“Needing external validation is a habit; a learned way of relating to your creativity; a roped boundary placed on an otherwise open field.

But habits can be broken…”

“If you’ve been on the hunt for ways to make creativity feel more possible, shifts in language—in how you talk about and frame your creative practices—can open a surprising door.”

“When we commemorate, we aren’t capturing our accomplishments and putting them behind glass; we’re relating to our own capabilities. We’re gathering ourselves together in a kind of kinship, acknowledging: yes, this happened, and I did good work, and that matters to me.”

“For a long time, I struggled to describe what I do—especially in the context of small talk, where nuance gets flattened. But if you asked me right now what I do, I’d simply say: I help people with their creativity.”

“Your creativity serves as a daily anchor, bringing clarity, confidence, and deeper connections with the world. This isn’t a rare occurrence, nor one reserved for weekends or vacations, but the way you experience your normal self.”

“Dear writer, you are allowed to be an artist and to have needs. Yes, even big ones.”

“The more my self-belief depends on an external, inflexible circumstance, the more anxiously I remain attached to it.”

“A healthy relationship to publishing and sharing our creative work doesn’t get to define our creative work entirely.”

“You are allowed to trade your economic frameworks for environmental ones."

“Sometimes, taking care of yourself is remembering that you can be creative in order to feel more like yourself, rather than waiting to feel more like yourself in order to be creative.”

“Discipline: the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience. From Middle English, carrying the sense of mortification by scourging oneself.

Um, is this what we really want to be?”

“That critical, hesitant voice you sometimes hear? The one that bellows from a deep, familiar place inside you—it might not be your actual voice. It might not even belong to you.”