A personal renaissance

I feel like I’m in my own, personal renaissance and I’m reconnecting with the creative person inside of me. For the past couple of years I’ve had periods where I felt like I was on the cusp of big changes in my life but I always felt like there was something holding me back from getting to that other side. Now, I feel like the boundary between those steps is fuzzy and unclear, but in a way that elicits excitement instead of the panic I would usually feel in the face of uncertainty. So what changed? Let’s break down the shifts in perspective that have gotten me to this point.

👋 Bye bye obligations

This past summer I reached a breaking point. I was working on so many disparate things all at once, none of them with a real end-date, and I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to keep up with all of them. All of this stress wasn’t allowing me to take a step back and re-assess, so I used the natural break that a short vacation provides and did just that. When I got back from my trip to Europe, I decided to take a pause from everything that wasn’t essential so that I could have space in my life for spontaneity and I called this period my mini-sabbatical. This meant that this newsletter went on pause (remember that? 🤭), I took a break from scheduled workouts, stopped taking LinkedIn coffee chats, and I cancelled my upcoming Dutch lessons. With the new free time and mental space, my true interests bubbled to the surface — not the ones that “made sense” based on my career, external pressures from society, or a sense of obligation. With the freed up time I had outside my working hours, I no longer felt guilty when I decided to spend time with friends in the evening instead of pushing on some side project, and I fell back into some interests that had been floating around in my brain for some time: physical journaling, sewing, music and djing, nail art, and creative writing. I quickly realized that if I put all of these things into a venn diagram there wouldn’t be any overlap with my career and that this was a beautiful thing! 

From that list of original commitments that I mentioned, some things are back in my life but in a different way. The weekly, hour-long Dutch lessons have been paired back to the occasional Duolingo lesson (het spijt me Duo). I’m not doing coffee chats at the moment because it takes quite a lot of time and energy so instead I’m putting that energy towards this newsletter since it’s another way for me to connect with people. And in terms of exercise? My body started feeling crunchy and stiff without my regular movement, so I’m working out again but I’m focusing more on stretching, some weights 1-2 times a week, and your girl has gotten into Pickleball! Start the countdown until I announce I’m running a half-marathon…

👀 Everything makes sense in hindsight

In the past, especially when I was a student, reverse-engineering was my bestie. The amount of time I spent on the LinkedIn profiles of people in industries that I wanted to be a part of, dissecting that minute amount of information for anything of value like guidance on what courses I should take or clubs I should participate in, it was kind of ridiculous! Now that I’m a few years into my career, I’ve realized two things:

1. People put a pretty small, curated part of themselves on LinkedIn

2. Living off someone else’s blueprint isn’t a very exciting way for me to live my life

The actual journey to where people get is a lot messier than it seems; its when we look back at our collection of experiences that we can pick out those distinct through lines that explain how we’ve made it to where we are now. So now I’m focusing on allowing for that mess that comes with following new and old curiosities, instead of trying to be logical and align my evolution with the skills that I think will make sense for the next step of my career. This has also allowed my hobbies to feel like hobbies again, since in my leisure time I don’t have this underlying thought that my leisure activities are actually work-related in some way. In the same way that I never could have predicted that my love of Notion would help me get into my current career, I find it exciting to think about all the potential futures and opportunities that my current hobbies could open up for me. But note that I’m excited about the multitude of possibilities, and not some pre-determined path that I’ve somewhat arbitrarily decided on. This is what allows me to enjoy the present, instead of focusing on some shiny future that might not even happen or I might not even want.

🌶️ Variety is the spice of life

A lot of traditional productivity advice recommends that you focus on one thing at a time, especially if it’s something big like learning a new skill or doing a project. After trying to force myself into this model so many times, I’ve gotten to a point where I know this doesn’t work for me because it makes me pin all my hopes and dreams on one project, which creates a lot of pressure, and is low-key kind of boring. Especially when it comes to projects that relate to my creativity, having just one on the go makes me feel like my creative worth is directly linked to the outcome and success of that project, at least subconsciously. However, when I have a bunch of projects going on — when I’m feeling creative in a bunch of different mediums — then my creativity feels intrinsically mine again and the mediums just become methods of expression… which is all they were ever meant to be. I shouldn’t be trying to push my curiosity for novelty away and shoehorn my brain into operating in a way that it really doesn’t want to. By letting myself flow between my different hobbies and interests naturally I felt more creative all the time and I’m loving this feeling of being a prolific creator with ideas oozing out of me into everything that I do. This is the energy that I felt all around me in studio at design school and this is how I’ve wanted to feel for years, and by letting go instead of tightening up the reigns I’ve actually gotten here.

I now think of my hobbies as an ecosystem that works together, ebbing and flowing in different ways but always helping me feel creatively fulfilled. This mindset has helped me get into some of the hobbies that are more intimidating because they have a bigger learning curve. As an example, I’ve wanted to make YouTube content for years but there are so many skills involved that I’m a n00b at like videography, editing, the list goes on. There are other skills that are useful for making YouTube videos that I do have a bit more experience with though, like storytelling, but I’ve still got room to grow with this skill too. Once I started to write this newsletter, I got to offload some of the work of building that storytelling skill here and I also felt like that part of my creativity was satisfied. Now when I listen to the little voice in the back of my head chanting “YouTube” it doesn’t feel like such a tall order to start making video content because I feel more confident in my ability to tell an engaging story. Video feels like a new and exciting medium for me to explore, and I’m now slowly figuring out how to make the learning curve for videography, etc. less steep by simplifying how I want to approach this new medium. This makes this new potential hobby feel a lot less intimidating because there’s a lot less riding on it in terms of my feelings of self-worth as a creative.

The past few months have been a huge lesson for me that when things don’t feel like they are working I should try the opposite instead of doubling down on what’s worked in the past. Now instead of feeling like I’m at a turning point to a new stage, I feel a lot more confident and relaxed when it comes to my creative output and I’m more focused on the process instead of the final product. What’s an area in your life where you could benefit from relaxing a little bit? I feel like it’s become so common to put so much pressure on ourselves all the time, but we aren’t WIP diamonds being formed underground. Relax and let yourself get swept up in the beauty of life as it’s the only thing happening right now.

xx Alex