When the Dream Ends, You Begin Again

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I feel as though I’m about to step into a world that feels like an old home. Maybe a little more cracks, a whole lot more dust, and wear, but it’s familiar. That place of inner exploration and self-discovery.

That’s what drew us to Substack, it gently invites the raw, the honest and the heartfelt, in fact I feel it’s the only way to show up here. Because here, I don’t have to perform, or sound good, although I still catch myself veering off that way, recovering from a major creative and life burnout from a business we gave our all to, will do that.

I’m turning 45 in a couple months, and what’s fascinating to me is how much I am turning to what I ‘used’ to love, how I ‘used’ to spend my time, what I would get absolutely lost in, from the age of 7 all the way up to my early twenties. Have you done the same? This huge returning to the loves of our inner child when life was simpler, and the world hadn’t yet told us who we should be. My mom Jan and I are showing up here with about 9 months distance from deciding our biggest dream and largest body of work just wasn’t working anymore. More on that later on, but we have both found ourselves remembering who we are, without the identity that we carried for 5 years. And in this remembering, I know this to be true.

The answers to our future, can often be found in our past.

I have always been a creative person. Designing my grandma’s denim jacket when I was 9, my god she wore it so proudly! Turning rolls of multicoloured flagging tape into bracelets to sell at the local sidewalk jamboree. I’ve painted, sculpted, sewed, designed, always looking at the world in a different way. I never had to think about it. It came naturally. I just did it. I had always associated my creativity with acts of art, of creating beautiful things… until, as an adult, I got so burnt out and far away from my creativity that I forgot how to call upon it. I forgot it was always in me, but like a flame, it needed to be nurtured back to life, now more than ever - like my life depended on it.

From our home studio in the country, overlooking the Alberta prairies, for 5 years my mom and I ran a gorgeous, quarterly, deeply meaningful printed, coffee table magazine called Trailblazher. It celebrated the lifestyles, businesses and wisdom of rural women doing truly incredible things in North America. We highlighted the women who were resilient and gutsy, and so often quietly creating and impacting their communities without acknowledgement. We published 19 issues and I am so proud of the stories we shared and the light we shone on the women inside its beautiful pages.

Our whole journey with the magazine started with gutsiness a call upon our greatest skills - storytelling and design. Without any publishing experience, we bootstrapped Trailblazher on hope and passion alone. And boy the passion helped us get through. We created a beautiful community supporting and championing the stories of rural, and received countless emails and dm’s saying thank you, thank you for acknowledging the work we are doing. The first couple of years, we were really running on determination and a huge vision for the future. It got us through… until the workload started catching up to us, the late nights, the weekends, the sacrifices away from family and fun. The finances. As a team of two (sometimes 3), we were carrying the workload of what a team of 20 usually did. And we hit a wall. Approaching our 18th issue, we were two very weary, worn out women. With every selfie of every issue over the years, we could see the strains of stress being added to our faces. At at the beginning of 2025, we just couldn’t hope, or work our way out of our situation. We realized that we needed to make a radical change in our lives, to get back the parts of ourselves that we sacrificed for too long. Our health and mental well being were suffering. It was shocking to us that we had never considered our magazine NOT working out. We were so stubborn and so strong in our conviction. However, looking back, our conviction should have been to ourselves first. Magazine second. We forgot about our own story, at the sake of everyone else’s. And we found ourselves lost and confused about who we were. We went on to publish our 19th issue just before the clock struck 2026. And YES, we put ourselves on the cover, and shared our story of what it was really like producing Trailblazher, after all, our story was no different than the gutsy, resilient stories of rural women that we had shared for those five years.

That brings us to now. We are different women. We have taken our time (at a crawling pace) to ever so carefully call in a new dream that not only fits our skills and gifts, but also our lifestyles. We are women who have walked through 26+ years of entrepreneurship together as a mother and daughter team. We have walked through many reinventions, losses, wins, and evolutions.

BraverNotes is our way of understanding ourselves again, in the hopes that it can maybe help you remember who you are, if you’ve ever lost yourself in a dream, a role or an expectation that no longer fits you. We want to share how we’ve regained our passion again and gotten in touch with our creativity - as a means of expression and reconnecting with our inner worlds this time, not as an output or means of producing anything.

We believe now, more than ever, that as women we are being called to access our creativity in a way that’s never been done before. I really believe that when we give space for our creativity to come to life, we are accessing a deeper level of ourselves that has the answers to all the questions we may not even know we are needing to ask. Creativity not for art, but as a way of expressing our inner worlds and then creating from THAT place.

I love that we are a two woman team, having gone through seasons of life that look so different being a 68 year old (mom) and an almost 45 year old (me). Here, you will get both perspectives. Multi-generational teams are special, and I am profoundly grateful that I’ve had my mom to learn from, work alongside and celebrate, create and dream up so much life together. Our relationship in many ways is our legacy with each other. We are truly best friends, and to be able to create from that place of mystery, being downloaded with ideas from some other entity bigger than us, together, has impacted my capacity to love in ways I won’t truly understand. Mom, I know you’ll be reading this, I love you.

So, we are so glad you are here. We will be posting solo essays, joint ponderings - all purely to connect with other women who have walked similar roads to us, or who know they need to and haven’t yet gathered up the courage to take the first step. Our intention is to post weekly. And soon we will be working out what a paid subscription could look like - we have some incredible thoughts and creative tools to share with you.

To us, the braver road is individual, and it’s not always forward… it’s inward.

With love and a grateful heart,

Erin

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