I once met a dancer at a dance intensive. Actually I didn’t meet her, she was singled out by one of the instructors for being exceptional. In a room full of dancers trying their hardest to keep up or step up, her movement looked effortless, intentional, and truly embodied. It wasn’t that she had impeccable technique, it was that she danced like the music told her story.

I later came across one of her dance videos with a caption that has stayed with me ever since. It was a blurry, low-quality video of her just freestyling in her bedroom. Nothing super impressive, but you could tell she was tapped into her body and the music. The caption started out pensive, talking about how she was called by her soul to move that night in this way. Then she wrote, “I’m truly falling in love with my own movement and my own being more and more everyday.”

Like, DAMN. At the time I had been dancing on-and-off for almost 10 years, and I had developed quite an unhealthy relationship with it. Long story short: I attached my self-worth to how “good” of a dancer I was, compared myself constantly to other dancers, felt bitter about my slow improvement, and frankly, hated the way I danced. The idea of falling in love with my own movement was so unfathomable at the time that this one sentence seared itself into my brain.

Fast forward a few years. After a tremendous amount of healing work, therapy, community support, and “putting myself in the ring” (i.e. dance studio) over and over again, I was able to get to a place where I love my movement, and I do to this day. That was a long and grueling journey, which deserves an entire series of posts. But, this post is not one of them.

Plot twist

This post is about how in life, you always learn the same lesson multiple times, at different levels. Level 1 was about my dance practice—learning how to accept and honour who I was, what I had to say, and how I moved as a dancer. It was activated when I chose to be a dancer, and it concluded** when I fully accepted myself as a dancer.

Level 2 was activated when I decided to start a business. This level is about my entire creative ecosystem: what I do, how I work, how my ADHD shows up, how I couldn’t just be happy with a 9-to-5, how I can’t just do the thing, how goals and deadlines make me want to puke, how I keep switching passions, and the pressure to appear straightforward and niched down in order to make money.

By the way, you never know when a level is activated. You only know once you’re already deep in that level, and then you can kind of trace back to when this level began. When I started my business, I expected it to be simple: make paintings and sell them. Since then, I’ve changed my “business strategy” about 24 times, specialized in at least 7 different craft forms, taken over 3 multi-month breaks from my business to “figure shit out”, and restarted too many times to count.

I attached my self-worth to how “successful” my business was, compared myself constantly to other artists on social media, felt bitter about my almost non-existent income, and frankly, hated how I ran my life. Sound familiar?

It has now been over 3 years of healing work, coaching, community support, and “putting myself in the ring” since starting a business. The main thread that kept coming up has been undoing the capitalist conditioning of needing to be straightforward and legible to others, the glamorization of productivity, the way “discipline” and “structure” has been co-opted to mean unrelenting rigidity, the individualistic mindset of success, and the scarcity of money. That means:

• Seeing my work across a timeline, instead of a static snapshot. Letting myself move from one practice to another, without expecting any of them to be permanent. Owning my past creations fully and proudly, instead of downplaying them because they don’t reflect my current practice.
• Being okay with being confusing. Letting the experience of my work resemble being a kid in a candy store instead of walking through a linear “Instagram museum”. Let the confused people be dumbfounded.
• Shortening the to-do list. Like, shorter. Even shorter. Lowering expectations for how much I do in a day. Getting rid of the list altogether some days, and trusting my intuition for what comes next.
• Realizing that discipline simply means being a disciple, showing up with devotion. Setting up supportive structure for my days, without resorting to fierce rigidity. Gentle nudges, not brute force.
• Letting myself be inefficient. This one was the hardest. There are a bajillion ways out there to maximize ROI. Low investment, high returns. Low effort, lots of money. Low friction, high visibility. Scaling, passive income, optimization. Forget them. Efficiency was never the goal. Creativity and expression are inherently inefficient. Trust the process.

Falling in love

Level 2 is still kicking my ass, but I think the peak difficulty has passed. I’m starting to fall in love with my own “movement”, or creative ecosystem. I’m falling in love with my own patterns and quirks, the structure of my creative practices, the things I notice, and the way I think about them. I’m starting to like that I don’t have a succinct answer to the question, “So what do you do?“

I like how my creative practices intersect, how my dance informs my writing and how my calligraphy feels like my photography. What I used to see as confusing and scattered, I now see as juicy and mysterious. I look at my new website and think, what an incredibly diverse set of expressions, and how funny that some people would be bewildered by all the options. I like that my “blog” of notes can be incoherent, self-centered, and pointless.

My creative ecosystem is beginning to feel truly whole, like it is capable of holding and honouring the full, complex expression of that which is me, rather than flattening me into a single dimension.

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**You could probably guess, a level is never truly “concluded”. Dance will still sometimes bring up insecurities and self-doubt in me, but it no longer shakes my entire core in the way that it used to.