. (To this day, any music that reminds me of those songs gets skipped on Spotify immediately.) She experienced intrusive thoughts for the first time, though it would be nearly 20 years before she knew what they were called and sought out OCD support.

I’m not jealous, per se, of her resilience, because I inherited it from her and I’ve built on her foundation over and over and over. But I am jealous of her energy and her curiosity and her willingness to be herself. I bless her conscientiousness, and I wish her even more carefree enjoyment of everything she loves.

2006 Amanda couldn’t have known what a gift it was to have all her grandparents sitting at the same table. She was 10, and it was all she’d ever known.

I’m so, so jealous that she could ask Harry about his childhood in the Netherlands and eat Mimi’s burnt bacon on a Saturday morning and visit the smelly pet store at the Dayton Mall with her dad’s parents.

2009 Amanda had spent the last three years of her life hungry and obsessed with winning the Christian-school national spelling bee. She’d spent who-knows-how-many hours handwriting every word that she didn’t know (with its pronunciation) from the approved competition dictionary, while her peers were at youth group or sports practice or a friend’s house.

I’m jealous of her single-minded focus and that feeling of breathless achievement when she reached her goal. But I’ve also lived long enough to know that the feeling of satisfaction lasts only a moment before you start to wonder… Now what?

Today, I’m learning to embrace multifaceted goals and the sacred imperfection of wanting a lot of things and knowing I won’t get most of them and choosing to chase many of them anyway. This Amanda taught me that I could.

I’m jealous of high school Amanda who set aside everything else each spring to embody a character onstage (a Shakespearean Helena one year and an optimistic Anne Shirley another). She had ready access to multiple artistic outlets built into the rhythms of life, not realizing that when she was 30 someday, she’d have to fight for her creative practice and consciously choose it.

I don’t envy her the drought of belonging that was her high school class for those four years (and well beyond them) or the limited perspective she couldn’t help but have. I don’t envy her the discomfort of trying to navigate parental dynamics of dating and driving in high school, both unsuccessful efforts.

I envy her wide-open summers of watching the entire animated Disney canon, starting to set her sights on working at one of the theme parks one day. She would and did just a few years later, though I’d spare her the tales of corporate reorgs and Orlando dating attempts that failed once again, though for different reasons this time.

I hope she’d be thrilled that I got to live the working-at-Disney dream, even if she wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t forever. And honestly, that’s so much of what I’d share with every version of me through the years:

If I told you how it all shook out, there’s so much you wouldn’t understand. And that’s okay.

What I want you to know is that I’m so, so immensely proud of you. The season you’re in has its amazing things and its hard things; life will always be that way.

But I’m doing everything I can, as life rolls on, to make you proud of me, too. I remember you. I don’t remember every small detail about what it was like to be you, but I try to look out for ways to honor you and make choices that you’d be excited about.

You’re an amazing person exactly as you are right now. Even if you never got another A or you spelled every word wrong for the rest of your life or you forgot all your lines during opening night. Maybe you fell off your bike and hurt your knee—I did that when I was 26, too. Maybe you didn’t reach your goal and aren’t sure if you should try again; that happens to me even now, but I hope you always get up and give it another go.

You’re worthy of love, no matter what, and you’re always with me, little one.

In 2004, Natasha Bedingfield sang, “Reaching for something in the distance, so close you can almost taste it,” and nine-year-old me felt that. Today me feels it, too.

Because inside of me exists this absurd instinct to chase a feeling I can’t quite name and will never, ever reach.

I want, for one brief and shining moment, for all of the to-do’s to be done and all of the checkboxes of my life to be ticked off so I can just breathe. And then, just maybe, I would feel I had permission to rest, and my bustling bingo hall of a brain would be at peace.

But when you’re an adult with rent to pay, that just-right moment never truly comes, does it?

Even when you finish the last load of laundry, you’re probably still wearing clothes that will need to be washed 12 hours from now, tops.

Even when you close your laptop for the weekend, more emails are always arriving.

Even when you empty the sink, it only stays that way until your next meal.

The clean slate never comes. Some task or demand or to-do will always stand in the way of your peace and rest, if you let it. You simply must choose to take a walk or read a mindless book or go on vacation, resting for five minutes or five days, or you will burn out like the firecrackers every noisy neighbor in the US set off on July Fourth.

The conditions for rest will never be perfect, but you must press on and do it.

