Welcome to the Broke Bitch Audit.

This is not where I tell you to stop buying coffee.

We’re not going to begin by canceling every subscription that brings you joy, creating a color-coded spreadsheet with 17 tabs, or calculating how much richer you’d be if you had simply invested your birthday money in the S&P 500 when you were nine.

We’re going to figure out what the fuck is actually going on.

Because if you’re anything like me, being broke can very quickly become an identity rather than a financial circumstance.

I’m bad with money.

I’m irresponsible.

I’m behind.

Everyone else understands this.

I’ll never catch up.

I should be making more by now.

I have ruined my life.

Cool.

None of these are numbers. And that’s our first problem.

As I wrote about earlier this week in The Creative Potential of Being Completely Broke, I spent years trying to shame myself into becoming less broke.

Shockingly, it did not work.

What eventually helped was learning to approach my financial life the same way I approach any creative problem:

What are the actual materials I’m working with?

What are the constraints?

What am I assuming can’t change?

And what moves are available to me from here?

That’s what we’re doing today.

Grab a notebook.

Open your Notes app.

Use the back of an envelope from one of the bills you’ve been avoiding for thematic consistency.

Let’s audit this shit.

STEP 1: Calm your broke bitch body

Do not open your bank account yet.

First, I want you to notice what happens when I say:

We’re going to look at your finances.

What happens in your body?

Chest tight? Stomach drop? Suddenly exhausted? Compelled to open Instagram? Would rather clean your baseboards? Perhaps you’ve decided that actually today is the perfect day to finally research whether you should move to Portugal?

Interesting.

That’s information.

Financial avoidance isn’t always an information problem.

Sometimes your nervous system has learned that money means danger, shame, conflict, scarcity, failure, or being completely fucking alone.

So before we do anything else, put your feet on the floor.

Look around.

Take a breath.

Notice where you actually are.

And tell yourself:

I am not fixing my entire financial life today. I am gathering information.

That’s it.

Looking at the problem is not the same thing as having to solve the problem.

Now we can begin.

STEP 2: What the fuck is actually going on?

Shame loves being vague.

I’m completely fucked feels very convincing.

But unfortunately it isn’t actionable.

$8,417 on a credit card at 24% interest is actionable.

It might make you say oh fuck. That’s okay.

At least now we have an actual fuck to work with.

Write down:

• How much money comes in every month

• Your essential monthly expenses

• Your debt balances

• Minimum monthly debt payments

• Interest rates, if you know them

• Savings

• Assets

• Bills you’ve been avoiding

• Expenses that fluctuate significantly

• Financial obligations you know are coming

• Anything else currently making you want to throw your phone into a lake

Approximate numbers are better than imaginary numbers. Missing information is also information.

If you don’t know the interest rate, write:

I DON’T KNOW THE FUCKING INTEREST RATE.

Congratulations. You’ve identified a move.

Your job in this step is not to fix anything.

Your job is to turn:

MY ENTIRE FINANCIAL LIFE IS FUCKED

into:

Here is what is actually happening.

Those are very different problems.

STEP 3: Separate the facts from the broke bitch mythology

Now look at your list.

Some of what you’re looking at is reality. Some of it is a story you’ve been repeating for so long that it feels like reality.

We need to separate them.

FACT:

My rent is $1,600.

STORY:

I’ll never be able to afford to live somewhere I actually like.

FACT:

I currently make $55,000.

STORY:

No one would ever pay me $100,000.

FACT:

I owe $40,000.

STORY:

I will be in debt forever.

FACT:

I need health insurance.

STORY:

I can never leave this job.

FACT:

My income is inconsistent.

STORY:

I’m terrible with money.

Do not replace your scary stories with delusional ones.

We’re not doing:

Actually, I’m a billionaire!!!!!

You don’t need to believe everything is possible. You need to become curious about whether the future you’ve assumed is inevitable actually is.

Take every story you’ve identified and turn it into a question.

What would have to change for me to earn more?

What other ways could I deal with this debt?

What would make leaving this job possible?

What kind of financial system might work better with inconsistent income?

Who knows something about this that I don’t?

Questions create space. And creativity needs space.

STEP 4: Find your expensive shame

Now we’re going to make this slightly uncomfortable.

Where is shame currently costing you money?

Not metaphorically. Literally.

• Are you undercharging because asking for more feels embarrassing?

• Avoiding negotiating your salary?

• Not opening bills and getting hit with late fees?

• Staying in a low-paying job because applying elsewhere makes you feel unqualified?

• Avoiding your debt because you’re scared of what you’ll find?

• Paying for something you don’t use because canceling it requires making a phone call?

• Not asking for assistance because you think you shouldn’t need it?

• Not telling anyone you’re struggling?

• Working so much that you’re constantly ordering takeout because you’re exhausted?

• Buying things when you’re dysregulated?

• Avoiding filing something because paperwork makes your ADHD brain want to crawl out of your body?

No judgment.

Seriously.

We’re auditing.

Write:

Shame may currently be costing me money by ____________.

This was enormous for me.

For years, I thought shame was motivating me to become more financially responsible. In reality, shame was narrowing the number of moves I believed I was allowed to make.

Which brings us to the fun part.

STEP 5: Give your broke bitch more moves

Choose ONE financial problem from your audit. Write it at the top of the page.

Then underneath it:

WHAT ARE 10 MOVES I COULD MAKE?

Not ten solutions. Not ten financially responsible choices. Not ten things Dave Ramsey would approve of. Ten moves.

The first few will probably be predictable.

• Spend less.

• Work more.

• Pay more.

Keep going. Could you:

• Negotiate something?

• Raise your rate?

• Ask for a raise?

• Apply for a job you don’t feel qualified for?

• Sell something?

• Research a different repayment option?

• Ask for assistance?

• Talk to someone who has solved this problem?

• Change providers?

• Turn an existing skill into income?

• Share an expense?

• Move?

• Downsize?

• Take on a short-term gig?

• Get professional advice?

• Ask for an extension?

• Start a business?

• Leave a business?

• Stop doing something?

• Do something extremely weird that nevertheless solves the actual problem?

Your job is not to decide yet. Generate. Some ideas should be bad. If every idea is sensible, you’re probably evaluating while you’re generating.

That’s not brainstorming. That’s anxiety wearing business casual. The goal is to teach your brain:

There is more than one move available to me.

STEP 6: What does your broke bitch actually want?

Now we get to the part most financial advice skips.

What are you actually trying to create?

Because “not being broke” isn’t much of a vision. For years I wanted more money because I desperately wanted to stop feeling financially terrified.

Fair. But underneath that, I wanted:

• Time.

• Choices.

• Travel.

• A home.

• Creative freedom.

• Support.

• The ability to take a risk without immediately threatening my survival.

• The ability to breathe.

Money was the resource. Those things were the life.

So imagine it’s three years from now and your relationship with money feels meaningfully different. Not perfect. Not billionaire-on-a-yacht different.

Just better.

What’s different about your actual life?

• Where do you live?

• How do you spend your time?

• What have you stopped tolerating?

• What can you say no to?

• What can you say yes to?

• What do you create?

• Who do you spend time with?

• What kind of support do you have?

• How does an ordinary Tuesday feel in your body?

Write about that life in the present tense. Don’t worry yet about how you’re getting there. We’re practicing imagining yourself resourced.

You can figure out the route later.

STEP 7: Make one broke bitch move

Look back at the ten moves you generated.

Pick one.

ONE.

Please do not emerge from this exercise with a 73-point plan to completely restructure your financial existence by Monday.

That is exactly the kind of shit we’re trying to stop doing.

Choose something you can realistically do in the next seven days.

Maybe you:

• Find the interest rate you’ve been avoiding

• Apply for one higher-paying job

• Ask for a raise

• Increase your rate for new clients

• Schedule a free consultation

• Research three options for a debt

• Cancel something you genuinely don’t want

• Sell something

• Ask someone for help

• Research what people with your experience actually earn

• Set up a tiny automatic transfer

• Finally open the fucking envelope

Small is good. Your assignment isn’t:

STOP BEING BROKE.

Your assignment is:

Make one move that wasn’t available to you when you were avoiding reality.

Then see what happens.

Congratulations, broke bitch

You have completed your audit. You may still be broke.

Sorry.

But now you know more about what you’re actually working with.

And that matters.

Because the goal of this exercise was never to convince yourself that everything is going to work out. Some of your constraints may be very real. Some of your options may suck.

You may discover problems that require professional help, significant structural change, more income, less spending, debt restructuring, or a lot of time.

Give them information. Give them support. Give them curiosity. Give them permission to experiment. Give them more moves.

Then make one.

And another.

And another.

That’s how my financial life began to change.

Not because I finally became a Good Responsible Money Person™.

Because I stopped requiring myself to know the entire way out before I was willing to make the next move.

Okay, but how do I actually build a financial system that works?

That’s the question I’m increasingly interested in. Because doing the Broke Bitch Audit may reveal something annoying:

Seeing what’s wrong doesn’t automatically teach you how to build something better.

Especially if you’re first-gen.

Especially if you’re neurodivergent.

Especially if your income fluctuates.

Especially if you’ve inherited financial trauma but not financial literacy.

Especially if conventional advice seems designed for someone with a completely different brain, family, income, and starting point.

That’s why I’m building The Money Reset System for first-gen and neurodivergent creatives.

I’m bringing together what I’ve learned the extremely expensive way about nervous-system regulation, debt, earning, creative problem-solving, resourcefulness, visualization, and designing financial systems around your actual life.

Not your imaginary perfectly disciplined life.

Your life.

If you’d like to know when it’s ready, message me MONEY.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, reinvention, money — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab.

I have been broke for most of my life.

Not I can’t afford the vacation I want broke.

I mean dumpster-diving-for-food broke. Working a full-time job plus a part-time job broke. Working multiple part-time jobs broke. Eventually, once remote work became possible, working multiple full-time jobs broke.

And somehow, through all of that working, still being broke.

I grew up in a working-class family where money was a constant source of stress. My parents worked multiple jobs. We lived paycheck to paycheck. We didn’t take family vacations. There wasn’t a secret account somewhere that could rescue us if something went wrong.

So I tried to be responsible.

I stayed in state. I didn’t go to my dream school because I couldn’t figure out how I would even get there, much less afford out-of-state tuition. My family qualified for grants because we had so little money. I earned merit scholarships.

And still, before my prefrontal cortex was fully developed, I had accumulated six figures of student debt and interest.

I had never even seen six figures. I had absolutely no concept of what it would take to pay six figures back.

No one sat me down and explained what the total cost of my education would be after interest. There wasn’t an adult in my life with the financial experience to help me understand what I was signing myself up for when loans were being taken out in my name.

I thought I had done something responsible.

Instead, I felt like I’d ruined my life before I’d really gotten a chance to live one.

When your entire life becomes a debt payment

When I graduated, my student loan payments ate essentially an entire paycheck.

So I worked more.

For almost my entire adult life, I have had at least one full-time job and another job on top of it.

Meanwhile, I watched people around me take unpaid internships that might advance their careers. Travel. Buy cars. Buy houses. Start families. Take risks. Quit jobs they hated without immediately knowing what came next.

I worked.

There is a particular cruelty to being poor while technically making too much money to qualify for help. Benefits don’t particularly care that an enormous percentage of your income is disappearing into student debt every month.

On paper, you have money. In your actual life, you don’t.

There were periods of profound depression. Periods of substance abuse. Periods when I didn’t want to be alive anymore because everything felt completely fucking pointless.

What was I working toward?

More work?

Another payment?

Another decade?

I carried an enormous amount of shame about this.

I was ashamed that I hadn’t known better. Angry that there hadn’t been adults around me who understood the system well enough to guide me. Resentful that I had been told education was the responsible path toward stability and somehow ended up feeling less stable because I had pursued it.

Eventually I went back to graduate school, this time on scholarship.

For the first time in six years, my loans went into forbearance. I could breathe.

Then, during my master’s graduation trip, I got into a life-changing car accident and was hospitalized for weeks, unable to work. My student loan payments were due again. Now medical debt was added to the pile. I started driving rideshare while my ribs were still broken.

My friend, who was in the accident with me, experienced it as a wake-up call. She got engaged, married, and returned to the career she'd built after being able to spend years working as an unpaid intern. I had never been able to afford opportunities like that.

I worked a full-time job and two part-time jobs to keep my head above water, dated people who were as emotionally unavailable as I was, and drank to manage my anxiety and depression.

My attempts to improve my life were beginning to feel almost comedic.

I thought shame would save me

For a long time, I thought the answer was to be harder on myself.

Spend less. Work harder. Need less. Want less.

Remember: You are the problem. This is all your fault.

But shame is not particularly imaginative.

You fucked up.

You should have known better.

You’re behind.

You need to work harder.

This is your life now.

You are a loser.

No one will ever love you.

You are forever fucked.

It was a super fun time.

Unfortunately, the more ashamed I became, the less capable I was of actually looking at the problem.

We tend to talk about financial responsibility as though it means being disciplined enough to stare at a spreadsheet.

But you can’t solve a problem you are psychologically incapable of looking at.

Looking directly at my finances meant confronting an amount of debt that felt impossible to solve, choices I regretted, an economic system I increasingly understood was profoundly inequitable, and the terrifying possibility that I might work this hard for the rest of my life and still never get free.

So I avoided.

I dissociated.

I worked.

I blamed myself.

None of it changed the math.

Then I learned how to breathe

When I entered graduate school in 2015, I had the best health insurance I’d had in my entire life.

Soon after, I started somatic therapy. At the time, I thought I was going because of my problem drinking and particularly committed relationship with tequila. I wanted to stop drinking once and for all and live up to my potential.

Instead, therapy began showing me the entire system underneath it.

For the first time, I began to understand how profoundly childhood trauma had shaped my life. Eventually I would understand that I had been living with C-PTSD. Later still, I would discover that I was autistic and had ADHD, and that I’d spent decades trying to function without understanding the kinds of support my brain and nervous system actually needed.

Suddenly, some of the things I had interpreted as personal failures started making more sense.

Why I became overwhelmed.

Why I worked until I burned out.

Why uncertainty could send me spiraling.

Why I tried to anticipate every possible disaster.

Why asking for help felt more dangerous than simply doing everything myself.

I started seeing how isolated I’d been inside my own challenges. Money wasn’t separate from any of this.

I had spent years longing for more connection—to other people, to the world, to myself—while simultaneously organizing my life around the belief that ultimately, I was on my own.

My body had learned:

There isn’t enough.

You’re on your own.

Something terrible is about to happen.

You have to work harder.

You can’t stop.

You can’t need anything.

And maybe most importantly:

There is no other way.

No wonder six figures of debt felt like a life sentence.

I wasn’t simply carrying debt. I was carrying it inside a nervous system that believed survival depended entirely on me.

Around that time, I had a free session with a financial advisor at a community arts space. She told me plainly that, given my experience and education, I wasn’t asking or expecting enough for myself.

She suggested I could make $100,000 a year.

