Summary
In this late-night reflection, I talk about reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron and the journey of recovering my inner artist after five years of running a business. Building a business made me more analytical and logical, which slowly disconnected me from my creative, abstract mind. I started curating content for clients instead of creating from my soul, and that pressure to perform as an “entrepreneur expert” burned me out creatively.
I share how watching Vanessa Lau’s journey back to authenticity after her own burnout mirrored my experience on a smaller scale. She’s been a mentor through the screen, and one of the people who led me to The Artist’s Way.
I’ve been practicing morning pages, writing stream of consciousness without filtering it through my knowledge of persuasion, copywriting, and human behavior psychology. That awareness became my “censor” – the voice that kept me from being authentic in my content. The Osmo Pocket 3 has also helped me capture ideas the moment they come, which is part of healing that creative muscle.
A passage about “poisonous playmates” hit hard. It talks about how the most toxic people for recovering creatives are those whose own creativity is still blocked. This brought awareness to a past relationship and to how I’m now refining who I work with and what projects I say yes to at 28.
The deeper realization: the answer to every problem is full submission to your own nature. I’m not trying to learn something new. I’m re-accessing a version of myself I’ve been before. As I choose more of myself, that authenticity creates itself in my decisions, actions, and what I draw into my life. This is an ode to the power of vlogging and content creation not for virality, but for self-development and sharing stories that might change someone’s life.
Full Transcript
I have a creative mind and sometimes my brain turns on at night, late times of the night. It’s where I get the most creative inspiration. I think it’s because everyone’s asleep, so I don’t have to really answer to anybody. It’s a really sacred and safe space for me to just explore my mind.
Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was I started reading the book called The Artist’s Way. I’ve been really trying to recover my artist within myself because over the past five years running my own business, having a lot of business injuries and having a lot of relationship injuries that really challenged and made me lose track of my identity, especially with my creativity. Also in the process of building a business, becoming more of a logical being where I have to solve problems and think more analytically about everything, I started to lose track of my creative side, my abstract mind.
I’ve seen this book pop up numerous times with different creators that I resonate with. One in particular is Vanessa Lau. Vanessa Lau is a content creator and she used to make content centered around growing on Instagram and social media and all those types of things. But there was a point where she had a sabbatical for a year and she disappeared from the content creation world. Really just took some time to get to know herself more and do therapy and just really just take a break from the pressure of social media. And she just recently came back with like a whole new energy of authenticity.
Watching her journey has really awakened that within me because I feel like I’ve experienced the same thing that Vanessa Lau experienced but on a much smaller scale. Vanessa Lau has hundreds of thousands of followers on all social media platforms and she’s built a I think million, like a million dollar business that burnt her out and she felt creatively burnt out and authentically burnt out. She started making content that was geared only towards like making it, like building a business. She realized how unsustainable that was for her creatively and soulfully as a content creator. She started losing passion for creating things and this is exactly how I felt when I started shifting my content.
I used to make content about like parkour and dance and whatever the heck I wanted. I used to be very artistic with the things that I put out into the world on social media. But once I started my own business I realized that I had to position myself in the right way. I had to make sure that I had to curate an image so that it would attract a certain type of client to me that would pay me. And the thing is it worked. I studied human behavior, psychology, persuasion, all that stuff and I started implementing those principles in the way that I created content and some of my videos went semi-viral but what happened was I started to just experience this new pressure to have to create in a certain way and this new pressure to constantly curate my image as this entrepreneur expert when I didn’t want to be that all the time.
So watching Vanessa’s journey and seeing her clearly articulate the exact struggles that I was going through as a content creator but on a smaller scale really opened me up to like okay I need to figure out a different way. She’s been a wonderful mentor for me just through the screen on YouTube. I love listening to a lot of different creators but she’s one of the main people who has inspired me to really recover my inner artist again and one of the people who also mentioned the book The Artist’s Way.
Now I haven’t finished this book yet but what I’ve been doing so far is morning pages. So it’s basically you write a stream of consciousness in a journal, handwritten, because it forces you to slow down and think more about what you’re writing and putting down on the paper. My biggest intention with that right now is to write in a way where I don’t filter it because this is just something that shows up in all of my content creation and how it’s shown up in the past few years. It’s like I would just filter it through the lens of my awareness of human behavior, psychology, and persuasion. Am I using these certain frameworks? Am I saying it in a certain way? If I’m not then I need to make it perfect.
In the book it talks about the idea of having a censor and working through that censor and quieting it. And so for me my censor, or the voice in my head that withholds me from being authentic when I make content, is my awareness of human behavior, psychology, and persuasion, and all the frameworks, and all the copywriting stuff that I’ve studied in the past. It’s still powerful and I’m grateful for all that knowledge, but now I’m trying to invite more just stream of consciousness, brain dumps, and the authentic soul that speaks through what I’m trying to communicate.
I practice that with the morning pages exercises and also now that I have the Osmo Pocket I feel like I can just, like the moment I have an idea or the moment I have the desire to express something, I can just turn on the camera and capture it right then and there. So these are exercises that I’m trying to invite back into my life to heal that creative aspect of myself again.
