Perfectionism doesn't make you better—it just keeps you stuck. Here's how the 80% rule helped me overcome my creative block and start creating after 10 years of waiting to be "ready."

A reflective essay on how loss became a language of its own — from losing a phone in a Scottish bog to losing jobs and identities years later. A story of creative recovery, writing as an anchor, and learning to live through the in-between.

What happens when you show up to create every day for a month — not to go viral, but to recover your creativity? This essay shares what Vlogtober taught me about fear, perfectionism, and finding peace

Every October teaches me how to let go. This year, it’s fear I’m shedding — fear of not being enough, of being judged, of wanting too much. Because joy, I’m learning, doesn’t come from certainty. It comes from trying.

By society’s standards, I’m a loser — unemployed, living at home, writing from the same bedroom I grew up in. For a long time, I carried the weight of that label like proof I’d fallen behind. But the truth? Living at home became the foundation for everything beautiful, brave, and free about my life. This Tiny Rebellion is about redefining what “making it” really means — and learning that sometimes, coming home is the most radical move of all.

After my layoff swept my table of proof clean, I had to rebuild my creative life from scratch. Here are three practices helping me create without equating my worth with output—lessons about capacity, imperfection, and learning to trust my seasons.

Some wounds take decades to surface. For me, it was a single moment in middle school — a cruel comment that left a crack in my creative self-worth. Twenty years later, while working through The Artist’s Way, I realized how deeply that memory still shapes my fear of being “too much.” This essay explores the messy middle of healing: belonging, validation, and what it means to finally offer my 12-year-old self the safety she deserved.

The cold sea licks at my feet, and I ache with yearning—for a cottage by the sea, for salt air and harbor walks. But yearning is not absence; it’s an invitation to live the dream life in the figs already ripe before us.