This seemed unfathomable.

I had spent my entire life practicing catastrophe. I had very little practice imagining myself resourced.

Then an older friend who knew I’d been struggling mailed me a copy of Creative Visualization. I started experimenting with something that felt almost embarrassingly simple. I wrote about the future I wanted as though it were happening in the present. I meditated on it.

But more importantly, I tried to feel it.

What would it feel like to have resources?

What would it feel like to have support?

What would it feel like to have choices?

What would it feel like to believe there might be possibilities I couldn’t currently see?

I started practicing the possibility of making $100,000 a year.

This wasn’t magic.

I wasn’t sitting in my apartment visualizing a giant novelty check and waiting for the universe to Venmo me $100,000.

Creativity requires reality

After graduate school, I applied for hundreds of jobs. I had interviews. Many of the salaries I was offered still weren’t enough to live on without another job or jobs.

Then I saw an opportunity for a client that seemed promising. I almost didn’t apply. I didn’t think I was qualified enough.

But by that point, out of desperation, I’d spent a few weeks practicing what it might feel like to inhabit a different future while meditating in the bathtub and writing a new reality in my journal.

So I thought:

Fuck it.

I applied.

I still remember the offer I heard on the phone: $100,000 a year to start, with the possibility of bonuses and equity. It took all my self-control not to shout: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME MY FUCKING IMAGINATION FUCKING WORKED IT WORKED!

I had been hoping for $100,000 while simultaneously believing it was a stretch. I thought I could “get by” on $75,000 and maybe have something left for emergencies.

Instead, I got what I had barely allowed myself to imagine.

The visualization hadn’t deposited money into my bank account. It had helped me become someone willing to make a move I otherwise might not have made.

And that changed the trajectory of my life.

I could leave some of my other jobs. I had leverage. I had enough breathing room to ask questions that are nearly impossible to ask when your nervous system is focused entirely on survival:

What do I actually want?

What resources do I already have?

What am I unusually good at?

What risks are actually worth taking?

What assumptions about money, work, and success have I never questioned?

I bought my first car.

I spent a year traveling around the country solo while working full-time and picking up additional gigs to make the math work.

I bought a house by myself somewhere I could afford to begin building something instead of merely surviving.

I started my own business.

And eventually, I did something that terrified me even more than earning more money.

I looked directly at my debt.

I’m still broke

Here’s where I could turn this into a satisfying personal-finance success story and tell you I paid everything off and now I have $3 million in index funds.

I did not.

Depending on how we’re defining broke—particularly if we’re looking at my debt-to-assets ratio—I am still technically broke.

But my relationship to being broke has completely changed.

I have paid close to $200,000 toward my debt and interest over almost twenty years.

And when I finally started looking creatively at the problem instead of assuming the only respectable option was to continue doing what I had always done, I discovered something absurd:

I was projected to be paying my student loans until I was nearly 70 years old.

Seventy.

I had spent decades trying to be “responsible” inside a system that wasn’t actually getting me free.

So I started asking different questions.

Eventually, that led me to enter a debt settlement program for my private student loans. It’s messy. There are risks. It isn’t the right strategy for everyone.

But after examining my actual circumstances—stable housing, a reliable car, multiple income streams—and questioning the assumptions I’d been living under, it became the choice that made sense for me.

I’m now on track to be free of my student debt within the next few years while potentially saving close to six figures in additional interest.

For the first time in my adult life, I can see an end to what once felt like a life sentence.

Being broke didn’t save me

I do not think poverty is a gift.

I don’t think struggling to afford food made me a better person. I don’t think working multiple jobs while watching other people get opportunities I couldn’t afford to take was secretly good for me.

Fuck that.

Financial stress has cost me enormously—my health, relationships, career choices, sense of safety, and time.

There are structural inequities that cannot be vision-boarded away. Telling someone who cannot pay their electric bill to simply adopt an abundance mindset is insulting.

But there is a difference between saying:

Being broke is a gift.

And asking:

Given that this is my reality, what creative possibilities are available to me?

Because creativity isn’t pretending reality doesn’t exist. Creativity requires reality.

A painter has a canvas of a particular size. A poet has language. A filmmaker has a budget.

Every creative act begins with constraints.

You have to see the materials you’re actually working with before you can make something from them.

If I refuse to look at the canvas, I can’t make anything with it.

Shame is expensive

And I mean that literally.

Shame almost convinced me not to apply for the opportunity that dramatically increased my income.

Shame convinced me that working harder was the only respectable solution.

Shame kept me from questioning whether the way I was paying my debt was actually serving me.

Shame kept making me the problem instead of allowing me to become curious about the system I was operating inside.

Creativity did the opposite. It gave me more moves.

Being broke AND creative taught me to make lateral moves, cobble together income from unexpected places, question advice designed for people whose lives look nothing like mine, tolerate uncertainty, and recognize that sometimes earning more is considerably more powerful than finding another $17 to cut from your grocery budget.

It taught me that I can experiment. I can change my mind. I can make another move.

Sometimes your constraints are very real. Sometimes every option available to you is bad. Sometimes the system really is unfair.

Acknowledging that isn’t helplessness. It’s information.

I spent years running from my financial reality because I thought looking at it would confirm my worst fear:

I ruined my life.

Instead, looking directly at it showed me possibilities I hadn’t seen yet.

I can breathe now

I am not writing this from the other side. I’m writing it from somewhere in the middle.

There is still debt. There are still moments when I look at the numbers and feel angry about how much of my life has been organized around paying them.

But for the first time, I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

And strangely, the light didn’t appear because I finally made enough money to deserve hope. Hope came first. Or maybe not hope exactly. Possibility.

That is what creative visualization gave me. Not a magical ability to manifest money. Practice experiencing myself as someone with agency.

Someone who could look at an impossible problem and say:

Okay. This is what I have. What can I make from here?

And I know paying off my student loans isn’t going to make me safe forever.

There is no fairy-tale ending where the balance hits zero and nothing bad ever happens to me again.

I could lose my house in a tornado. I could get sick. I could lose my clients or ability to work completely.

I could spend the rest of my life trying to anticipate every possible disaster and construct a life so perfectly controlled that nothing can ever hurt me again.

I am extremely good at that particular spiral.

But creative practice has given me something I didn’t have when I was twenty-two and staring at six figures of debt:

Confidence in my ability to respond.

I don’t know exactly what will happen to me.

But I know I can look at what is actually happening instead of only what I’m afraid might happen.

I can ask for help, get curious, question my assumptions, experiment, make another move. That feels more useful than the fantasy of becoming financially invulnerable.

I don’t think creativity eliminates the constraints of being broke. I think creativity begins when we are willing to see our constraints clearly enough to work with them.

And sometimes the first creative act is simply opening the bill. Looking at the number. Taking a breath.

And refusing to believe that the future you’ve been handed is the only future you’re allowed or able to create.

This Friday: What to Do When You’re Sick of Being Broke

This Friday’s practical guide is for anyone exhausted by money shame, avoidance, hustle, and financial advice designed for someone else’s life.

We’re going to look at how to face your actual financial reality without using it as another opportunity to punish yourself—and how to create more moves around income, debt, resources, constraints, and possibility.

Subscribe so you don’t miss it.

I’m also building something bigger.

Over the last twenty years, I’ve learned a lot about money the extremely expensive way.

I’m currently building The Money Reset System, specifically for first-gen and neurodivergent creatives who need something more useful than make a budget, stop buying coffee, and invest the rest.

I’m bringing together what I’ve learned about nervous-system regulation, creativity, debt, earning, resourcefulness, visualization, and designing financial systems around the reality of how our lives and brains actually work.

If that sounds like something you need, message me MONEY and I’ll let you know when it’s ready.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, reinvention, money — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab.

Earlier this week, I wrote about an uncomfortable realization I’ve been having: some of the biggest acts of self-sabotage in my life haven’t looked much like self-sabotage.

They’ve looked like trying.

Trying to understand someone, fix a relationship, get my parents to see something differently, figure out why someone behaved the way they did, determine what I did wrong, anticipate what might happen next so I could somehow be prepared for it.

Trying, trying, trying.

The problem wasn’t that I cared too much. The problem was that I was putting enormous amounts of creative energy toward outcomes I couldn’t actually create.

And knowing this intellectually has not magically made me stop doing it.

Unfortunately.

This is because there is usually a reason we’re pouring our energy into something we can’t change.

Worry can unconsciously make us feel like we’re preparing. Analyzing someone can make us feel like we’re gaining control. Overfunctioning can protect us from the terror of finding out what happens if we stop.

Wondering what’s wrong with us can even protect us from something: if I’m the problem, then maybe I can fix myself and finally guarantee that I’ll never be rejected, abandoned, disappointed, misunderstood, or hurt again.

So this isn’t a guide to simply “letting go.” I have always found that advice incredibly annoying anyway.

This is a practice for figuring out where your energy is going, what you’re trying to accomplish with it, and whether the thing you’re trying to create is actually yours to create.

And if it isn’t?

We’re going to give that energy somewhere else to go.

Step 1: Follow your attention

Before trying to change anything, pay attention.

For the next day or two, notice what repeatedly pulls your attention away from the life directly in front of you.

• What conversation are you replaying?

• Whose behavior are you analyzing?

• What are you checking?

• What future scenario are you rehearsing?

• What are you Googling?

• What are you repeatedly talking to your friends about?

• What question have you already answered twelve different ways but somehow find yourself asking again?

• Where do you feel the strongest urge to figure something out?

Don’t judge any of it yet. Just write it down.

You might notice things like:

• Why hasn’t she texted me back?

• How do I make my dad understand why this hurt me?

• Is my partner ever going to change?

• What if I choose the wrong career?

• What if this business doesn’t work?

• What if everyone else is ahead of me?

• Why am I like this?

Some of these questions may genuinely deserve attention.

There is a difference between reflection and rumination.

Reflection eventually creates movement.

Rumination keeps promising that if you think about the problem one more time, you might finally achieve certainty.

Certainty rarely arrives. But exhaustion does.

Step 2: Ask what all this thinking is doing for you

This is the step I think we skip most often. We notice we’re obsessing over something and immediately tell ourselves to stop.

• Stop worrying.

• Stop thinking about them.

• Stop caring what your parents think.

• Move on.

Very useful. Thanks, brain.

Instead, let’s get curious about why your system keeps returning there. Try completing this sentence:

If I keep thinking about this, I don’t have to feel ________.

Maybe the answer is:

• Helpless

• Grief

• Rejection

• Uncertainty

• Anger

• Loneliness

Maybe it’s the terrifying possibility that you already have enough information to make a decision you don’t want to make.

Then try:

If I could finally figure this out, I believe I would get ________.

• Safety

• Love

• Closure

• Certainty

• Permission

• Belonging

• Control

• An apology

• Proof that I’m not the problem

This is where wasted energy starts becoming useful information. Because beneath all that thinking is often something very reasonable that you want.

Step 3: Ask: Is this mine to create?

This has become one of my favorite questions.

Not: Can I influence this?

We can influence lots of things.

Not: Could this theoretically change?

Almost anything could theoretically change.

The question is: Is this mine to create?

You can create an honest conversation → You cannot create someone’s honesty

You can tell someone what you need → You cannot create their willingness or ability to meet it

You can apologize → You cannot create forgiveness

You can invite someone closer → You cannot create intimacy by yourself

You can apply for the job → You cannot create the hiring decision

You can make the art → You cannot create everyone’s reaction to it

You can tell your parents how their behavior affected you → You cannot create the parents you needed them to be

This distinction sounds obvious until you start paying attention to how much energy you spend trying to create things that are out of your control.

Step 4: Do a Creative Energy Audit

Take out a piece of paper and make three columns.

In the first, write: What am I spending energy on?

In the second: What am I actually trying to create?

And in the third: What is mine to create?

For example:

• What I’m spending energy on: Wondering why they haven’t texted me back

  • What I’m trying to create: Reassurance and connection

  • What’s actually mine to create: How I respond to uncertainty and where else I seek connection

• What I’m spending energy on: Wishing my parent understood me

  • What I’m trying to create: Feeling seen and understood

  • What’s actually mine to create: Building relationships where I can be known and grieving what I didn’t receive

• What I’m spending energy on: Trying to get my partner to change

  • What I’m trying to create: A healthier relationship

  • What’s actually mine to create: My requests, boundaries, participation, and choices

• What I’m spending energy on: Worrying about whether I’ll succeed

  • What I’m trying to create: Certainty that everything will work out

  • What’s actually mine to create: The next experiment I can run or action I can take

• What I’m spending energy on: Wondering what’s wrong with me

  • What I’m trying to create: Protection from rejection

  • What’s actually mine to create: Understanding myself without turning myself into a problem

Don’t use this exercise to convince yourself you shouldn’t need anyone. That’s definitely not the point.

We’re relational creatures. We need other people. We affect each other. Healthy relationships require reciprocity, communication, repair, vulnerability, and interdependence.

The goal isn’t to become so self-sufficient that nothing anyone does can hurt you. I’ve tried that, and unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Somehow we still get hurt.

The goal is to stop taking responsibility for both sides of the relationship.

Or both sides of reality.

Step 5: Accept what is actually happening

This one is difficult because acceptance often gets confused with approval, but they aren’t the same thing.

Acceptance doesn’t mean: This is okay.

It doesn’t mean: I deserved this.

It doesn’t mean: I shouldn’t want something different.

And it certainly doesn’t mean: I have to continue participating.

Acceptance simply means: This is what reality is currently showing me.

Someone can repeatedly disappoint you and you can accept that disappointment as information.

Someone can tell you they don’t want a relationship and you can believe them even if you desperately wish they wanted one.

Your parents can repeatedly demonstrate the limits of what they’re capable of giving you.

A career can stop fitting. A friendship can change. A project can fail.

You can want something very badly and still not get it.

Reality gives us something much more useful: A place to stand.

Once I stop asking reality to be different, I can finally ask: Given what is actually here, what do I want to create now?

That’s where your agency comes back.

Step 6: Give the energy somewhere to go

This might be the most important part. Because “stop thinking about them” isn’t a plan. Neither is “focus on yourself.”

If you’ve spent months—or years—pouring energy into a relationship, problem, fantasy, worry, or version of yourself you’re desperately trying to fix, removing it creates a vacuum.

Your attention needs somewhere to go. So don’t ask yourself to redirect all of it.

Start with 10%.

What would happen if I gave 10% of this energy back to my own life?

If you’ve spent five hours this week analyzing someone’s behavior, what could thirty minutes create?

• You could send the application.

• Write 500 words.

• Go for the walk.

• Call someone who consistently shows up for you.

• Move $50 into savings.

• Research the class.

• Clean the corner of your house that’s driving you insane.

• Make dinner.

• Draw something terrible.

• Sign up for the thing you’ve been thinking about for six months.

• Have the conversation you’ve been avoiding.

• Sleep.

Do something that reminds you that you are a participant in your life rather than someone waiting for your life to begin.