And the specific passage that I want to share tonight that really resonated with me. It talks about poisonous playmates:
“Creativity flourishes when we have a sense of safety and self-acceptance. Your artist, like a small child, is happiest when feeling a sense of security. As our artist’s protective parent, we must learn to place our artists with safe companions. Toxic playmates can capsize our artist’s growth. Not surprisingly, the most poisonous playmates for us as recovering creatives are people whose creativity is still blocked. Our recovery threatens them.”
This kind of reminds me of a past relationship that I was in where I was trying to recover my sense of identity and recover my artistry but I was just with somebody who couldn’t really nurture that aspect because they didn’t know how to nurture that within themselves. That really just stood out to me and has brought awareness. It’s kind of like shed a light on a decision that I made in the past that kind of kept me stagnant within my growth as an artist. And not just growth but healing my creative self.
It’s my egoic mind that talks about growth, that wants to grow, that wants to expand. But it’s my soulful self that just wants to allow my creative soul to express itself without them, if that makes sense. And so bringing awareness to this and then also being more conscious of inviting more people, surrounding myself with people, including my business partners, people that I work with in a professional context.
At this point in my life I’ve worked with a lot of different types of clients and partners with a lot of different types of personalities, and I think at 28 years old I’m starting to really fine-tune the type of energy and the types of projects and the type of businesses that I really enjoy helping. And a lot of times it has to do in the industries of spirituality or creativity and working with people who also have a certain degree of emotional awareness, emotional intelligence, and just really good communication skills I guess.
All this to say, I really loved that because it’s just a sign for me, just in my journey. Like I’m making this video again to just document my growth as a person, which is the original intention that I had whenever I would make a piece of content online. Wasn’t to get a lot of followers. It wasn’t even to make a lot of money but it was to just share my soul, you know.
This passage kind of reminded me and brought the awareness that I’ve made a lot of progress, and I’m making so much progress back towards my authentic self.
There’s a quote by Jeremy Giffin and it says: “The answer to every problem is full submission to your own nature.” And the problem that I’ve been trying to solve for the past five years is not like, yes it’s like understanding the material world, the material dimension of things. But more specifically, how can I make money? And I’ve learned I can make a lot of money really fast. How can I make money in a way that’s very aligned to me and the ways that I just naturally am, without having to try to force myself into different molds and force myself into different skill sets?
There are always different areas that I’m trying to grow and become better in, whether it be teamwork or leadership. I’ve been reading a ton of books on leadership and teamwork lately. But even deeper than that, like what are the domains, what are the topics, what are the industries that really bring me so much joy? And who are the types of people that I love to work with? It’s the types of people who acknowledge me for the things that I do, for the skills that I provide, for the value that I give for their businesses. But also the domains that I’m actually passionate about myself. I love dance, I love spirituality, and I love really deep, objective, purposeful, and practical spirituality.
And so I’m grateful because again, this book where it said poisonous playmates, not just in being around people who haven’t embraced their inner creativity, but overall just all encompassing. Like the people that I surround myself with and the projects that I say yes to and the projects that I say no to. I’m realizing at this point in my life at 28 that this is becoming much more refined. I’m just grateful for that.
I want to share this moment on a camera and also I’m just so happy that I have the Osmo Pocket 3 because I could just turn it on, record, and trust that it’ll be a good video.
Yeah, just want to share these realizations. For me, really doing things for me again. And I remember I wrote a long time ago, another version of myself, he said that as above so below, as within so without, so the universe so the soul. And so be it and so it is. And so within myself, as I love myself, as I choose more of myself, as I become selfish, that selfishness brings me to more and more authenticity within myself that I can share with other people. So it’s not really selfishness, because as I learn to love myself well, as I learn to re-love myself, because I’ve lost so much of that. It’s not really, I’m not like learning something new. It’s like I’ve been here before. I’ve tasted what self-love is.
As I re-access that, then that will start to create itself in my decisions, my actions, and the things that I draw to me. So these were some of the insights that I’ve gained from The Artist’s Way. It is the energy that it’s channeling, it’s awakening within me. So I’m so grateful to Julia Cameron for this just timeless book. I’m glad that I picked it up at this point in my life. It’s really helpful at 28 for me to help me recover my creative heart.
So thank you Julia Cameron. Thank you to all the people that I mentioned. Vanessa Lau, your stuff is amazing. If you ever see this video. And for you who’s watching, whoever you are, if there’s anything I could say to you who’s watching this, just remember who you are. That’s okay if you don’t remember it right now, but leave clues for yourself.
This is why I love logging. This is why I love what I call meta reflections. Capturing yourself, raw stream of consciousness, so you can study it for later on. So that you have these breadcrumbs of who you’ve been in the past to remind you who you can choose to be in the present.
This is really an ode to I think just the power of vlogging and the power of content creation, not just for growing and going viral, but for self-development, for understanding yourself at a deeper level, and really sharing your stories with the world because you never know whose lives it can change. I remember when I was really active on YouTube and people would be saying like, “Man Perris, like I watched this video and thanks to this video I didn’t kill myself today.” Like that changed my life. And I want to invite more of that back into my life.
So again, thank you guys for witnessing this story. I love you all like I love myself. And yeah, I’ll see you in whatever video I make next.