Creative Polyamory, Slowing Down Time, Breaking my Phone Addiction, & What I Recently QUIT

A "Life Lately" Post

I think I said this in a recent post or conversation IRL or both: 75% of my creativity has no business plan. (25% of it does and that’s my day job).

This blessed Substack?

Definitely falls into the 75% of creativity-without-business-plan.

Most people would call that a “hobby.”

And they wouldn’t be wrong.

I prefer “vocation.”

Writing is work that I “can’t not do.” (To riff on Parker Palmer’s definition of vocation from my favorite (absolutely non) business book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for The Voice of Vocation).

Vocation is a funny reference point in capitalism and a society that wildly undervalues (and leaves unpaid) tremendous amounts of creative and caretaking work.

But it’s one that makes sense to me.

Vocation as orienting concept also gives me a different frame of reference than the the ever-elusive (and complete BS!) “work-life balance.”

Vocation allows me to understand my efforts in a way that doesn’t chase some impossible calibration — because so much of what we’re trying to “balance” is not actually quantifable.

I like “wholeness” better than balance. And “vocation” better than work.

I picture my life like a big circle. Actually, a very full, mostly beautiful plate would be accurate.

And rather than walking some tightrope or trying to zero out a balance sheet of my productivity and effort, the dance becomes understanding how to hold my own wholeness, be supremely nimble and receptive enough to make my transitions between the parts (especially the seemingly contradictory ones) as gracefully and full-of-ease as possible.

It also means asking for & graciously receiving help when I need it (and giving it when I can!).

(And dismantling the systems that keep us unequivocally stuck and marginalized VOTE!).

So here I am in that 75% of my wholeness and vocation that is creative and largely unpaid.

Except I DO have this amazing, small & mighty group of paid subscribers who I feel a real kinship with (THE BEST, you are!).

Last week I re-released an old episode from my former podcast called Beyond Balance (see the through line there? ;)).

In it, I told the story of my leap from corporate litigator to meditation teacher, writer, coach, and creative entrepreneur, etc. (full plate, remember?).

It’s a story I’ve told plenty of times and one that folks ask for more than others of mine.

But it’s also kind of … an old story at this point.

I made that leap almost 11 years ago.

So today, I thought I’d share 5 quick-ish, kind-of-playful observations from the story I would tell about my life right now, in early November 2024 (!).

1. I am in a Polyamorous Relationship with my Creativity.

So, I’m fairly sure I’m done having kids. And my youngest is now 3. So — at least for me — it feels like a LOT of creative energy and juice is finally FREED UP after 8+ years of devoting the majority of it to creating humans.

I cannot stop working on creative projects! I feel kind of nutty sometimes when I make a list of “open creative contracts” I currently have going right now.

It includes: 2 podcasts, the rebrand of one of my businesses, the ongoing creative juice it takes to keep that business going (and literally show up there and create classes several times a week!), 4 (FOUR!) books I’m in various stages of writing (including a kinda sexy, “coming of aging” NOVEL!), this Substack, a meditation program I am currently running, ongoing coaching / client work, a bunch of things I am currently forgetting, and of course my amateur dead flower and branches arranging 🤣

The older I get (and the more I hear and read about these things), the more I suspect I may also have a slightly ADHD brain like many of my other creative entrepreneur women friends and / or wherever my human design / birth chart placement puts me means I thrive in a creatively polyamorous situation.

For THIS moment, it works, so I’m just going to continue to tap out 1,000 words at a time on my novel a few nights a week in bed, hop over here a few times a week to string together an essay like this one, and eventually get more serious about a book proposal for one of the books and an actual deadline on another one!

Till then, just groovy.

2. It hit me the other day: If I could freeze any moment in time in my life ever, THIS might be it.

Now listen, it might very well have something to do with the fact that I turn 40 in 265 (who’s counting?!). But I genuinely would freeze this moment in time if I could.

The second-best alternative I know is to SLOW it down. And here’s how I’m doing that.

It’s really simple. And not at all easy.