It doesn’t have to be impressive. It just needs to be yours.

Try this for seven days

For the next week, notice whenever you catch yourself mentally trying to solve another person, predict an unknowable future, or control an outcome that isn’t entirely yours.

Then ask yourself four questions:

1. What am I trying to create right now?

Name the actual outcome.

2. Is this mine to create?

Be specific about where your participation ends and someone else’s—or reality’s—begins.

3. What am I hoping this outcome would give me?

Safety? Connection? Validation? Certainty? Rest? Love? Permission?

4. What’s one way I can participate in creating that for myself today?

Then do something. Tiny is fine. In fact, tiny might be better.

We’re not trying to completely transform your life in seven days. We’re practicing something much smaller and, I think, much more transformative:

Putting your energy where your participation matters.

Your energy is going somewhere

The goal here isn’t to become perfectly disciplined about our attention. I’m certainly not.

We’re going to worry. We’re going to obsess.

We’re going to fantasize about conversations that will probably never happen and imagine alternate versions of people we love.

We’re going to occasionally spend forty-five minutes trying to determine what the punctuation in a text message means.

We’re human.

But I know I want to get increasingly better at noticing when I’ve left my own life. And then come back to it.

Your creative energy doesn’t disappear when you aren’t using it to make art or build a business or change your life.

It goes somewhere. It can go toward rehearsing the past. Managing other people. Predicting the future. Trying to guarantee that you’ll never be hurt.

Or it can go toward participating in the small corner of reality where you actually have some power.

You don’t have to stop caring about people. You don’t have to stop wanting things you can’t control. You don’t have to become detached from outcomes.

You can simply practice asking:

Is this mine to create?

And when the answer is no, you can grieve it. You can be angry about it and wish it were different.

And then, slowly, you can choose to bring some of that energy back home.

If you want to practice this with me

This is the kind of work we’re doing inside Creative Reset Studio: noticing where our energy is getting stuck, coming back into relationship with ourselves, and practicing putting our attention toward the lives we actually want to create.

It’s not another place to optimize yourself. It’s a place to practice a new way of life.

And if what you’re noticing is specifically about the patterns you keep recreating with other people, that’s the work we’re exploring in Do Something Different, a relationship lab for people who want to stop endlessly understanding their patterns and actually practice relating differently.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, reinvention, money — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening soon.

I have wasted an extraordinary amount of my life wishing other people were different.

Throughout various chapters of my life, I have wished my parents were different. I have wished friends were different. I have wished I had a partner. Then, when I had a partner, I wished my partner was different.

I have replayed conversations in my head. Tried to understand what someone meant. Tried to figure out what I could say differently so they would finally understand me. I have worried about whether someone loved me enough, whether I was asking for too much, whether I was too sensitive, too needy, too independent, too complicated, too difficult to love.

And when all of that failed, I inevitably turned the investigation back on myself:

What is wrong with me?

This can feel like self-awareness. And sometimes it is.

But after committing the last twenty years to self-examination, creative practice, and studying what makes relationships thrive — not just survive — with ourselves and others, it’s abundantly clear to me now that a lot of what I have called “working on myself” was actually a very elaborate form of self-sabotage.

The reality is that when we try to solve other people like they’re puzzles we might someday unlock, we don’t have to fully confront the much more frightening question:

What do I want to create with my life?

Dysfunction gives you a job

One of the seductive things about dysfunctional relationships is that they give you something to do.

There is always a problem to solve.

A text to interpret. A conversation to rehearse. A boundary to figure out. There are childhood wounds to understand and a person whose behavior needs explaining. A relationship that could finally become what you always knew it could be if only you could find the right combination of communication, compassion, patience, therapy, boundaries, books, podcasts, attachment theory, nervous-system regulation, and carefully worded text messages.

Ask me how I know.

When you have spent your life becoming highly attuned to other people, or if you are neurodivergent like me and highly perceptive to pattern recognition, this work can even feel productive.

You are doing something.

Your brain is busy. Your nervous system is busy. Your imagination is extremely busy.

But busyness and movement are not the same thing.

You can expend an enormous amount of energy without actually going anywhere. And eventually, whether you resist it or not, you will be asked to confront something you most likely won’t particularly enjoy confronting:

Every hour you spent trying to create a different version of someone else was an hour you weren’t spending creating your own life.

That doesn’t mean the pain wasn’t real or that someone else’s behavior didn’t affect you. It also doesn’t mean relationships don’t require work.

It merely means our energy is finite.

And, that perhaps, the reason you aren’t where you want to be in work, with finances, or your creative life is because you need to become much more interested in where you are putting your energy and why.

Your imagination does not know the difference between a life and a fantasy

Creativity isn’t just making paintings or writing novels. Creativity is the human capacity to imagine something that doesn’t exist yet and participate in bringing it into existence.

Our relationships are creative. Our careers, communities, homes, families, lives are all a result of how we collaborate creatively.

We may have a fantastic vision for our family, but it requires other people being willing to bring that vision to life too. Or be self-aware and willing enough to share their own vision for how they’d like your family to function so you can create something even better together.

Yet, instead of developing the relational and creative skills we need to move forward, there is another place we tend to direct these capacities — toward imagining alternate versions of a reality that already happened.

The childhood we should have had and the parents who finally understand us. The person who chooses us or the apology from a friend that changes everything. The partner who becomes the person we know they could be. The version of ourselves who is finally lovable enough so no one ever abandons, disappoints, rejects, or misunderstands us again.

This is still imagination. It just isn’t creation. Because creation requires some relationship with reality.

It asks:

Given what is actually here, what can I make?

Fantasy asks:

How can I make what is here become something else?

I have spent years confusing the two.

Sometimes focusing on someone else’s dysfunction protects you from your own freedom

This is the part I find most uncomfortable.

At certain times in my life, it would have been much easier to believe that other people or circumstances were simply preventing me from becoming myself.

Sometimes they were. But sometimes I was also using them. Not consciously and definitely not maliciously.

If we tell ourselves our lives aren’t working because our — partner, job, parent, body, economy — won’t change and we make it our full-time job to try to change them, then we don’t have to decide what we want to do if they never do.

If I can’t feel okay because my parents still don’t understand me, I don’t have to grieve the possibility that they never will.

If I’m waiting for someone to choose me, I don’t have to fully choose myself.

If I’m constantly asking What’s wrong with me?, I can remain permanently occupied with fixing myself instead of risking finding out what happens when I assume I am already allowed to participate in my own life.

And if I spend all of my creative energy managing dysfunction, there isn’t much left over for creating something new.

That is the strange bargain.

Dysfunction can be miserable. But it can also be familiar.

Creation is uncertain.

Your nervous system may prefer a familiar problem to an unfamiliar possibility

There is a reason all of this is much harder than simply deciding to “focus on yourself.”

Our brains are prediction machines. They use previous experience to anticipate what is likely to happen next, and familiar patterns require less uncertainty than unfamiliar ones.

This means something can be deeply unpleasant and still feel strangely compelling because your nervous system knows the choreography.

You know what to do when someone pulls away. You know how to overthink, chase, fix, make yourself smaller. You know how to become indispensable. You know how to wait.

What you may not know how to do is wake up on a Tuesday morning with no emergency and ask:

What would I like to make today?

That space of possibility can be surprisingly terrifying.

You have to make choices without knowing exactly where they lead. You have to risk wanting things, which means you have to risk failing at them. You have to discover preferences you can’t justify, which also means you have to disappoint people.

But mostly, you have to stop waiting for permission. You have to become responsible for what happens next.

Sometimes obsessing over another person is merely easier than taking responsibility for your reality.

Pay attention to where your creative energy is going

Lately I’ve been thinking about self-sabotage less as doing things that are bad for me and more as misdirected creative energy.

Where am I putting enormous amounts of attention without producing meaningful movement?

Where am I trying to create an outcome I don’t actually control?

Where am I repeatedly asking a question reality has already answered?

Where am I using analysis to avoid grief?

Where am I waiting for another person to become different before I give myself permission to live differently?

And perhaps most importantly:

What could all of this energy create if I brought it back to myself?

Not in an individualistic, fuck-everyone-else, I-don’t-need-anyone way. I don’t want a life without relationships.

I want the opposite.

Relationships where both people can be responsible for their own growth, where difference doesn’t automatically become danger, and where love doesn’t require abandoning yourself.

Relationships where the energy between us creates more possibility in our lives rather than making our worlds progressively smaller.

But I can’t create those relationships by myself. What I can create is my side of them.

That distinction has completely changed how I show up in my life.

Stop trying to create people. Create conditions.

You cannot create a different parent. You cannot create someone’s readiness. You cannot create someone else’s emotional capacity. You cannot create another person’s desire to change or reciprocity by giving more. You cannot love someone into becoming who you need them to be.

But you can create conditions.

You can create boundaries, space, friendships, rituals, art, communities, new ways of relating. You can create opportunities to meet people who are capable of meeting you.

And you can practice directing your attention toward the places where your participation actually matters.

I think this is one of the most important creative practices there is.

Not figuring out how to get everything you want. Learning to recognize what is actually yours to create.

This is the work I’m increasingly interested in

The more I’ve worked and learned with clients and taught groups about creativity and relationships, the less separate they now seem to me.

Both require us to confront the same fundamental question:

Where am I putting my life force?

Am I spending it maintaining an old pattern? Trying to earn something? Waiting Proving? Fixing? Managing?

Or am I putting it toward something that can actually grow?

This question sits underneath two spaces I’m building right now.

Creative Reset Studio is for practicing what happens when we bring our attention back to our own lives — our creative capacity, our bodies, our questions, our desires, and the things we actually want to make possible. It isn’t about becoming more productive. It’s about getting better at noticing where your energy is going and intentionally putting more of it toward what matters.

Do Something Different is a relationship lab for the other side of this work: recognizing the patterns we keep recreating with other people and practicing different ways of relating instead of endlessly thinking our way through the same dynamics.

We don’t need another ten years of understanding why we do what we do.

Understanding matters. But eventually we have to do something different.

Eventually we have to stop trying to create a different past, a different parent, a different partner, a different person.

And take all of that extraordinary creative energy — and use it to create a new life.

This Week’s Creative Reset: Take Your Energy Back

Think of one person, relationship, or situation you’ve been spending a lot of mental or emotional energy trying to change, understand, predict, or solve.

Set a timer for five minutes and write down everything you wish were different about it. Then draw a line down the page.

On one side, write: Not mine to create.

On the other: Mine to create.

Start sorting.

Not mine

• Their response

• Their willingness to change

• Whether they understand you

Mine

• The boundary you set

• The conversation you choose to have

• Where you put your attention today

• What you make with the energy you’ve been spending on them

When you’re finished, choose one small action from the Mine to create side and do it this week.

This doesn’t mean you have to stop caring or end the relationship. You’re just practicing putting your creative energy somewhere it can actually become something.

Coming Friday: How to Stop Wasting Your Creative Energy

Knowing that you’re pouring your energy into something you can’t change is one thing. Actually learning how to stop is another.

In Friday’s practical guide, I’ll walk you through how to recognize where your attention, imagination, and emotional energy are getting stuck — and how to start redirecting them toward the relationships, projects, decisions, and possibilities where you actually have agency.

We’ll look at the difference between processing and perseverating, how to tell when reflection has become avoidance, and a simple practice for asking: Is this mine to create?

Subscribe so the guide lands in your inbox Friday.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening soon.

Earlier this week, I argued that self-sabotage isn’t usually a sign that you’re lazy, broken, or secretly allergic to happiness.

It’s often a sign that your nervous system is trying to protect you.

Unfortunately, our nervous systems are a bit like the smoke detector in my house. They’re incredibly useful. They’re also capable of going completely feral because I dared to make toast.

Many of us are walking around with nervous systems that respond to launching a business, setting a boundary, or texting someone we like with the same level of concern they might reserve for an actual bear.

No wonder we end up scrolling Instagram instead of doing the thing we actually want to do. If that’s where you find yourself, this guide isn’t about forcing yourself to “just do it.”

It’s about helping your nervous system discover that the life you’re trying to build isn’t a threat — even if it feels that way sometimes.

1. Figure out what self-sabotage actually looks like for you

When people hear “self-sabotage,” they usually picture dramatic moments.

Quitting.

Giving up.

Blowing up your life.

Sometimes that’s true. But self-sabotage is often much sneakier. Mine likes to wear glasses and carry a clipboard.

It says things like:

Let’s just do one more round of research.

Maybe we should reorganize our workspace first.

You know what would really help us write this article? Reading three more books about writing articles (lol).

Very convincing. Your version might look different.

Maybe you become the most productive person alive — as long as the task has absolutely nothing to do with the thing you actually care about.

Maybe you volunteer to help everyone else or you convince yourself the timing isn’t quite right. Maybe you spend six hours choosing a font.

I wish I were kidding, but these are real examples from my life!

Try asking yourself:

When I avoid something important, where does my energy usually go instead?

Because it always goes somewhere.

2. Ask what you’re trying to protect — not what you’re doing wrong

This question has probably changed my life more than any other.

Instead of asking:

What’s wrong with me?

Try asking:

What is this part of me trying to protect?

Maybe it’s protecting you from rejection and the feelings of failure that accompany it.

But it also could be protecting you from success, disappointing someone you care about, being misunderstood, or discovering that what you’ve wanted for years isn’t actually what you want anymore.

Your nervous system isn’t trying to ruin your life. It’s trying to prevent pain using a playbook it wrote years ago.

The problem is that it hasn’t yet realized your world has changed. Or that you have.

Try asking yourself:

How old does this fear feel?

Not how old are you. How old does it feel?

Sometimes the answer is surprisingly young.

3. Thank your nervous system for its terrible advice

Hear me out!

The next time your brain says:

Absolutely not. We cannot possibly send that email.

Try responding with something like:

Thank you for your concern.

Seriously. Not sarcastically.

Imagine your nervous system as an overprotective relative. You don’t have to do everything they suggest. But arguing with them usually doesn’t help.

You can appreciate that they’re trying to keep you safe while gently deciding not to take their advice this time.

This isn’t about pretending fear isn’t there. It’s about remembering that fear doesn’t automatically get the final vote on your life or how you show up for it.

Try asking yourself:

What would happen if I treated this fear like information instead of instructions?

4. Make the next step laughably small

One of the biggest mistakes I make is assuming I need courage for the entire journey. Usually I only need enough courage for the next five minutes.

Don’t write the book. Write one paragraph.

Don’t redesign your entire life. Send one email.

Don’t become the kind of person who effortlessly sets boundaries. Practice saying one honest sentence.

Your nervous system learns through experience — not motivational quotes. Every small action becomes evidence that uncertainty is survivable.

Try asking yourself:

What’s the smallest version of this that still counts?

Then do that. Over time, those tiny actions compound.

5. Celebrate your nervous system — not just your results

Here’s something I’ve been practicing lately.

When I finish something that scared me, I don’t immediately ask:

Was it good? (Am I good?)

