Essays Stories
[ Stories We Live ]
When Wholeness Is Treated as a Liability
It didn’t take long for me to notice how often good motherhood was conflated with self-abandonment. How devotion was measured by willingness to surrender. How visible, unapologetic success was treated as suspicious once a woman became a mother, as though drive and creativity were indulgences rather than capacities. As though wholeness itself was something to be negotiated down.
I wasn't willing to make that trade. Not because I misunderstood sacrifice, but because I understood the difference between sacrificing for your child and sacrificing yourself to an idea of motherhood that requires erasure. One builds a legacy. The other builds resentment under the guise of virtue.
When Creativity Is Asked to Outrun the Body
As time has passed, my career has consistently orbited one truth: creativity, productivity, and growth do not exist in isolation from well-being. We like to pretend they do. We build systems that reward output while ignoring capacity. We praise resilience while overlooking exhaustion. We celebrate ambition while normalizing burnout.
I’ve worked alongside deeply talented, driven, and capable people, brands, teams, and creatives who looked successful on paper but were disconnected from their own clarity, rhythm, or sense of intention. That disconnect doesn’t just affect mental health; it affects decision-making, culture, leadership, and longevity. Watching that pattern repeat is what reshaped how I approach strategy. Not as a purely commercial exercise, but as a human one.
When a strategy ignores the nervous system, it eventually collapses under its own weight.
Is There a Spiritual Connection to Your Creativity?
There are mornings when I wake up, and I can’t explain my mood. I don’t feel bad, I don’t feel good, I just feel indifferent. My thoughts feel heavier, or brighter, or slightly out of place, depending on the mood. And somewhere in the middle of brushing my teeth or making breakfast, I realize that my desire to create that day feels different, too. I know when I am in a great mood because I am typically full of ideas, and I know exactly how I want my day to flow from a creative standpoint. But when my mood is indifferent, the ideas don’t flow the same way. The inspiration isn’t as loud. My mind isn’t as open. I used to brush these days off as “off days,” but the more I pay attention, the more I understand that creativity rarely moves without reason. Something inside me is speaking. The question is whether I’m listening.