Self-employment’s biggest side-effect is loneliness. You create alone. You work alone. Until you find community, you very much feel alone.

The loneliness has a big impact on the ebbs and flows of your creativity. It can make you feel like you’re aching for more ideas, different stimulation, or a different medium altogether, when all you’re really wanting is a friend to talk about your writing or content.

I know it seems simple and like something that we should all be coached on the day we decide to pursue creativity as an outlet or a career, but the truth is that…

So many people resonated with one of my latest Medium posts, If Your Writing Is Tied To Your Personal Experiences — Keep This In Mind, that I’m turning that post into a series. The comment section alone offers a slew of different topics we can cover at the intersection of creativity, lived experience, and mental health.

For this post, we’re going to focus on compassion fatigue.

An American Psychological Association article defines compassion fatigue as an experience “when psychologists or others take on the suffering of patients who have experienced extreme stress or trauma.”

Writing from a place of lived…

I think I’ve lived with anxiety my entire life. Even though I wasn’t officially in therapy for anxiety until my early twenties, I can remember being a kid with unexplainable stomachaches and difficulty breathing.

My family would explain away those episodes as “being in my head” and for a long time their explanation felt like my truth. The remnants of believing those explanations laid a foundation of mistrust within myself. It was hard to believe that what I was experiencing was real because I was so readily told that more than not being real, it was totally something else.

Going…

The Hulu reality TV show kicked off with more intensity than I had been expecting. I was in it for the distraction. I thought I would get the TikTok generation version of what Keeping Up With The Kardashians offered when it was on air, but instead I got an 8-episode breakdown on creator mental health.

I loved it.

I think the show should be a required watch for everyone because while only some may be creating content, we are all consuming it daily. We could all stand to be kinder people.

For content creators (writers, artists, photographers, anyone with an…

There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you find yourself constantly obsessed with when “your moment” will get here. I’d be more surprised if you weren’t.

The story goes that creatives, business leaders, or the world’s next greatest minds, have Moment A (an “aha” moment), then they pay their dues, and eventually they arrive at Moment B (“your” moment). Moment B is the magical day when your bank account is overflowing, your creativity is unblocked, and your reputation precedes you.

It’s a creative’s Disney prince arriving to save them. And while the moment may never manifest with a frog or…

At the top of a piece of paper — of any size — write down, “I’m sorry” and then add some bullet points. I want you to jot down all the times that you told your inner creative that it was:

• stupid
• inadequate
• incompetent
• not as good as the next person
• childish
• too out of the box

I want you to apologize even if you don’t mean it just yet because putting down the bad words, the hurtful phrases, the limiting beliefs, it’ll shift the power back to you. …

I’m in the middle of finishing up a book proposal and the strategy for two courses I’m launching this fall. These projects demand a good chunk of my time and energy, which can leave my creativity well pretty dried up, if I’m not careful.

I try my best to write on Medium daily, to journal, and to create content on IG that sparks joy, all in an effort to feed my inner creative. Beyond those creative hacks, I also thoroughly enjoy writing prompts to help my inner writer simply play for a bit.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, overworked, or uninspired…

The ask is simple — turn Fridays into your free-for-all. Write the piece that didn’t fit into your creative calendar this week because it wouldn’t drive traffic. Spend the whole day brainstorming a project that may never see the light of day.

Give yourself the day off, but don’t take the day off. Instead, use it as a reminder that you love creativity for the sake of creativity.

You may not be able to do this every single Friday, but I encourage you to budget at least one Friday a month to the art of fun. It’ll serve as a…