I ask:

Did I stay connected to myself while I did it?

Because that’s actually what I’m trying to build. Not a perfect career, relationships, essays, or art. But a nervous system that trusts me.

Don’t skip over celebrating because the outcome wasn’t exactly what you hoped. Your nervous system is paying attention. Give it something worth remembering.

Honoring where you are in the process is how you continue to build the capacity to keep going.

Try asking yourself:

What evidence did I create today that I can handle more than I used to believe?

Want to practice this with us?

One of the hardest things about changing old patterns is that we often try to do it alone.

We might read books, listen to podcasts, or save a million posts about how to change. We promise ourselves that this week, this month, or this year we’ll begin to show up differently.

And then life gets busy, our nervous systems get overwhelmed, and we slip back into the patterns that once helped us survive.

That’s exactly why I’m creating Creative Reset Studio.

It’s a weekly space inspired by my 1:1 client practice where we practice — not perform. Together, we use creativity, reflection, and evidence-informed somatic practices to gently expand our capacity for uncertainty, self-trust, and meaningful change.

Changing the patterns that have kept us safe isn’t something we think our way into. It’s something we practice. And it’s something that becomes more possible when we do it with support.

If you’re ready to stop waiting until you feel confident enough, healed enough, or ready enough to begin creating the life you want, I’d love to have you join us.

→ Learn more about Creative Reset Studio here.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening soon.

I used to think self-sabotage looked dramatic.

Quitting the job. Blowing the opportunity. Burning the bridge. Walking away from the relationship. Giving up on the dream.

Then I started paying closer attention to my own life.

It looked like overthinking instead of deciding. Perfectionism instead of publishing. Overfunctioning instead of asking for help. Staying in relationships long after I’d realized they no longer fit. Waiting until I felt more certain, more qualified, more healed before allowing myself to become the person I already wanted to be.

From the outside, it looked responsible. From the inside, it was exhausting.

For years, I couldn’t understand why I kept creating a life that looked increasingly aligned with my values while still feeling like I had one foot pressed firmly on the brake.

I wanted to write more, but I delayed sharing my work. I wanted deeper relationships, but I found myself repeating familiar patterns. I wanted to build a business around the things I cared most about, yet I kept finding reasons to wait until the next certification, the next milestone, the next version of myself.

It wasn’t a lack of ambition. It wasn’t laziness. And it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t want the life I imagined.

It was because my nervous system wasn’t convinced that the life I truly wanted was safe.

That realization is what finally changed how I related to my choices. Choices that I needed to make if I ever wanted what I said I did.

Your brain is designed to predict — not to make you happy

One of the brain’s primary jobs is prediction.

Long before it cares about fulfillment, purpose, or creative expression, your brain is constantly asking a much older question:

Can I predict what happens next?

Predictability has historically increased the odds of survival. If our ancestors could anticipate danger, they had a better chance of avoiding it. Our brains evolved accordingly.

Launching the business. Ending the unhealthy relationship. Publishing the book. Setting a boundary. Falling in love with someone emotionally available. Making significantly more money than anyone in your family ever did.

These aren’t inherently dangerous. But they are unfamiliar.

And unfamiliarity is often enough for a nervous system shaped by chronic stress, trauma, emotional neglect, or instability to sound the alarm.

Which means something remarkable begins to happen.

The very life you’ve spent years trying to build can start to feel threatening.

Self-sabotage is often self-protection

This is the part I wish someone had explained to me years ago.

Children are extraordinary adapters.

If growing up taught you that love had to be earned, you might become an adult who constantly overfunctions in relationships.

If being visible led to criticism or ridicule, your adult self may procrastinate every creative project that could bring you attention.

If mistakes weren’t tolerated, perfectionism becomes less of a personality trait and more of a survival strategy.

If chaos was familiar, calm can feel strangely unsettling.

These adaptations weren’t failures. They were intelligent. At one point, they may have helped you survive.

The tragedy is that the strategies which once kept us safe can quietly become the very things that keep us from fully living.

Your identity is trying to stay consistent

Neuroscientists often describe the brain as an efficiency machine.

It builds patterns. It automates them. It conserves energy wherever it can. That includes the stories we tell about ourselves.

I’m the anxious one.

I’m always broke.

I’m the responsible one.

I’m the caretaker.

I’m not creative.

I’m just someone who never finishes things.

The more often we repeat these stories, the more familiar they become. Changing them isn’t just about changing your thoughts. It’s about changing your identity.

And identity change can feel surprisingly threatening. Not because your current identity is making you happy. Because it’s making you predictable.

Growth asks us to become someone our nervous system has never met before.

No wonder it feels uncomfortable.

Creativity reveals our self-sabotage faster than almost anything else

This may be one of the reasons I’m so drawn to creative practice — not because creative people sabotage themselves more, but because creativity makes our protective patterns impossible to ignore.

Every meaningful creative act requires uncertainty.

You don’t know whether the essay will resonate. You don’t know if the painting will work. You don’t know how people will respond to the business. You don’t know whether you’ll succeed.

For a nervous system organized around prediction, that’s a terrifying request.

Which is why so many of us clean the house instead of writing. Research another course instead of launching. Edit the same paragraph for three hours. Wait until we feel confident. Convince ourselves we’ll begin after life calms down.

We call it procrastination. Sometimes it’s protection.

The beautiful thing is that creativity also offers one of the most powerful ways to confront the unconscious fears holding us back.

Every time you create something despite uncertainty, your nervous system gathers new evidence. Not evidence that you’ll never fail. Evidence that you can survive not knowing. That you can tolerate being seen. That uncertainty doesn’t have to end in catastrophe.

Slowly, almost invisibly, your definition of safety begins to expand.

The goal isn’t to eliminate fear

I don’t think healing means reaching a place where your nervous system never sounds the alarm again.

Mine certainly hasn’t.

I still notice the urge to overprepare before publishing something important. I still catch myself wanting one more certification before calling myself qualified. I still feel the impulse to overfunction when someone I love is struggling.

The difference is that I recognize these impulses for what they are.

Not evidence that I’m incapable. Evidence that a protective part of me is trying to do its job.

That, I’ve found, is where freedom begins.

Maybe you’re not broken

If you’ve been calling yourself lazy, inconsistent, unmotivated, or self-sabotaging, I’d like to offer another possibility.

Maybe your nervous system is protecting you with strategies that made perfect sense in another chapter of your life.

Maybe the question isn’t: Why do I keep getting in my own way?

Maybe it’s: What is this part of me trying so desperately to protect?

Because self-sabotage is rarely a lack of desire. It’s more often a lack of safety. The work isn’t convincing yourself you deserve the life you want.

And every boundary you set. Every difficult conversation you have. Every page you write. Every piece of art you make.

Every risk you take before you feel completely ready is another quiet vote for a future your nervous system is still learning to believe is possible.

Leave a comment

This week’s Creative Reset

This week, I want you to notice just one moment when you feel the urge to pull away from the life you say you want.

Maybe it’s before you hit publish. Before you ask someone out. Before you send the application. Before you raise your rates. Before you tell someone how you really feel.

Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?” pause and ask:

“What is this part of me trying to protect?”

Don’t rush to fix it. Don’t shame it. Just get curious.

See if you can thank that protective part for trying to keep you safe — even if it’s relying on strategies that no longer serve you.

Then ask yourself one final question:

“What would one small act of trust look like today?”

Not the biggest leap you can imagine. Just the next honest step.

Because your nervous system doesn’t learn safety through convincing. It learns safety through experience.

On Friday, I’ll share a practical guide with five science-backed ways to begin rewiring self-sabotage patterns — without relying on willpower or toxic positivity.

We’ll explore how to work with your nervous system instead of against it, including practical exercises you can start using immediately when you notice yourself slipping into perfectionism, procrastination, people-pleasing, or avoidance.

If this essay resonated with you, consider subscribing so you don’t miss it. I’d love to practice this together.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of the month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening soon.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve continually learned over the past handful of years is that most of us aren’t consciously choosing how we relate to other people.

We’re merely reenacting.

The stories we absorbed about love, conflict, gender, intimacy, worthiness, and belonging become so familiar that they feel like reality.

Until something interrupts them.

That’s why we called the new relationship lab we’re co-creating DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Because insight rarely changes our lives.

Practice does.

Here are five small experiments I’ve been practicing that I’d be curious to hear if you might be interested in trying them too.

1. Trade certainty for curiosity.

The next time you catch yourself thinking:

“They’re ignoring me.”

“They don’t care.”

“Men always...”

“Women never...”

Pause.

Ask yourself:

What story am I telling?

Then ask:

What else might be true?

Curiosity doesn’t eliminate discernment. It simply creates enough space for reality to surprise you.

2. Notice when you’re relating to the past instead of the person.

One of my favorite questions is:

Who am I talking to right now?

Is it actually the person in front of you?

Or are you talking to your father?

Your ex?

Your middle school bully?

The teacher who embarrassed you?

Trauma has a way of collapsing time. Healing gently pulls us back into the present.

3. Try one response your nervous system doesn’t expect.

Our brains love efficiency. They also love repetition. That’s wonderful when we’re brushing our teeth. Less wonderful when we’re recreating the same conflict for the fifteenth time.

This week, choose one moment to do something different.

Instead of defending... ask a question.

Instead of fixing... listen.

Instead of sending the fourth text ... go for a walk.

Instead of withdrawing... say, “I’m overwhelmed and need a little time.”

4. Expand the story.

One of the simplest ways I’ve found to build compassion is this sentence:

Both can be true.

Someone can have hurt you... and still be deeply hurting themselves.

You can love someone... and decide not to continue the relationship.

A person can disappoint you... without becoming entirely disappointing.

Complexity isn’t confusion. It’s maturity.

5. Practice imagining a different future.

Creativity isn’t just something that happens on a canvas. It’s our ability to imagine beyond the stories we’ve inherited.

Every healthy relationship I’ve built began with one creative act: The willingness to believe another way of relating might be possible.

That’s true with partners. Friends. Family. And especially ourselves.

Do Something Different This Week

Choose just one. Not five. One.

Relationships rarely change through dramatic breakthroughs.

P.S.

If these experiments resonated with you, they’re exactly the kinds of practices we’ll be exploring together inside DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

Not because we’re trying to become perfect partners, friends, parents, or communicators.

But because every healthy relationship is built through practice. And sometimes the smallest experiment can change an entire life.

This Week’s Creative Reset

Before your head hits the pillow tonight, ask yourself:

Where did I do something different this week?

Even if the answer is incredibly small. Especially if it’s incredibly small.

That’s how new ways of relating become new ways of creating the life we truly want to be living.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I’m currently practicing taking the last week of every month off to rest since it’s an essential practice for sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

Last month I posted three words I never expected to become controversial.

I love men.

Within a few days, more than 100,000 people had seen the post. Thousands commented and liked it. Hundreds of men wrote to tell me they cried. Some said they couldn’t remember the last time someone had spoken about them with that kind of warmth. Others thanked me for reminding them they were more than what they could provide, produce, or endure.

There were other responses too.

People called me naïve. A “pick me.” Some insisted the only value men have is in what they do. Others assumed those three words meant I was minimizing the very real harm many women, including myself, have experienced.

I understood those reactions.

What fascinated me wasn’t the disagreement. It was how quickly three simple words became a mirror.

Not reflecting who men truly are.

Reflecting the stories we carry about them.

Love Doesn’t Require Simplicity

I love men.

Not because they’ve never hurt me. I’ve experienced real harm at the hands of men. I’ve also experienced extraordinary kindness from them.

I’ve been mentored by men. Protected by men. Challenged by men. Collaborated with men. Loved by men.

Those truths don’t compete with one another.

I’ve started to wonder if maturity isn’t arriving at certainty. Maybe instead it’s being able to expand our capacity to hold many truths at once.

Gender Was Never Big Enough

One of the greatest gifts of coming to understand myself as nonbinary wasn’t finally finding a word that fit my experience. It was realizing how much suffering comes from believing human beings can be neatly sorted into categories.

Masculine.

Feminine.

Strong.

Weak.

Protector.

Provider.

Victim.

Villain.

Especially men.

Because I started seeing something I hadn’t fully understood before. Many of them weren’t simply performing masculinity.

They were also surviving it.

What bell hooks Understood

I love men.

Not because I think they’re uncomplicated. But because I don’t think any of us are.

bell hooks writes in The Will to Change that the first act of violence patriarchy demands of boys is not violence toward women — it is violence toward themselves.

I’ve never forgotten that.

Reading through the comments on my post, I wasn’t struck by men asking to be admired. I was struck by how many seemed relieved.

Relieved to be seen as something more than a paycheck. More than a protector. More than someone whose worth depends on how much they can endure before breaking.

My post and those celebrating it in the comments weren’t asking any of us to lower the bar for men. Instead, what I experienced us celebrating together is the full, imperfect humanity of men in a patriarchal culture that harms and dehumanizes us all.

There’s a difference.

Creativity Is How We Imagine New Relationships

The longer I study creativity, the less I believe it’s primarily about making art. I think creativity is our capacity to imagine beyond the stories we’ve inherited.

It’s what allows us to see ourselves differently. To see one another differently. To interrupt old patterns instead of repeating them.

Every healthy relationship I’ve built — whether with myself or someone else — has begun with a creative act.

The willingness to imagine that another way of relating might be possible.

Maybe that’s why those three words landed the way they did. Not because everyone agreed with them.

But because they invited us to imagine something different.

Doing Something Different

I love men.

Not because they’re perfect. Not because women aren’t hurting. Not because accountability doesn’t matter.

I love men because I refuse to believe the healthiest future we’ll build together begins by reducing one another to our deepest wounds, cultural tropes, or worst moments.

Lately, that’s what doing something different means to me.

Not abandoning accountability. Not pretending harm didn’t happen. But refusing to let fear, shame, or inherited scripts have the final word.

Because every relationship — whether with ourselves or with each other — is shaped by the stories we’re willing to imagine.

Coming Friday

If today’s essay is about seeing the stories we’ve inherited ...

Friday’s guide is about rewriting them.

I’ll share five simple practices that have helped me notice — and interrupt — the inherited relationship stories I didn’t even realize I was living inside. Small experiments you can begin practicing immediately with yourself, your partner, your friends, or your family.

If you’d like that in your inbox, make sure you’re subscribed.

Subscribe now

An Invitation

This question — what becomes possible when we relate differently? has quietly become the center of my work.

It’s why I’m creating Creative Reset Studio, a place to build a more secure relationship with yourself through creative practice.

And it’s why we just launched DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT, a space devoted to practicing healthier relationships with one another in real time.

Because I don’t think we change our lives by winning arguments. I think we change them by becoming willing to practice and create something different together.

If you’re in a season of becoming, I’d love to create alongside you. Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. I take the last week of every month off to rest since it’s an essential practice in sustaining my creativity.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

I don’t think I realized how often I abandoned myself until I noticed I had started doing other people’s jobs for them.

The people who first taught me to doubt my needs, ignore my body, or question my intuition weren’t always in the room anymore.

