Last week we took our first vacation in over a year. It was the first time I completely unplugged and didn’t touch my computer for days — even now, as I write this, I’m doing so on my iPad so that I don’t have to open my computer until after. (It’s actually one of the challenges I’m posing to myself, more below.)

Recently I published a piece on how having a good morning has very little to do with your morning routine and way more to do with setting yourself up for success. Morning routines and daily or weekly schedules are very similar. In order to ace them, you need to pay attention to your unique needs instead of trying to fit yourself into a one-size-fits-all approach.

As more of us continue to work solely from home, especially as COVID variants become more prevalent, there are a couple of shifts that you can start making today, if finding the right schedule for you has felt impossible.

I’ve been feeling my creativity hit new levels lately and it’s felt so invigorating. I know that in addition to resting and family time, this weekend will be spent working through a few different creative hustles. The ones I’m focusing on — mapping out a course, a community platform, and prepping for a photoshoot next week — all fall into the category of creative hustle for me.

But whether you’re pursuing a hobby, a side hustle, or a passion project this weekend, I know weekends spent with your creativity can sometimes feel lonely. A big goal for my community member platform is to give us all a space to connect with others who also value creativity in similar ways. But in the meantime, I don’t want you to feel lonely or alone.

I have specific pet peeves lately when it comes to how we talk about passion projects. An unpopular opinion I hold is that I don’t think every hobby or passion project needs to be a profitable side hustle. Our current economy makes it incredibly easy for you to take on side gigs in ways that earn you extra revenue and if that’s calling you, go get your bag and start your side business. I’ve done it and I find so much joy in it.

But I’ve also picked up hobbies and passion projects that don’t earn me anything financially, but have helped me immensely when it comes to bringing peace into my life, a coping mechanism for my mental health, or simply turned into a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon. For instance, I’ve picked up a real interest in interior decorating over the last year. I’m reading the books. I’m subscribing to the sites that let me create 2D models of my living room. I’m living my best life spending hours looking through Target for the best finds. The hobby doesn’t help anyone other than me (and my boyfriend) and that’s okay.

I didn’t mean to pull together a starter kit on creativity and artistic development, but I’m glad I did. Whether I was listening to Matthew McConaughey or flipping through Lisa Congdon’s imagination, these books helped spark something inside of me that had been dormant for a long time — my desire to fail. McConaughey has a whole section of his book dedicated to telling tell me all about that one time he had to throw “it” all away in order to get the kind of roles he wasn’t getting naturally asked to play. All of these books help you define what “it” (how you see creativity now vs how you want to see it) is and then offer up a roadmap that challenges you to grow.

Oftentimes being stagnant within our creativity comes at the heels of a some success or major “aha” moments. We’ve found something that works well and we stop trying to understand how to make it work better. I’ve been writing and creating content for 8 years now and I’d forgotten how to study the craft. I’d grown to the point of assuming that I would always be typecast for the kind of writing or content creation I was known for so there was no point in pushing my boundaries, but then this year something shifted for me.

I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

I’d seen The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron on bookshelves for years, but had never picked it up. To be honest, I only picked it up in January because it was the main read of a class I had signed up for through Literary Arts. Sifting through their website a few months ago, I was drawn to the course because it said it was dedicated to helping students cultivate a writing habit, which is something I felt I was missing.

I could have never imagined what the first six weeks of the class - and of working through The Artist’s Way - would actually entail. True to its name, it is a recovery workbook and it weaves into more than just your creative life. I still have six weeks to go in the program, but I have already felt such a shift in my own process.

I have to be honest - the title is clickbait, mostly because I don’t actually think you can “fail” at journaling, but I do think that most of us think that we do. I have stopped and started journaling so many times over the last few years. Each time I started for a different reason and stopped for a different reason.

The most harmful perspective we can own when trying to journal is that there’s only one way or one reason to do it. Each of us are navigating so many different lived realities at any given moment, if journaling is a tool we’re using to navigate those times then it’s bound to be as unique as our circumstances are. It can feel like because there’s a label for it “journaling” that it should be as structured as “eating” in that you do it at a specific time and for a specific amount of time.

I am drowning in the dark gloomy days of Portland. At the top of my list of things that are currently hurting my mental health, creativity, and overall quality of life are gloomy days I cannot control. On the right side of a column is a long list dedicated to all that is helping me in this exact moment.

One of the ways we trip up when assessing our quality of life is to measure it up against the ruler of what used to make us happy or to only notice the things that used to make our days harder. While those details are amazing to have in our back pocket as context, the only way we’re going to address our right now is to notice our right now.

I thrive off of people watching. It’s one of the top reasons I love to travel. It’s why working for myself has always worked for me.

The ability to jump from one coffee shop to another has never felt rootless, quite the opposite. For me, my lifestyle has grounded me in what’s important — my ability to notice the world. The last time I sat at a coffeeshop to work without any worry of COVID was in February when we spent most of it in London.

The last few days I’ve been extremely melancholic and just very aware that not only did I miss people watching and the freedom of working from anywhere, but I was suffering as a result of it.