Alas… the conditions for enjoying your life are never perfect, either. I hope you will, anyway.

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don’t wait for the “right time” to like your life; the moment is now!!!

It’s tempting to look for the moment to like our lives; we wait for everything to line up perfectly, trusting that some grand realization or accomplishment will tumble from the sky, and that’s when we’ll start enjoying our lives.

Some ill-defined, if not non-existent, condition must fall into place before we take that leap or chase that dream, we think. We want to reach some work milestone or make a certain amount of money or be in a certain kind of relationship that will tell us we’ve arrived. Et voilà, our likable life will have arrived, too!

And of course, those goals (the job, the dream apartment, the supportive and loving partner or community) are good things. They’re worth chasing! But don’t wait for them to enjoy your life now.

Don’t wait for someday to notice and seek out and choose what’s lovable about your life already.

There will always be frustrations and incompletions about your life. The planet is turbulent and conflict-filled and swelteringly hot, and those facts are unlikely to change. The most radical and beautiful thing you can do in response is to choose to build a life that you like anyway.

“How???” you might ask, as I often do when it all feels like a little (a lot) too much. “How do I like my life when things are hard and uncertain around me and there are so many problems to be solved? Isn’t it fake or forced to smile and giggle and twirl in this economy?”

And to that, I say, that smiling and giggling and twirling are the best possible responses to this economy because, what a miracle, you still have the power and agency and control over those expressions of delight in spite of it all.

Here’s my best piece of advice to start sparkling in the sh*t-tsunami and laughing when things are crumbling. (After, of course, you’ve taken a moment to grieve what should be grieved and feel the frustrations that are completely sensible when you are an awake and alive human in 2026.)

Go out of your way to look forward to things.

Important note: You will have to consciously choose or perhaps even create those things. Please sprinkle them into your schedule, liberally and with the enthusiasm of confetti.

Here are a few of my own personal examples:

• 24 hours away: I’ve been obsessed with homemade iced vanilla lattes lately; I genuinely look forward to waking up to make them for myself. While I still snooze my alarm for a few extra 15-minute chunks (I’m on Summer Month Off right now, after all), the thing that finally convinces me to get up is the thought of my better-than-a-café coffee waiting to be assembled in my kitchen.

• A few weeks away: Later this month, some summer movies are coming out that I simply cannot wait to consume, including The Odyssey, the Hadestown pro shot, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Each time I picture myself watching them in a dark theater, it sends a thrill through me.

• A season away: I adore the autumn. I’m already anticipating the thrillers I will read in September and the cozy chai snickerdoodles I will bake.

• Several months away: I’m choosing work things to be excited about, too, like ’s Reach Out Party cohort starting in October. I’m looking forward to the bold emails I will send, the ideas that will come to me after some time away from work, and the connections I will build within and through the cohort.

None of these looking-forward-to’s happened by accident! I had to buy the ingredients for the vanilla syrup and put movie premiere dates on my calendar and invest in future career activities that would help me build a life I would like more and more.

What are those things for you???

liking your life anyway

I’m looking forward to my life intentionally, in small and big ways. And even so… I feel so confused and overwhelmed about so much of my life.

Being 30 feels like one giant liminal space. (I haven’t seen Backrooms yet, but my career and lots of other things feel like all the promo imagery I’ve seen for it, that yellow room with the fluorescent pallor. I want to be on the other side already!!)

But gosh, if we’re always waiting to be on the other side of something to like our lives, we’ll be waiting forever!!! There will always be something that could keep us stuck, unsatisfied, discontent if we let it. In this mess of a world, joy and delight are acts of resistance.

Liking your life is an intentional practice, a rebellion against the pressures that could keep us down.

Our lives will never be perfect. And that’s precisely why we must choose to love them now.

We take small steps and big swings toward a career or a job that feels more right to our souls.

We create art that expresses what we need to say and what the world urgently needs to hear, the things that AI couldn’t replicate because it’s borne of our precious lived experience in a human body.

We notice, we notice, we notice small miracles like the fireflies in our backyard and the hopeful sidewalk chalk note we pass on the street and the smile of the person next to us in line because there is so much beauty all around us, in spite of it all.

Will you choose to see it with me? My spirit is so desperately, ravenously hungry for the beauty here and a life that I genuinely, truly like.

cover photo and illustration by the author