But I was.

Somewhere along the way, I’d learned to continue those patterns on their behalf.

This might sound harsh, but this isn’t about blame. My attachment wounds were real. My trauma was real. There were seasons of my life when other people did leave, dismiss, betray, or misunderstand me.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed something uncomfortable. Long after those people were gone, I continued abandoning myself and had no real idea what it meant to stay with myself instead.

When I say abandon I mean:

• I ignored my body’s signals.

• I overrode my intuition.

• I dismissed my own curiosity because it didn’t seem practical.

• I waited until I felt confident before beginning.

• I measured my worth by my productivity.

• I overfunctioned and ignored my boundaries to avoid being disappointed.

• I spoke to myself in ways I would never speak to someone I loved.

The hardest realization wasn’t that my relationships had shaped those patterns. It was that I was continuing to rehearse them every day without realizing it.

The good news is that if self-abandonment is something we practice, then self-nurturance can be practiced too.

By self-nurturance, I don't mean constantly making yourself comfortable or avoiding difficult emotions. I mean learning to relate to yourself the way a secure caregiver would — with curiosity instead of criticism, consistency instead of neglect, and compassion instead of shame. Sometimes that means rest. Sometimes it means telling yourself the truth. Sometimes it means beginning before you feel ready.

These are five creative practices that have continued to change my relationship with myself from one of self-abandonment to one of self-nurturance.

1. Notice Before You Judge

Before I try to fix a feeling, I try to notice it. Not analyze, explain, or change. Just notice.

One of the greatest gifts creative practice has given me is the habit of observation.

Instead of asking,

Why am I like this?

I try asking,

What am I noticing?

What is my body doing or feeling? What emotion is here? What part of me is speaking?

2. Create Before You Consume

This has become one of my favorite personal rules.

Whenever possible, I try to make something before I scroll. Not because social media is inherently bad. But because creating reminds me that I have an inner life worth listening to before the rest of the world starts telling me who to be or how to feel.

Sometimes that’s ten minutes of writing, sketching, taking photographs on a walk, dancing in the shower, tending to my garden.

3. Keep Small Promises to Yourself

I used to believe self-trust and nurturance came from making good decisions. Now I think it grows from keeping tiny promises.

Write one paragraph. Walk around the block. Mix one color. Read one page. Stretch for five minutes.

Our nervous systems learn trust through consistency, not intensity.

Creative practice has taught me that returning matters more than streaks.

4. Follow Curiosity Instead of Performance

One question has changed my entire perspective on how to live a meaningful life:

What am I genuinely curious about?

Not:

What will perform well?

Not:

What will make people like me?

Not:

What should I create?

Curiosity is the voice of Self — our authentic, wise, compassionate, creative, connected core.

Performance is often the voice of protection.

Whenever I notice myself obsessing over outcomes — likes, subscribers, book deals, approval — I practice gently returning to curiosity.

5. Practice Returning

This might be the most important one.

There have been seasons where I didn’t write for months. Where I stopped making art. Where I disconnected from myself.

I used to believe those seasons erased all the progress I’d made. Now I think something completely different.

Secure relationships aren’t built because no one ever leaves. They’re built because return and repair become possible.

Every time I return to my creative practice after disappearing, I’m practicing repair.

Every blank page says:

You can begin again.

Every brushstroke says:

I’m still here.

Every walk with my camera reminds me that paying attention is a way of coming home.

An Invitation

When I think about my younger self, I wish someone had told me that healing isn’t just about finding people who make you feel safe.

It’s also about becoming someone who knows how to return to yourself.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Creative practice won’t prevent heartbreak. It won’t guarantee confidence. It won’t erase attachment wounds.

But it can become one of the places where you repeatedly practice curiosity instead of criticism, presence instead of performance, and consistency instead of self-abandonment.

For me, that’s been one of the greatest gifts my creativity has ever offered. Not just better art or a growing business or an interesting life.

A better relationship with myself.

If this guide resonated with you, that’s exactly what we’re practicing inside Creative Reset Studio.

Every week we gather to make progress on something we’re committed to creating, and strengthen the qualities that support a more animated life: curiosity, self-trust, emotional resilience, and the courage to keep showing up before we feel ready.

If you’re in a season of becoming, I’d love to create alongside you. Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

For most of my life, I thought healing meant finding people who wouldn’t abandon me.

It made perfect sense. If my earliest wounds happened in relationships, surely they would be healed by finding better relationships.

Better friends. Better partners. Better communities. People who would stay.

And while relationships have absolutely been part of my healing, over the past two decades I’ve realized something I never expected.

Not because writing magically healed my trauma or making art erased loneliness. But because creative practice quietly became one of the first places I learned what it felt like to stop abandoning myself.

I knew writing, making art, being in creative community was magic. But I didn’t understand what that magic was for a long time.

I thought I was becoming a better writer and visual storyteller.

Looking back, the even deeper work I was doing was becoming someone I could trust.

We Learn Relationships Before We Learn Words

Attachment theory tells us something remarkably simple. Before we develop beliefs about ourselves, we develop relationships.

We learn whether our emotions are welcomed or dismissed. Whether curiosity is encouraged or punished. Whether our needs matter. Whether it’s safe to make mistakes. Whether someone returns when we’re distressed.

Long before we have language for any of it, our nervous systems begin drawing conclusions.

I’m too much.

I’m not enough.

My needs are inconvenient.

Love has to be earned.

If I become who you need me to be, maybe you’ll stay.

Those conclusions don’t simply disappear when we become adults. They become the invisible architecture of our lives.

They’re reflected in the partners we choose. The jobs we tolerate. The boundaries we struggle to set. The risks we never take.

Even the way we relate to ourselves.

I Didn’t Realize I Was Abandoning Myself

For years, I thought self-abandonment meant something dramatic. Now I know it often looks surprisingly ordinary.

Ignoring your body because someone else needs you.

Talking yourself out of your own intuition.

Staying so busy you never have to hear your own thoughts.

Saying yes when every part of you wants to say no.

Waiting for someone else’s approval before beginning the thing you desperately want to create.

Overfunctioning in relationships until you’re exhausted.

Believing your value comes from being useful.

I know these patterns because I’ve lived them. Some of them helped me survive childhood. Some helped me build a career. Some shaped my relationships.

But eventually I noticed something. The person I disappeared from most often wasn’t someone else. It was myself.

Creativity Asked Something Different

Here’s what has surprised me.

Writing never demanded I become someone else before I was allowed to begin. The blank page didn’t ask whether I was productive enough. Lovable enough. Successful enough. Certain enough.

It simply asked, “Will you stay long enough to see what emerges from the staying?”

Not forever. Just for today.

Come back. Write one sentence. Notice what you’re feeling. Tell the truth.

Try again tomorrow.

One built on curiosity instead of judgment. Presence instead of performance. Listening instead of fixing.

It occurred to me recently that these are many of the same qualities psychologists describe when they talk about secure attachment.

Not perfection.

Attunement.

Creativity Is an Act of Self-Attunement

One of my favorite ideas from Internal Family Systems is Dick Schwartz’s description of Self.

He says that when we’re leading from Self, we naturally become more:

• Calm

• Curious

• Compassionate

• Courageous

• Confident

• Clear

• Connected

And...

Creative.

I love that creativity isn’t something we achieve after healing. It’s one of the qualities that emerges as we become more deeply ourselves.

This completely changed the way I think about creative practice.

Every time we pause long enough to notice our own experience, listen before judging, become curious instead of critical — we’re practicing the very capacities secure relationships cultivate.

The Neuroscience of Coming Home

Neuroscience has made this way of thinking about our relationship with creativity even more compelling for me.

Creative practice strengthens many of the same capacities that trauma tends to interrupt.

Cognitive flexibility.

Emotional regulation.

Tolerance for uncertainty.

Play.

Curiosity.

Integration across different brain networks.

More able to stay present with complexity instead of immediately trying to escape it.

Maybe that’s why I leave my studio feeling different than when I walked in.

Not because I solved all my problems. But because I practiced staying with myself while they still existed.

The Relationship That Changed Everything

Looking back, I don’t think writing saved my life. I think it quietly became one of the most enduring relationships I’ve ever had.

For years, it was one of the few places where I didn’t feel like I had to earn my place. The blank page didn’t ask whether I was successful enough, productive enough, or certain enough before I began. It simply waited. Whether I came back the next morning or six months later, it was there, inviting me into conversation again.

But if I’m honest, that isn’t the whole story.

As I began publishing my work, building a career around creativity, and eventually trying to publish my first novel, all of my old attachment patterns found new places to hide.

Suddenly I wasn’t just writing. I was performing. Seeking approval. Checking numbers. Wondering whether silence meant rejection. Questioning whether I was good enough to keep going.

For a while, I thought something had gone wrong. I wondered if I’d somehow lost the relationship creativity had once given me.

Now I see it differently. The work hadn’t changed. The relationship was simply asking more of me.

Every rejection became an opportunity to notice how I spoke to myself. Every disappointing launch became an invitation to practice self-compassion instead of self-criticism. Every comparison became another chance to return to curiosity.

Every time I chose to keep writing — not because I felt confident, but because writing remained deeply meaningful — I was strengthening a different kind of trust.

I believe this is what forming a more secure relationship with ourselves actually looks like.

Not the absence of self-doubt or freedom from disappointment. Not aiming to reach a place where criticism no longer hurts.

The publication isn’t the relationship. The award isn’t the relationship. The book deal isn’t the relationship.

Those are things that may or may not happen. The relationship is how I meet myself while pursuing them.

That’s what my creative practice has become. Not simply a place I return when life falls apart.

A place where I keep practicing how I want to relate to myself and the world while building a life that matters to me.

Creating a Home to Return To

When people ask why I care so much about creativity, I rarely know how to answer briefly.

It’s because I don’t think creativity is about making beautiful things. I think it’s about becoming someone who knows how to stay.

With uncertainty. Grief. Joy. Difficult conversations. Your own inner world long enough to actually hear what it has been trying to tell you.

Creative practice didn’t make my attachment wounds disappear.

It did something I now think is far more important. It helped me build a relationship with myself that feels safe enough to keep coming home to.

And maybe that’s what healing has been asking of us all along. Not simply to find people who won’t abandon us.

But to become someone who doesn’t abandon ourselves.

Coming Friday: How to Stop Abandoning Yourself

Five creative practices that have helped me build a more secure relationship with myself — and how they might help you do the same.

Make sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss it.

Subscribe now

An Invitation

Every week, I spend a few hours making something.

Sometimes it’s writing. Sometimes it’s drawing. Sometimes it’s walking with my camera or working in the garden.

I seldom leave thinking, “That was the best thing I’ve ever made.”

But I almost always leave feeling more connected to myself than when I began.

That’s the practice.

Not making something perfect.

Returning. Again. And again. And again.

That’s exactly why I’m creating Creative Reset Studio.

It’s a space for people who want to practice that kind of relationship with themselves — not through more productivity or self-improvement, but through small, consistent acts of creativity and self-return.

Each week we’ll gather to reflect together, make progress on something we’re committed to creating, and strengthen the qualities that support a more animated life: curiosity, self-trust, emotional resilience, and the courage to keep showing up before we feel ready.

If you’re in a season of becoming, I’d love to create alongside you. Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

Earlier this week, I wrote about why growth can feel like grief.

I explored the idea that some of life’s deepest losses aren’t just the people we lose. They’re the futures we imagined, the identities we’ve outgrown, and the versions of ourselves that can no longer accompany us into the next chapter.

After publishing it, I kept thinking about a question I’ve asked myself countless times over the years:

When am I finally going to feel better?

It’s the question I asked after my dad left when I was a teenager.

After each heartbreak Burnout. Lost friendships. Financial hardship. When relationships changed. After receiving my AuDHD diagnosis.

Every difficult season seemed to come with the same expectation:

Eventually I’ll stop hurting.

But I know now from experience and from working with clients as a coach that this isn’t actually what healing is asking of us.

One of the strangest realizations I’ve ever had over the course of becoming familiar with loss is that my goal is no longer to stop feeling heartbroken.

It’s to stop organizing my entire life around avoiding heartbreak.

There have been moments recently where I’ve felt overwhelmed by uncertainty about my future. I’ve questioned whether the life I imagined is still possible. I’ve wondered what partnership will look like, whether I’ll become a parent, and who I’m becoming through all of this as an artist, creative, and helper.

And yet, in the middle of those same weeks, I’ve found myself laughing with friends, planting flowers, writing essays I’m proud of, coaching incredible clients, making art, and dreaming about the kind of connected life I will continue to create.

Healing isn’t about making grief smaller. It’s about allowing ourselves to imagine and then create a life that is large enough to hold it.

Here are five practices that have consistently helped me do exactly that.

1. Stop Asking, “How Do I Feel Better?”

Instead, ask:

What would help me feel more alive today?

I don’t ask this because feeling alive is always comfortable.

Sometimes it looks like crying while writing. Sometimes it looks like having a difficult conversation. Sometimes it looks like going for a run when I’d rather stay in bed. Sometimes it looks like finally telling the truth.

Whenever I notice myself spiraling into the question, “How do I make this feeling go away?” I gently redirect myself toward something more useful:

What would help me fully participate in and embrace my life right this moment?

That small shift has changed far more than trying to feel better ever did.

2. Build Capacity Before You Need It

I used to think resilience showed up the moment life became difficult. Now I know it works much more like physical fitness.

You don’t become strong on race day. You become strong on ordinary Tuesdays.

Every night’s sleep. Therapy session. Nourishing meal. Creative practice. Healthy friendship. Every walk. Every boundary. Every time you choose curiosity over self-judgment.

None of these remove pain. But they do increase our ability to carry it.

When life asks more of us — and it always will — we aren’t starting from zero.

We’ve already been quietly building the capacity to stay and face the present moment rather than run from it.

3. Give Your Emotions Somewhere to Move

One of the biggest changes in my own life has been realizing that emotions aren’t problems to solve.

They’re energy.

Grief is energy. Love is energy. Anger is energy. Joy is energy.

When that energy doesn’t have somewhere to go, it often turns inward.

Sometimes it becomes anxiety or endless rumination. Sometimes it becomes control or numbness.

Not because writing solves heartbreak or gardening fixes uncertainty. Not because making art answers every question.

But because creating gives our inner world somewhere to move.

Lately, that’s looked like writing these essays and working on my next book. Planting flowers. Training for a marathon. Taking courses.

The grief, anger, frustration, fear, despair — they’re all still there. But they don’t have to be the only thing growing.

Ask yourself:

Where does this feeling want to move?

Not disappear. Move.

4. Practice Holding Many Truths at Once

One of the clearest signs that I’ve grown isn’t that life has become simpler. It’s that I’ve become less interested in either/or thinking.

I can love someone deeply ... and recognize I can’t do their healing for them.

I can grieve the future I imagined ... and remain open to the future I haven’t met yet.

I can feel afraid ... and continue moving toward the life I want.

