If I had to describe the main theme of this current season of my life (let’s say, of the past three months) it would be “unraveling”.

A bunch of events coincided with the end of summer for me this year: a trip to Toronto, moving apartments, and the beginning of the creative community container, labyrinth. At that time I felt a sense of certainty about my work and my business path ahead. I had just picked up a renewed sense of connection and pride in my design skills while redesigning my website, and my immediate next reaction was to monetize it and become a web designer.

Not surprising, given that for the past 3+ years since leaving my day job, this has been my reaction every time I realized I was decently good at something I decently enjoyed. Ever since I quit, I’ve been looking under every rock for what I could do next to make money and feed myself.

What could I do as a living, without going back to a job? Which one of my skills would I not hate to employ? How can I put a roof over my head without selling my soul? How can I copy other people’s business models and make it work for me? How can I spend my life making art, and still survive within this capitalist system?

Every business decision that I made — every painting I sold, every commission I earned, every website update and every announcement of “I’m doing this now!” — was against the backdrop of a fear of going back to a job. Back to the thing that suffocated me, that rotted my soul, that gave me trauma (yes, I’m officially calling it trauma now).

So when I decided to become a web designer at the end of summer, with so much certainty and excitement for this prospective career path, that certainty wasn’t from a deep inner calling I was responding to. That certainty was from the external appearance of it “making sense”, with my background in web and experience working in design for several years. It made sense: I have the skills, it’s a fairly simple business model, other people have tried this successfully, and it didn’t trigger my work trauma.

Two types of certainty

There are two types of certainty I want to talk about.

1. Inner alignment. This is what I will call an internal certainty: a felt sense that you are on the right path no matter how crazy it seems. It feels like you’re answering a call from god/the universe. A deep knowing that you can’t explain. It feels like something you just HAVE to do. Sometimes this feeling will come with fear, the kind that shakes your entire ground.
2. Making sense. I’ll call this external certainty: everything looks right from the outside. All the puzzle pieces fall into place. You feel equipped and ready for whatever needs to be done. You feel propelled forward. The path is lit up for you and you can see far ahead. There’s a sense of obviousness.

We all want both kinds of certainty. That’s what happens when someone is following their calling, and successful at it. They love their job, they feel like they’re living their best life. They feel like they are living their life’s purpose, living up to their fullest potential. Things are both internally aligned and externally moving.

We rarely get both kinds of certainty. The decision to quit my job came from inner alignment, at the absolutely devastating cost of not making sense. It made NO sense: giving up my financial security, losing my spot on the career ladder, spending my hard-earned savings, watching my friends (who were all in my industry) develop more and more advanced credentials, experience, wealth, security, and luxuries.

But the inner call was too strong, so I made my decision to leave. Here’s the thing though: the inner-alignment type of certainty isn’t tethered to anything else. It usually feels like it came out of nowhere, like a random splotch of ink on a white shirt. There’s nothing preceding it, nor any follow-up. I heard the inner call to quit, but there was no second call telling me what to do next.

My many unravelings

Our world very heavily privileges “making sense”. Everyone is happy with you when you make sense to them. I, like most of us, have been trained since birth to do the thing that makes the most sense. There’s a lot of fear in doing the thing that doesn’t make sense, and for good reason: disapproval, judgement, dismissiveness, gaslighting, abandonment, etc. Turns out, I have a lot of that fear.

I couldn’t admit it at the time, but after I quit, whenever I picked up a new skill (drawing, painting, calligraphy, neon, type design, etc) I would subconsciously be thinking about how to monetize it. Like a software program running constantly in the background of my brain, trying to solve the problem of “how to get Bonnie’s life and finances to make sense again”.

That is to say, I rushed every business decision. I rushed to claim every new creative endeavour in my business. I rushed to say “This is the new thing I’m doing now! And this is how you can pay me for it.”

A lot of the time, before I could even announce that to the outside world, my inner alignment voice would wake up. It would say, “Actually…you like this thing but I don’t think you want it to be your business. It doesn’t feel right.” And so, that decision’s unraveling began. I had found a golden thread and ran with it, weaving away before looking down and seeing a tangled mess of threads that I now had to undo.

So I would start unraveling the tangled mess, and then I’d find another golden thread! Omg THIS must be the new thread I’m supposed to weave, let’s GO! Then I would weave away before my inner knowing stepped in, and I’d have to unravel once again. This is how I kept starting and stopping my business, too many times to count.

Back to this season

My latest unraveling was realizing that as much as I enjoy web design, I don’t know if I want to run a web design company. Web design is something that I want to do once in a while, for friends and clients that feel like my designs speak to them. I’m interested in it being a part of my practice, not it being the whole of my business.

So now, who am I and what do I do? Am I an artist? A dancer, a calligrapher, a painter, a glassblower, a photographer? Am I a type designer, a web designer? Do I say I am all of these things, even though I feel much more of a dancer than a painter? Do I say I’m none of these things, because I don’t practice any of them 40 hours a week? Do I want to teach dance, sell art, license fonts, build websites? Would I commission photography, offer calligraphy as a service, paint at live events? All of the above? None of the above?

I have a lot of questions, and no answers. I’m holding a lot of golden threads, each filled with substance and passion, with no inner answer on how to weave them together. It’s honestly such an uncomfortable feeling to just hold all these loose threads without doing anything with them. Maybe that’s because of our solution-driven culture, the same one that makes it difficult for people to hold space for others’ tough emotions without solutionizing.

In past seasons of unraveling, I didn’t allow myself to unravel enough, and rushed to pick back up the loom. That led to having to unravel, over and over again.

Right now, what I’m most enamored with is analog darkroom photography, and it’s SO tempting to run with it and build my entire business around it. I’m resisting this temptation, and waiting instead. That making-sense type of certainty is tempting, but I’m waiting for that inner-alignment type of certainty before taking action.

What to do in the meantime

But my mind wants action! It wants to feel like it’s DOING something! So here’s what I’m able to give my mind, so that even though it doesn’t get to do its favourite thing of weaving threads, it at least won’t feel like it’s just sitting there twiddling its thumbs.

Clean the house.

Build a stable foundation for my life so that when the inner-alignment call does come, everything else in my life can support it. Set up my new apartment, develop strong rituals, secure my fitness practices. Work on all the other parts of my life that could use improvement. Build my friendships, engage in local communities, strengthen my support network. And maybe even…get a job that I won’t hate, so that I can afford the time that it will take for my inner-alignment certainty to arrive.

Strengthen the threads.

Build the individual bodies of work in each of my practices. I’m just gonna keep doing what I’m doing, without any idea of how it’s all gonna work out in the end. Blind faith, supported by the knowing that even if a particular practice doesn’t end up becoming part of my business, it will influence how I look at things and how I do everything. It will be a part of my business by way of being a part of my life. It’s cliché but I think of the quote by Steve Jobs, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

So here I am, holding all my loose threads, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that each one of them carries gold but not knowing how to weave them together. Making space for this uncomfortable feeling, while not knowing whether 2026 will have me doing more unraveling or beginning to weave. This is what every therapist means when they tell you to sit in the discomfort instead of taking any action. I hope mine is proud.