Exploring A Creative Life

Today I am reviewing a past essay, A Creative Life, with new eyes.

A question I’ve carried with me, and one that used to wake me up in the middle of the night is: How resilient are you, really, if you’re constantly trying to survive?

This week I am returning to an essay which I wrote not too long ago—titled “A Creative Life.” It was written as my soft return to content creation; a gentle approach to rebuilding myself after a public scandal that happened years ago, and had left me feeling exposed, misunderstood, and permanently marked.

Though the incident is behind me, I do continue to grapple with what it means to exist in a world where strangers even today feel entitled to opinions about my life based on skimmed headlines and narratives they’d never questioned.

When I wrote “A Creative Life,” I was acknowledging the weight of not being able to shape my own narrative: I describe it as “a constant, dull ache that sits just beneath my lungs.” Even now when I meet new people I feel this creeping paranoia. Internally I ask myself “Were they looking at me strangely? Did their smile seem to say, “I know about you”?

Some days I feel it more than others. What I couldn’t articulate at the time of writing, was that the ache beneath my lungs wasn’t only pain, it was grief. Grief for the version of myself who used to move through the world unburdened. And underneath the grief, a question: How do I create anything when I feel like I am too much of everything?

The creation began as small, short videos on my phone. I started recording moments not for an audience, but for myself. The camera was rarely facing me. Instead, I was capturing the world as I saw it: violinists on sidewalks, an elderly man wrapping flowers with twine, birds perched on a traffic sign, a dog’s small belly under my hand. In the middle of my darkness, I was documenting light.

In four years I have recorded over 23,000 videos.

At the time, I was trying to hold onto fleeting moments of happiness. I was terrified those feelings would disappear if I didn’t capture them somehow. But now, I see those videos for what they really were: evidence. Evidence that even when I felt broken, I could find beauty. Evidence that even when I didn’t believe in my own resilience, I was practicing it - 23,000 times over.

Creating in the aftermath of public shame? That’s radical. Recording joy when the world expects you to stay small? That’s defiance. Choosing to document beauty when you’re convinced you don’t deserve it? That’s revolution.

I didn’t recognize it then, but the videos weren’t just about capturing moments. It was about reclaiming my right to be a witness to my own life. It was refusing to let someone else’s narrative define my worth. Each video became a seed; tiny catalysts of joy planted in the soil of my own becoming.

I used to think resilience meant bouncing back identical to how you was before -returning to who you were before The Hard Thing happened. I’ve since learned that’s not resilience; it’s denial. Real resilience is allowing yourself to be changed by what you’ve survived, and then choosing to keep going anyway.

I am still learning to walk into rooms without flinching. I am continuing to learn that creativity isn’t about perfection, it’s about presence.

So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re too much, or not enough, or permanently marked by something you can’t undo, I want you to know: your small moments matter. The way you notice light. The way you pause to watch rain. The way you refuse to let shame steal your capacity for wonder. That is your resilience. That’s a creative life. And it’s yours to claim.

And now, please listen along as I share “A Creative Life.”

If you would prefer to read the original essay, or follow along as I read, I have linked it for you down below.

Original Essay