Whenever I notice myself searching for certainty, I try adding two simple words:

... and also.

Those words create room for complexity and contradiction. They create room for being fully human.

5. Grow One Square Inch at a Time

For years, I waited for the breakthrough. The insight. The moment everything finally made sense in my life.

Change has been much quieter than that.

Transformation has happened through repetition. Every healthy boundary, difficult conversation, therapy session, page written, long or short walk. Every time I chose to stay curious instead of shutting down.

One square inch.

Not because life became easier. Because you’ve become larger.

And you’ve learned how to practice setting down what you no longer need to carry.

A Question That Changed Everything

Instead of asking,

How do I get over this?

I’ve started asking,

Who am I becoming because of this?

That question doesn’t make grief disappear. It reminds me that grief isn’t the whole story.

The story is becoming.

The story is continuing to show up for life and be shaped by it. To continue choosing to create something beautiful.

Before You Go...

When I was younger, I thought emotionally healthy people eventually stopped hurting. Now I think they simply build lives with enough room for the full range of being human.

Room for heartbreak. Joy. Uncertainty. Love. Creativity. Disappointment. Hope.

None of those experiences cancel one another out. They coexist.

I don’t think healing is about becoming someone who feels less. I think it’s about becoming someone who can hold more.

That’s one of the reasons I’m building Creative Reset Studio.

Not simply as a place to make art, build a business, or create content.

But as a weekly practice space of becoming.

A place where we strengthen self-trust, build emotional flexibility, reconnect with our creativity, and practice staying fully present with the demands and opportunities in our lives — even when they’re unfolding differently than we planned.

Creativity isn’t the reward we receive after healing.

It’s one of the ways we become people capable of holding more of our lives.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Tuesday, with practical guides every Friday. This new schedule begins next week!

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

I first read Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses in college.

At the time, I was trying to understand something I experienced at a much younger age than my college self. I was trying to make sense of the fifteen-year-old whose father left one day and never really came back.

Like many children, I thought healing meant figuring out how to stop missing him. I wanted an explanation. A framework. Something that would make the loss feel purposeful instead of random.

Necessary Losses was one of the first books that gave me language for that experience.

Viorst writes that loss isn’t simply an interruption of life. It’s woven into the process of becoming fully human. We don’t just lose people. We lose childhood illusions. Certainty. Ways of belonging. Dreams we assumed would come true. Versions of ourselves that once made perfect sense.

I remember feeling comforted by that idea, though I don’t think I fully understood it.

At twenty-one, I read the book as a daughter. Nearly twenty years later, I’m reading it as an adult.

I see myself then, newly in my twenties, reading a paperback of Necessary Losses from my university’s library on my bed in my small attic room, longing for understanding and hope that someday I might have my dad back.

I wish I could tell her what I couldn’t have known then, but I know now: life is going to get so much harder. The grief will pile up. But learning how to hold that grief and refusing to settle for a numb life, will lead to more beauty, relationships, and self-connection than you ever thought was possible.

Sometimes We’re Grieving the Person We Can No Longer Be

I’ve been thinking about that book again lately. Not because another chapter of my life has neatly come to an end. But because I’m living inside one that hasn’t.

One of the strangest parts of the season I’m in is fully feeling how many things can be true at the same time.

I can deeply love someone.

And I can also recognize that the versions of ourselves who first built our relationship aren’t capable of building the future we both say we want.

That isn’t criticism. It’s grief.

If my partner wants the life he talks about — health, meaningful work, deep partnership, a family — he has to outgrow the identities that taught him to hide, numb, and carry shame alone.

If I want those same things, I have to outgrow the identities that taught me love meant overfunctioning. Anticipating. Rescuing. Believing that if I could just understand enough, communicate clearly enough, or love deeply enough, I could somehow carry another person toward healing.

Those identities didn’t appear out of nowhere.

They protected us. They helped us survive earlier chapters of our lives.

That’s the part I’m grieving. Not simply the uncertainty of what happens next.

I’m grieving the realization that neither of us gets to bring our old identities into the life we say we want.

Whether we eventually build that life together, or eventually apart, I genuinely don’t know. This is the risk involved in choosing a fully present life.

And maybe that’s what makes this grief so difficult.

I’m not only mourning a relationship. I’m mourning the certainty of a future I had already begun living inside.

The version of myself who thought I knew what this year would look like. The version who believed motherhood was just around the corner. The version who thought I had finally arrived in the life I’d spent years building with someone.

But then I remember a moment with my partner this week. Looking at each other and smiling, feeling how seeing each other more clearly is the greatest gift anyone could ever give each other.

How giving someone an opportunity to be let into where you currently are, not just where either of you hoped you’d be, is beautiful. Even if disappointing. Even if uncomfortable. Even if scary.

It’s a place that’s alive.

We can choose to take pleasure wherever we are. To find the beauty and gratitude even amidst the loss. This is one of the gifts of necessary losses.

The Grief No One Teaches Us to Name

We tend to think grief belongs to obvious endings.

Someone dies. A marriage ends. A diagnosis arrives. A job disappears.

Those losses have rituals. People bring casseroles. They send sympathy cards. They take you to happy hour. We know what to call them.

But what about the losses that don’t come with a funeral, a divorce, a treatment plan, or a future job recommendation?

Psychologist Pauline Boss has spent decades studying what she calls ambiguous loss — losses that remain psychologically present because they never receive a clear ending.

A parent who is still alive but no longer part of your life.

Someone living with addiction.

An estrangement.

An uncertain relationship.

The future you imagined but never got to live.

The more I’ve learned about ambiguous loss, the more compassionate I’ve become toward myself.

I wonder how many of us are walking around carrying grief we don’t even realize we’re allowed to have.

Grief for identities we’ve outgrown. Old dreams. Communities that no longer fit.

Grief for the versions of ourselves that once helped us survive but can no longer accompany us into the next chapter.

Our Brains Experience Growth as Loss

One of the most surprising things I’ve learned while studying neuroscience is something I wrote about last week: the brain isn’t primarily trying to make us happy.

It’s trying to make the world predictable.

Every day, our brains generate models of who we are, how relationships work, what belonging looks like, and what we should expect next. Those predictions become incredibly efficient. They help us move through life without having to reinvent ourselves every morning.

But they also become deeply attached to familiarity.

Not because familiarity is always healthy.

Because it’s known.

If you’ve spent years believing your value comes from rescuing other people, your brain becomes very good at predicting a world where rescuing leads to connection.

If you’ve learned that drinking is how you belong, Friday night begins to carry an entire story.

If you’ve built your identity around independence, letting someone help you can feel strangely threatening, even if it’s exactly what you need.

No wonder it feels disorienting. No wonder we sometimes mistake growth for failure.

Every New Chapter Requires a Necessary Loss

Carl Jung believed the central task of adulthood wasn’t becoming someone different.

It was becoming more fully ourselves. He called this process individuation.

I find that idea both comforting and heartbreaking.

Comforting because it suggests that who we are becoming has always been somewhere inside us.

Heartbreaking because every act of becoming asks something else to end.

The perfectionist.

The rescuer.

The addict.

The overachiever.

The chronic caretaker.

Jung famously wrote,

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”

For years, I thought that sounded unnecessarily bleak.

Now I hear something much kinder.

I don’t think he was glorifying suffering. I think he was describing the emotional cost of awareness.

We can’t realize an identity no longer fits without first feeling the discomfort of wearing it.

Perhaps grief is simply what it feels like to make room.

Creativity Gives Grief Somewhere to Go

In 2020, I found out my boyfriend had been cheating on me for our entire relationship while being paranoid I was cheating on him, and then in the midst of lockdown, my friend died after being hit by a drunk driver on her way to work.

Isolated during quarantine and drowning in grief, I made a decision.

I would surrender to the grief. I would let it transform me. I would observe and take notes on how it helped me to become someone new.

For me that meant allowing myself to feel the full impact of my grief. To be wrecked by it. To cry for as long as I needed. To show up for myself as the kind, accepting, and gentle parent I’d always needed. To choose self-compassion and my deepest desires over fear and role-based relational performances.

I would choose to make each of my next moves intuitively. To let my grief crack me open rather than shut me down. To show me it is safe to trust myself and the world even though it hurt me so much.

As soon as it was safe, I sold all my belongings and began traveling with my dog and cat in my truck. I would learn to live the questions. I would practice everything I learned as a writer and artist up to that point and apply it to my life.

I would embrace uncertainty. I would follow my interests and whims. I would trust the process.

For a long time, I thought creativity was something you did after life settled down.

I imagined I’d write more once I felt confident. I’d make better work once I had more clarity. I’d return to my creativity after the grief had passed and I finally felt like myself again.

Life has never worked that way.

I wrote while I was drowning in debt, selling books I loved just to afford groceries and wondering if I’d ever experience financial stability. I kept sending my novel out, even after years of rejection, because something inside me still believed the story deserved a life beyond my hard drive.

More recently, I’ve found myself planting flowers, training for a marathon, building Creative Reset Studio, and applying to graduate school to become a therapist — not because my grief has disappeared, but because it needs somewhere new to move.

That’s the thing no one tells you.

Grief is energy.

Love is energy.

Hope is energy.

If they aren’t given somewhere to go, they have a way of turning inward.

Sometimes they become anxiety.

Sometimes depression.

Sometimes addiction.

Sometimes control.

Sometimes endless rumination about a future we can no longer change.

For me, creativity has become another possibility.

Not an escape from grief. A relationship with it.

Growing Larger Than Our Grief

For most of my life, I believed healing meant feeling less.

Less sadness. Less fear. Less anger. Less uncertainty. Less grief.

Now I know I’ve had it backwards.

The older I get, the less interested I become in the fantasy of reaching some permanent state of emotional peace. I don’t think that’s what emotionally healthy people experience.

I think they experience the full range of being alive.

They continuously develop a greater capacity to hold and let go of all of it. To let life flow through them.

The capacity to love someone while accepting they cannot change for them. The capacity to hope without demanding certainty. The capacity to grieve one future while remaining open to another. The capacity to stay present instead of abandoning ourselves whenever life becomes painful.

When I look back at my twenties, I don’t think I experienced less grief. I think I had a smaller container to hold it all.

Every disappointment felt like my entire life.

Every ending felt permanent.

Every uncertainty felt unbearable.

Slowly — and mostly through therapy, creative practice, relationships, and a great deal of failing — that container has grown.

The grief hasn’t become smaller. I’ve simply become larger.

Returning to Necessary Losses

When I first read Necessary Losses, I thought Judith Viorst was teaching me how to survive what life would inevitably take away.

Now I think she was pointing toward something much more hopeful.

Necessary losses aren’t simply what life takes from us. They’re also what create the conditions for us to become someone new.

The daughter who eventually became her own source of belonging.

The artist who stopped waiting for permission.

The partner learning that love doesn’t require self-abandonment.

The person discovering that certainty was never the goal. Presence was.

Maybe that’s why every meaningful transition feels so disorienting.

We’re not only leaving something behind. We’re meeting someone we’ve never been before.

And introductions like that are rarely comfortable.

Grief isn’t evidence that we’re moving backward, though it can sometimes feel like it. It’s merely evidence that something mattered to us — deeply.

Healing doesn’t ask us to love less. Or hope less. Or grieve less.

When I first read Necessary Losses, I thought the title described what life would inevitably take from me.

Now I think it describes something else entirely.

The identities we eventually thank. The dreams we lovingly release. The certainty we surrender. The versions of ourselves that carried us exactly as far as they could.

Because maybe the opposite of grief isn’t happiness.

Maybe it’s capacity.

The capacity to keep loving after disappointment. To keep creating after heartbreak and participating in a life that no longer looks the way we imagined.

And maybe that’s the quiet work of adulthood.

Not avoiding necessary losses or rushing to replace them. But allowing them to enlarge us.

To make us more compassionate. More curious. More alive. More fully ourselves.

Before You Go...

If you’ve been walking through a season of transition yourself, I hope this essay reminds you that grief isn’t always a sign you’ve taken a wrong turn.

Sometimes it’s evidence that you’re standing at the edge of a new chapter, even if you can’t see it yet.

That’s one of the reasons I’m building Creative Reset Studio.

Not simply as a place to make art, start a new business, or create content, but as a place to practice becoming.

Each week we’ll create together, reflect together, and build the emotional flexibility to stay present with uncertainty instead of immediately trying to escape it.

Creativity isn’t the reward we receive after healing.

It’s one of the ways we grow into people capable of holding more of life. More of ourselves. More of each other.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Monday, with practical guides every Thursday.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

Earlier this week, I wrote about The Loneliness of Becoming Yourself — the strange season where you’ve begun to outgrow one version of your life but haven’t yet fully grown into the next.

It’s one of the most disorienting places we can find ourselves.

The routines that once felt comforting begin to feel restrictive.

Some relationships start to shift.

The coping strategies that once helped you survive no longer feel like they belong to the person you’re becoming.

I don’t think you have.

I think you’ve reached one of life’s most important thresholds — realizing you don’t just outgrow habits. You outgrow identities.

For most of my adult life, I became very good at being single. I learned how to build a career, buy a house, travel alone, make difficult decisions without asking anyone else’s opinion, and create a life I genuinely loved. Independence became one of the identities I was most proud of.

Then I fell deeply in love.

What surprised me wasn’t how difficult relationships could be. It was how much I had to outgrow versions of myself that had served me well for years. I had to learn that partnership isn’t simply finding the right person — it’s becoming the kind of person who knows how to build a life with someone else. That meant making room for another person’s needs, communicating instead of assuming, asking for help, and realizing that some of the strategies that had helped me survive alone no longer fit the life I wanted to create.

More recently, I’ve had to outgrow yet another identity: the version of me who believed that loving someone deeply meant I was responsible for saving them. Letting go of that story has been one of the hardest transitions of my life — not because I stopped caring, but because I had to learn that love and responsibility are not the same thing.

And every season has left me standing in unfamiliar territory before the next version of my life came into focus.

I’ve started to think that’s simply what growth feels like.

Here are five practices that have helped me move through these seasons without abandoning myself. I hope they help you too.

1. Name What You’ve Outgrown

Instead of asking,

What’s wrong with me?

Try asking,

What no longer fits?

Maybe you’ve outgrown:

• drinking to belong

• a relationship dynamic

• people pleasing

• perfectionism

• proving your worth through productivity

• always being the responsible one

• friendships built around habits you no longer want

• an identity that once kept you safe

This isn’t about judging your past.

It’s about recognizing your growth.

2. Thank the Strategy Before You Replace It

One of the biggest shifts I’ve made over the past few years has been learning to stop fighting old versions of myself.

Instead, I’ve started thanking them.

Every pattern you’ve outgrown once served a purpose.

Maybe overworking gave you a sense of significance. Maybe binge drinking gave you belonging. Maybe perfectionism gave you predictability. Maybe rescuing other people helped you feel loved. Maybe staying small kept you safe.

Instead of asking,

Why did I do that?

Try asking,

How was this trying to protect me?

