The Process IS the Purpose

...or why I finally started a Substack

It’s been a while since I’ve created anything. I forgot how hard it is to stare down a blank page, fighting off my perfectionism. I’ve been lurking and commenting on Substack for a while but am finally compelled to write for my own sanity.

Let’s rewind.

I was laid off from a creative job in August of 2024. My industry was in turmoil, and I was one of thousands sharing the fate of sudden unemployment. It also signaled the end of a twenty-year career that I had loved and had success in. I thought I knew what my life was. I thought I knew who I was. Turns out, there was a lot I didn’t know about either.

I had a lot of feelings and suddenly, a lot of free time to feel them. It wasn’t pretty. I’d like to say I handled it with grace and equanimity – but I’d be lying. It was the first time since I was a teenager that I didn’t have a job, and unfortunately, I didn’t have another creative outlet. I don’t paint or sculpt or play an instrument. My career has always filled my creative cup. Without it, I found myself in the void. The void can be a fertile place if you allow it. But I fought it for a good while, nursing my bruised ego and tamping down my panic about what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

A short time after, a family crisis required my full attention (I’m not trying to be oblique - just respecting my family’s privacy). I threw myself into full time mom-ing. As a working mom for most of my children’s lives, I never had the opportunity to do this. This was my chance! I took on the nightly dinner duty. I did endless dishes. I did laundry. I cleaned out closets. I made doctor appointments. Most importantly, I tried to be fully present with my kids and what they needed. It was tough trying to balance the grief over my career ending while staying grounded for my family. Sometimes I was great at it. Sometimes I wasn’t. Life kept life-ing though, and eventually things settled down again and I fell into a rhythm. The crisis was over, and I was still making dinner and doing dishes - but I wasn’t creating anything.

As of this writing it has been almost a year of not working. This time has been a great gift in so many ways. But yesterday, while cooking dinner, I took stock of my emotional state. Inside I felt like a bratty teenager – angry and resentful of my household tasks. That’s when it hit me: YOU NEED TO CREATE. The chores aren’t the problem. It’s the absence of creativity to balance them out. I’m sure some people would say that making a home can be creative – and I would agree. It’s just not my breed of creativity. So here I am, just me against the page, letting the thing happen.

Maybe my writing will get better with time. Maybe it won’t. But it soothes my soul. It tends to a part of me that was begging for attention. In thinking about what I would call my Substack, I recalled the painful process of trying to get started on writing my master’s thesis. I had too many thoughts, ideas, and interests – and it paralyzed me. I was studying transpersonal psychology and had been circling around the themes of creativity, emergence, and transformation. I knew I didn’t want to write an academic paper – I wanted something more active and experimental. But I could not figure out where to begin and how to bring all these things together into something coherent. In what I now think of as a moment of genius, my advisor gave me a freewriting prompt to get me started. Her only requirement was that I set a timer and write to the prompt for ten minutes every day. The prompt:

What if trusting the process IS the experiment?

This simple prompt created a paradigm shift. It got me writing. It helped me let go of concrete ideas of what my paper should be. It took me down rabbit holes, fueled by my curiosity. It was a practice of allowing and emergence. Instead of asking myself what I wanted to write I started asking: what wants to emerge? Could I relinquish control enough to let something be born through me? Turns out I could. Also turns out, it was a metaphor for life.

I came back to this again and again over the past year when I felt fear about being in the void. My old career was gone. My new one hasn’t arrived yet. It’s sometimes a scary place to be. I reminded myself that sometimes allowing is better than forcing. Things take the time they take. I started asking what wanted to emerge from this pregnant emptiness. Slowly, I began to let life unfold. I let me unfold. Until one day, I arrived here, staring at the blank page until the words spilled out, and this Substack was born.