That doesn’t mean you need to keep the strategy. It means you can outgrow it without shaming the version of yourself who needed it.

One of the most compassionate things I’ve learned is this:

3. Expect the Empty Space

This is the part no one prepared me for.

Every time I’ve outgrown an old identity, it has left space behind.

A Friday night. A relationship. A routine. A dream. An identity.

That space can feel unsettling. Sometimes it feels deeply lonely. Sometimes it feels like you’ve made the wrong decision.

I’ve started wondering if it’s actually something else.

Possibility.

The temptation is to fill that space as quickly as possible — with another relationship, another distraction, another version of the life you’ve already outgrown.

Instead, try staying with it a little longer.

4. Replace Consumption with Creation

Whenever I notice myself wanting to escape discomfort, I’ve started asking a different question:

What could I create with the energy I’m about to spend avoiding this feeling?

Notice the question isn’t:

How do I become more productive?

It’s:

How do I participate in my own life?

Write one page.

Plant something.

Cook dinner.

Sketch badly.

Go for a walk without your phone.

Read poetry.

Build something.

Journal.

Call someone you love.

The point isn’t to make something impressive.

It’s to remind your nervous system that uncertainty doesn’t have to be filled with old habits. It can become the place where something new begins.

Share Creative Reset, Decoded

5. Practice the Person You’re Becoming

One of the biggest lessons creativity has taught me is that we don’t become ourselves through insight alone.

Instead of asking,

Who am I?

Try asking,

Who am I practicing becoming?

Then ask,

What would that version of me do today?

Not forever.

Not perfectly.

Just today.

One conversation.

One boundary.

One page.

One walk.

One act of courage.

A Reminder I Keep Coming Back To

I don’t have to know exactly who I’m becoming.

I only have to stop pretending I’m still the person I’ve already outgrown.

That single shift has changed almost everything in how I think about growth.

Journal Prompts

• What version of yourself have you outgrown?

• What did that version help you survive?

• What space has opened because you’re letting it go?

• How are you tempted to fill that space?

• What could you create there instead?

• What is one small way you can practice the person you’re becoming this week?

Before You Go...

If you read The Loneliness of Becoming Yourself, you’ve probably noticed a pattern.

I don’t think becoming ourselves happens through insight alone. I think it happens through practice.

That’s why I’m building Creative Reset Studio.

Creative Reset Studio is where we practice the skills that make reinvention possible: creativity, emotional resilience, self-trust, curiosity, and showing up consistently even when life feels uncertain.

As a place to build the habits, relationships, and creative practices that help us navigate uncertainty without abandoning ourselves.

Every week we’ll create together, reflect together, and experiment with new ways of showing up to our work, our relationships, and our lives.

Becoming yourself isn’t a single decision. It’s something you practice.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Monday, with practical guides every Thursday.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

Every version of me has had to grieve the life that made sense before it could build the one that fits now.

I remember one of the first Friday nights I decided I didn’t want to binge drink anymore. For years, weekends had followed a familiar rhythm. Meet friends. Go to the bar. Stay out too late. Wake up exhausted. Tell myself I’d cut back next weekend.

Then, almost without noticing, something shifted.

I wasn’t judging anyone else’s choices. I just didn’t want my own life to revolve around alcohol anymore.

So I stayed home. Then, I went for a run.

At first, it felt less like making a healthy decision and more like losing a place where I belonged. The people I usually spent time with were still together. The group chat was still active. The invitations still came.

But suddenly, I was on the outside of a version of my life that no longer fit.

The strangest part wasn’t saying no to drinking. It was realizing I had no idea what to say yes to instead. I went for a run because I didn’t know what else to do with my anxiety.

That moment has repeated itself in different forms throughout my life.

When I stopped using casual sex to outrun heartbreak, I had to learn how to spend an evening alone with my own thoughts.

When I stopped overfunctioning in relationships, I suddenly had no idea what to do with all the emotional energy I’d spent managing other people’s lives.

When I started focusing on whatever I’d have to do to pay off my school and medical debts instead of accruing material signs of success, my priorities slowly stopped resembling those of most people around me.

More recently, I’ve had to let go of futures I desperately wanted to preserve before I knew what would take their place.

Each transition looked different. But they all shared something in common.

For years, I mistook that feeling for loneliness. Now I wonder if it was something else. Maybe it was the feeling of becoming.

Every meaningful change seems to create a strange stretch of life where your routines change before your community does. Your values change before your calendar does. Your relationships change before your identity catches up. You’re no longer entirely at home in the life you’ve been living. But you don’t yet feel at home in the life you’re building.

I think many of us interpret that feeling as evidence that we’ve made the wrong decision. That we should go back. Drink again. Text them. Take the old job. Spend the money. Return to the version of ourselves that feels familiar.

Not because it’s healthier. Because it’s recognizable. Because it feels safe.

Looking back now, it’s difficult to recognize some of the people I’ve been. The version of me who believed getting drunk was the easiest path to belonging. The version who confused being needed with being loved. The version who believed productivity could protect me from worthlessness. The version who thought understanding another person’s pain meant I could somehow save them from it.

I don’t remember those versions of myself with shame anymore. Only tenderness. They weren’t broken. They were adaptive. They were trying to meet profoundly human needs with the tools they had available.

Belonging. Connection. Relief. Safety.

The problem wasn’t that those needs existed. The problem was that I’d learned to meet them in ways that no longer allowed me to grow.

I don’t think becoming ourselves is always lonely. Many changes eventually become joyful. Some become so ordinary we can hardly remember living any other way.

But I’ve noticed that almost every meaningful transformation contains a season where the old life has ended and the new one hasn’t yet arrived.

It’s an uncomfortable place to stand.

And I think it’s one of the most important places a human being can learn to stay.

Why Becoming Ourselves Feels So Uncomfortable

The thoughts that once protected us often become the identities we're eventually asked to outgrow.

It took me years to realize that this discomfort wasn’t a character flaw. It wasn’t evidence that I’d made the wrong decision. It wasn’t a lack of discipline or confidence.

It was my nervous system trying to make sense of a life it had never lived before.

One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned while studying neuroscience is that the brain isn’t primarily trying to make us happy.

It’s trying to make the world predictable.

Every moment of every day, your brain is making thousands of tiny predictions about what’s going to happen next.

This process is remarkably efficient. It allows you to tie your shoes without thinking, recognize a friend’s face in a crowd, and drive home while your mind wanders somewhere else entirely.

But those same predictive systems shape something much more personal than our habits. They also shape our identities.

If you’ve spent years believing that being useful is how you earn love, your brain becomes extraordinarily good at predicting a world where usefulness leads to belonging.

If you’ve spent years drinking every weekend because that’s where your friendships live, your brain learns that Friday night means bars, laughter, alcohol, and connection.

If you’ve learned to overfunction in relationships because chaos once felt familiar, your nervous system begins expecting chaos.

Not because chaos is good. Because it’s known.

Which means that every meaningful identity shift asks your brain to do something surprisingly difficult. It has to begin making predictions about a person you’ve never been before.

The version of you who sets boundaries.

The version of you who asks for help.

The version of you who spends Friday night writing instead of drinking.

The version of you who belongs to themselves before they belong anywhere else.

Of course, that feels strange. Your nervous system has no evidence yet that this version of you is safe. Not because it isn’t. Because it hasn’t gathered enough experience to believe it.

For those of us who grew up with trauma, emotionally immature caregivers, or inconsistent attachment, this challenge can feel even greater.

Psychologists have long understood that belonging isn’t simply a pleasant emotional experience. It’s one of our oldest survival strategies.

For most of human history, separation from the group could mean death. Our nervous systems evolved accordingly.

I think that’s why healing so often feels lonely. Not because we’re doing something wrong. Because our brains are slowly updating one of the oldest stories they know.

The story of where safety lives.

Carl Jung approached this same mystery from a different direction. He believed the central task of adulthood wasn’t becoming someone new. It was becoming more fully ourselves. He called this process individuation.

When I first encountered this idea, I found it comforting. Until I realized what it actually asks of us. Every time we become more fully ourselves, another version of us has to come to an end.

The perfectionist.

The rescuer.

The people pleaser.

The workaholic.

The person who believes being needed is the same thing as being loved.

The person who mistakes chaos for chemistry.

The person who believes they have to carry everyone else’s pain before tending to their own.

For years, I resisted that idea. Surely awareness could arrive more gently than that. Surely healing could feel more encouraging!

Now I hear something entirely different.

I don’t think Jung was glorifying suffering. I think he was describing the cost of awareness. We cannot recognize that an identity no longer fits us without first feeling the discomfort of wearing it.

Every meaningful transformation contains a kind of symbolic death.

Not because life is cruel. Because becoming requires making room.

Mystics have described this space for centuries as the dark night of the soul. Not as punishment. Not as failure. But as the strange season where the old self has begun to fall away before the new one has fully emerged.

Looking back over my own life, I think I’ve entered that place more times than I realized.

Leaving behind binge drinking.

Learning to live with my AuDHD diagnosis.

Walking away from identities built entirely around achievement or usefulness.

Allowing versions of relationships — and versions of the future I thought I was building — to come to an end before I knew what would replace them.

Every one of those moments felt frightening while I was inside them.

Now they look like thresholds.

Not because they were easy.

But because they changed who I became.

Creativity Taught Me How to Stay

For a long time, I thought creativity was something I did after life settled down.

I imagined I’d write more once I felt stable. I’d make better work once I felt confident. I’d return to my creative practices once I had more time, more clarity, or a clearer sense of who I was.

Life kept proving me wrong.

Almost every meaningful creative project I’ve ever made has emerged from a period of profound uncertainty.

I wrote while I was deeply in debt, selling books I loved just to afford groceries and crying on the phone with debt collectors because I couldn’t imagine a future where I wasn’t buried under financial stress.

I kept sending out the novel I’d spent years writing, even after agents passed and publishers said no, trusting that the work still mattered even if I couldn’t yet see where it belonged.

For a while, all I could see was what I’d lost.

Every time an old identity dissolved, creativity gave me somewhere to place all of the energy that used to go toward surviving.

The energy I once spent trying to rescue other people became writing.

It became planting flowers.

It became building Creative Reset.

It became applying to graduate school to become a therapist.

It became training for a marathon.

It became imagining a future I couldn’t yet prove was possible.

None of those things removed uncertainty. They simply taught me how to remain in relationship with it.

Every blank page begins with uncertainty.

Every first draft begins with uncertainty.

Every painting.

Every garden.

Every song.

Every business.

Every relationship.

Every meaningful life.

They all begin before we know exactly how they’ll end.

Artists practice something the rest of the world often tries to avoid. Beginning anyway. Returning anyway. Revising anyway.

Trusting that clarity will arrive through participation rather than before it.

I used to think creativity was about self-expression. Now I think it’s just as much about self-construction.

A place to rehearse new ways of being. A place to experiment with identities before the rest of your life catches up. A place to become familiar with the person you’re slowly growing into.

Maybe that’s why creative practice has accompanied every major transformation of my life. Not because it gave me certainty. Because it gave me somewhere to practice becoming.

As I think about the next chapter of my life — deep partnership, motherhood, becoming a therapist, turning forty — I don’t expect uncertainty to disappear.

I don’t think becoming ourselves ever stops asking something of us.

The difference now is that I no longer mistake that discomfort for failure. I recognize it as evidence that something new is asking to be lived.

I think that’s why I care so deeply about helping other people build a sustainable creative practice — and creative practice as a way of living.

Not because I believe everyone should publish a book or become a professional artist. Because I believe everyone deserves a place to practice becoming.

To experiment. To stay curious. To tolerate uncertainty without immediately trying to escape it. To make something instead of reaching for what feels familiar.

That’s why I’m building Creative Reset Studio.

It’s not simply a place to make art. It’s a weekly practice of returning to yourself in community.

A place to remember that creativity isn’t the reward we receive after healing. It’s one of the ways healing happens.

Maybe becoming ourselves will always contain seasons of loneliness.

Maybe every meaningful chapter begins by asking us to leave something behind before we understand why.

But if that’s true, then perhaps creativity isn’t a luxury.

Perhaps it’s one of the oldest ways human beings have learned to cross the bridge between who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.

Because one day, almost without noticing, the life that once felt unfamiliar becomes the one that finally feels like home.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Monday, with practical guides every Thursday.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Creative Reset Studio — Founding Membership or DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT: A Relationship Lab, both opening this summer.

Earlier this week, I wrote about The Thoughts That Stole My Life related to patterns of:

• Worry

• Perfectionism

• Independence

• Comfort

• Waiting

The surprising thing wasn’t realizing these thoughts were limiting me. The surprising thing was realizing they weren’t trying to hurt me.

They were trying to protect me.

That insight has changed the way I relate to almost every difficult thought I have.

Especially one that has haunted me at the end of nearly every romantic relationship. It usually sounds something like this:

This is all my fault.

I should have been able to stop it.

The details change.

Sometimes I should have left sooner. Sometimes I should have communicated differently.

Been more patient. Been less patient.

Known better. Chosen differently.

But somehow I often arrive at the same conclusion:

This was my responsibility.

For most of my life, I treated this thought as evidence. Evidence that I had more work to do. Evidence that I had failed somehow. Evidence that if I could just understand what I’d done wrong, I could prevent the same thing from happening again.

The latest ending in my life brought these thoughts back again. Only this time, I have a different set of tools.

Instead of asking whether the thought was true, I asked a different question:

What is this thought trying to protect me from?

And that question changes everything. Because I realized the thoughts aren’t trying to reveal the truth. They’re trying to protect me from difficult emotional states.

The thoughts are trying to protect me from helplessness.

Because if everything was my fault, then maybe I could have prevented the ending. Maybe I could have controlled it. Maybe I wasn’t powerless.

The thoughts are trying to protect me from grief.

Because the moment I fully accept that I cannot make another person choose honesty, accountability, or communication, I have to grieve.

Not just the relationship. But the future I thought I was building. The family I had. The version of our life that no longer exists.

The thoughts are trying to protect me from anger.

Because if everything was my fault, then I never have to fully confront the ways I was hurt. The ways I was lied to. The ways I was left carrying uncertainty. The ways I was asked to absorb the consequences of choices that weren’t mine.

The thoughts are trying to protect me from uncertainty.

Because uncertainty is painful. And self-blame creates a clean story. Reality is usually much messier.

When I completed the exercise recently, this is what emerged:

These thoughts protect me from helplessness, grief, anger, and uncertainty.

These thoughts cost me self-compassion, peace, and the ability to move forward.

The thoughts don’t disappear. They still show up. But now I understand them differently.

Instead of treating them like the truth, I recognize them as protectors. A part of me trying — however imperfectly — to make sense of pain. And once I saw that, I started noticing the same pattern everywhere.

In my creativity.

In my finances.

In my relationships.

In the stories I tell myself about what is and isn’t possible.

That’s what this exercise is about. Not getting rid of difficult thoughts. Not replacing them with positive ones.

But learning to recognize when a thought is acting as a protector — and deciding whether it’s still helping you to create the life you want.

Step 1: Identify the Thought

Think about an area of your life where you feel stuck.

• Relationships

• Creativity

• Money

• Work

• Health

Ask yourself:

What thought keeps showing up here?

Examples:

• I have to do it alone.

• Nobody is coming.

• I’ll start when I’m ready.

• If I fail, everything falls apart.

• It’s safer not to get my hopes up.

• People always leave.

• I’m too much.

• I’m not enough.

Don’t worry about whether the thought is rational. Don’t try to fix it. Just notice it. Write it down.

Step 2: Ask What It’s Protecting

This is the question that has changed everything for me.

Instead of asking:

Is this thought true?

Ask:

What is this thought trying to protect me from?

Take your best guess.

For example:

“I have to do it alone.”

Might be protecting you from:

• disappointment

• rejection

• dependence

• vulnerability

“I’ll start when I’m ready.”

Might be protecting you from:

• failure

• embarrassment

• uncertainty

Remember:

Protective thoughts usually have good intentions. Treat them with curiosity rather than judgment.

Step 3: Calculate the Cost

Complete these two sentences:

This thought protects me from __________.

This thought costs me __________.

For example:

“This thought protects me from disappointment.”

“But it costs me intimacy.”

Or:

“This thought protects me from criticism.”

“But it costs me creative expression.”

Most protective thoughts are not free. They always charge a price.

Sometimes that price is creativity. Sometimes it’s connection. Sometimes it’s opportunity. Sometimes it’s joy. Sometimes it’s a life that feels fully lived.

Step 4: Notice What Happens in Your Body

Before trying to change anything, pause.

Read the thought. Read what it’s protecting you from. Read what it’s costing you.

Then ask:

• What emotions arise?

• What sensations do I notice?

• Where do I feel this in my body?

Tightness? Heaviness? Numbness? Heat? Relief?

Many of us try to think our way out of beliefs that are actually being held in the nervous system.

Awareness comes before change. Curiosity comes before change. Compassion comes before change.

Step 5: Choose Participation Over Protection

This is the most important step.

Don’t ask:

How do I stop having this thought?

Instead ask:

What would participation look like?

Not certainty. Not confidence.

Participation.

If the thought is:

“I have to do it alone.”

Participation might look like:

• asking for help

• joining a group

• sharing something vulnerable

• letting yourself be supported

If the thought is:

“I’ll start when I’m ready.”

Participation might look like:

• publishing the draft

• submitting the application

• having the conversation

• signing up for the class

The goal is not to eliminate fear. The goal is to stop letting fear make all your decisions.

A Final Thought

The thoughts that steal our lives are not villains. More often, they’re loyal protectors who have stayed on duty long after the danger has passed.

You don’t need to shame them.

You don’t need to fight them.

You don’t even need to get rid of them.

You simply need to remember that protection and participation are not the same thing.

The question isn’t:

What am I afraid of?

The question is:

What is my fear costing me?

Because every meaningful thing I’ve ever wanted has required me to become vulnerable to exactly the things I was trying to avoid.

• Love requires uncertainty.

• Creativity requires imperfection.

• Growth requires discomfort.

• Community requires interdependence.

A meaningful life requires participation before guarantees arrive.

If the essay earlier this week was about the thoughts that stole my life, this exercise is about how I’m learning to stop handing them the keys.

Journal Prompt

• What thought has been protecting you?

• What has it protected you from?

• And what has it cost you?

I’d love to hear your answers in the comments.

And if you’re looking for a place to practice choosing participation over protection, that’s exactly what I’m building inside Creative Reset Studio.

A place for people who want to stop postponing their lives.

A place to create, reflect, experiment, and grow alongside others.

A place to remember that becoming ourselves was never meant to be a solitary act.

If that sounds like something you’re curious about, I’d love for you to join the early interest list.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Founding Membership opening this summer.

Hi, I’m Bowie 👋🏼

I write about creativity, relationships, psychology, and reinvention — and how we stop surviving and start participating in our lives again.

If this essay resonated, consider subscribing. New essays arrive every Monday, with practical guides every Thursday.

I’m writing this from my tiny house, which I’ve lovingly described as the gay cowboy space bar of my dreams.

Outside, my mini wildflower meadow is exploding with black-eyed susans. Four rescue dogs are asleep on the couch next to me. The mortgage is paid this month. My refrigerator is full. I have work I enjoy, people I love, and enough freedom in my schedule to spend an afternoon writing an essay like this.

A younger version of me would have found this almost impossible to believe.

There was a time when I sold the paperback books I had for a couple bucks for groceries. A time when I cried on the phone with debt collectors. A time when I only ate dollar boxes of mac and cheese because that’s all I could afford. A time when I dug through dumpsters for food even though I had a full and part-time job.

Most of my twenties into my early 30s were spent so overwhelmed by debt, shame, and hopelessness that I genuinely struggled to imagine a future worth staying alive for.

In a few months, I’ll turn forty.

Because when I look back, many of the things that once felt impossible were never blocked by a lack of talent, intelligence, ambition, or hard work.

They were blocked by a handful of thoughts that I mistook for wisdom.

If you had asked me ten years ago what was standing between me and the life I wanted, I would have given you a list of external obstacles.

• Money

• Time

• Student loans

• Connections

• The right opportunity

• The way I look

• More confidence

• Better timing

• A different childhood

What I would not have told you was that some of the biggest obstacles were living inside my own head — thoughts guiding my life that weren’t designed to help me live and thrive, but were designed to help me survive.

They sounded responsible. Aware. Practical. Mature. Protective.

Looking back, I know they weren’t trying to hurt me. They were only trying to keep me safe like a protective parent who hasn’t yet processed their own shame, grief, fear, and longing.

The problem is that, eventually, these thoughts began protecting me from creating the very life I wanted to live.

Worry Was Trying to Protect Me from Uncertainty

Long before I knew I was autistic and had ADHD, I knew I worried more than other people.

I worried about saying the wrong thing. Missing something important. Forgetting an assignment. Being too much. Being misunderstood. Being rejected.

Looking back, I can see how much energy I spent trying to anticipate every possible outcome before it happened. If I could predict what was coming, maybe I could prepare for it. Maybe I could finally relax.

The irony is that I never relaxed.

A certain amount of anxiety is useful. Research suggests moderate levels of anxiety can improve preparation and performance. Anxiety has a purpose.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, I stopped using worry as information and started using it as a form of control.

I believed that if I worried enough, I could prevent pain.

If I thought hard enough about every possible outcome, maybe I could avoid being surprised. Maybe I could avoid loss. Maybe I could avoid heartbreak.

I’ve spent much of the past month confronting the limits of that strategy.

Just a few months ago, I was finally brave enough to admit to something I wanted: I wanted to become a parent.

Not someday. Soon.

For years that desire felt too vulnerable to fully acknowledge. Then I finally let myself want it.

Shortly afterward, the future I thought I was building unraveled. My partner’s mental health deteriorated. The relationship fractured and became less secure. The plan and the certainty I thought I had disappeared almost overnight.

Suddenly, I was back in one of the places I hate most: uncertainty.

No amount of worrying changed what happened. No amount of rumination made the situation easier.

Of love. Of joy. Of presence.

For years, I thought worry was helping me prepare for life. More often, it has only prevented me from fully participating in it.

Perfectionism Was Trying to Protect Me from Judgment

I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to publish a novel. Not because it takes a decade to write a book, though it certainly can!

But because writing a book and sending it into the world are two very different things.

Over the years, I’ve thrown away hundreds of pages. Rewritten entire sections. Revised whole drafts. Celebrated moments of interest from agents only to discover we weren’t ultimately the right fit.

There are days I wonder whether the book will ever find a home. Weeks and months I wonder whether all this effort will amount to anything at all.

Perfectionism would love certainty.

It would love a guarantee that the work will be rewarded before I continue, proof that I’m not wasting my time.

That’s the thing about perfectionism. It gets mistaken for excellence when it’s often fear wearing nicer clothes.

Fear of criticism, embarrassment, being misunderstood, discovering our limits.

The novel exists because I finally became willing to continue without guarantees. To write without certainty and share work before I knew how it would be received. To practice risking rejection in service of a creative vision I love.

The life I wanted required participation. Perfectionism kept offering protection instead.

Comfort Was Trying to Protect Me from Disappointment

One of the strangest truths I unfortunately keep learning is that familiar pain often feels safer than unfamiliar possibility.

Especially if chaos played a starring role in your early life. We adapt to what we know. Even when what we know hurts.

Sometimes we become so accustomed to struggle that peace feels suspicious. We become so familiar with disappointment that hope feels dangerous.

I’ve noticed this pattern in relationships, work, creativity, and happiness.

Again and again, I’ve found myself standing at the edge of something I deeply wanted while simultaneously feeling terrified to step toward it.

Not because it was wrong. But because it mattered. Because disappointment hurts. Loss fucking hurts.

But wanting something requires vulnerability.

The old version of me would have looked at the uncertainty of my life right now and taken it as evidence that hope was dangerous. That trusting people was dangerous. That wanting things was dangerous. But I’m trying to learn something different.

Comfort was trying to protect me from disappointment. The problem is that the life I wanted was almost never waiting inside my comfort zone.

I would have to make friends with discomfort if I wanted to experience something new.

Independence Was Trying to Protect Me from Being Let Down

This might be the thought that’s stolen the most from me.

If you’ve spent enough years being disappointed by people, “I have to do it myself” starts sounding like wisdom.

I have been so overwhelmed by debt for most of my adult life that I genuinely struggled to imagine a future. School debt. Then medical debt. Then credit card debt to fill the gaps created by the other debts.

There were moments when I felt so trapped by my financial situation that I wondered whether I would ever experience stability at all. Whether I had ruined my life simply by deciding to get an education or go out into the world.

I didn’t want luxury.

I wanted breathing room.

I wanted to stop feeling afraid.

There were periods when I felt so hopeless that I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep going.

During those years, depending on other people rarely felt like a viable option. Self-reliance wasn’t a personality trait. It was the only survival strategy I had.

The belief that I had to do everything alone helped me survive. But it also made my world smaller.

Because the truth is that nearly every meaningful transformation in my life has happened through relationship.

Teachers.

Friends.

Therapists.

Mentors.

Readers.

Community.

Creativity itself is relational. Every book, story, or piece of art that’s changed me was another human reaching across space and time, saying, me too.

The life I wanted was never going to be built alone.

Waiting Was Trying to Protect Me from Vulnerability

This is perhaps the most convincing thought of all.

I’ll start living when the debt is gone. When the book is published. When my relationship feels secure. When I lose weight. When I heal more. When I finally know what I’m doing.

For years I treated my life as something that would truly begin later.

Just beyond the next milestone, accomplishment, and problem solved. But life kept happening while I waited.

The people I loved kept changing. The seasons kept passing. The opportunities kept arriving and disappearing.

There is only this life. This imperfect moment. This unfinished chapter.

Waiting feels like putting your arms out in front of you, palms out, in an attempt to push life away. Waiting was trying to protect me from being vulnerable.

I know now that vulnerability is the cost of admission for a meaningful life.

My Thoughts Were Never the Enemy

Looking back, I don’t hate these thoughts like I once did. In many ways, I’m grateful for them. They emerged for good reasons.

They helped me survive difficult things:

• Worry tried to protect me from uncertainty.

• Perfectionism tried to protect me from judgment.

• Comfort tried to protect me from disappointment.

• Independence tried to protect me from being let down.

• Waiting tried to protect me from vulnerability.

The thoughts that stole my life were never trying to hurt me. They were trying to make sure I never got hurt again.

The problem is that, eventually, they began protecting me from love, creativity, community, uncertainty, and possibility, too.

In other words, they began protecting me from life itself.

Every meaningful thing I’ve ever wanted has required me to practice vulnerability and acceptance of what I fear.

• Love requires uncertainty.

• Creativity requires imperfection.

• Growth requires discomfort.

• Community requires interdependence.

These days, I’m trying to relate to these thoughts differently. Not by fighting them or trying to eliminate them. But by recognizing them for what they are:

• Old protectors

• Former survival strategies

• Voices that helped me get here

• Voices that no longer get to decide where I go next

Later this week, I’ll share the practical framework I’ve been using to identify these protective thoughts and begin relating to them differently.

The goal isn’t to eliminate fear. The goal is to stop handing it the keys.

Because one of the thoughts that has stolen the most from me is the belief that I have to do everything alone, I’ve been creating Creative Reset Studio as an extension of my 1:1 client work — a place to practice something different in community.

A place for people who want to stop postponing their lives.

A place to create, reflect, experiment, and grow alongside others.

A place to remember that becoming ourselves was never meant to be a solitary act.

If that sounds like something you’re curious about, I’d love for you to join the early interest list.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Founding Membership opening this summer.

Not in a dramatic sense, though maybe a little in a dramatic sense.

I mean that when I look back over the past twenty years, the major turning points in my life seem to be marked less by achievement than by loss. A friendship ending. A parent disappointing me. A relationship falling apart. A dream dissolving. A version of myself reaching the end of its usefulness.

Again and again, life has arrived with a pair of scissors and cut me loose from something I thought I couldn’t live without.

Maybe that’s true for all of us.

It is embedded in growing up. In becoming who we are. In realizing our parents are human. In leaving places we love. In watching people change. In discovering that a future we spent years building toward no longer exists.

Lately, as I’ve been moving through a new course in heartbreak — bearing witness to someone I love navigating debilitating mental health challenges — I’ve found myself thinking about a pattern I’ve noticed in my own life.

The irony is that I'm writing this from the middle of heartbreak, not the far side of it. I am not sitting on a mountaintop having extracted a neat lesson from my suffering. There are still mornings when I wake up with anxiety already blooming in my chest. There are still moments when I find myself bargaining with reality, replaying conversations, imagining different outcomes.

Whatever wisdom exists in this essay has not arrived because I have figured heartbreak out. It has arrived because, once again, I am trying to live inside it.

For as much as heartbreak has hurt me, it has also been one of the greatest creative forces I’ve ever known.

This feels like a dangerous thing to admit because I don’t want to romanticize suffering. If someone offered me a button that would allow me to skip the grief, the sleepless nights, the panic, the obsessive mental loops, and the particular ache of missing someone who is still alive, I would probably press it.

Actually, that’s a lie.

I would hover my finger over it for a long time.

Because as much as I hate heartbreak, I’ve started to suspect that some of the most meaningful things I’ve ever created have emerged from the places where my life cracked open.

The novel I spent years writing began after a significant trauma. Some of my deepest friendships arrived after other relationships ended. Entire chapters of my life — career shifts, cross-country moves, creative projects, spiritual practices, communities — can be traced back to moments when something fell apart and left me standing in unfamiliar territory.

I don’t believe heartbreak makes us any more talented, though maybe. And I do not believe pain is inherently noble.

I’ve always thought of creativity as much larger than art.

Art is one expression of creativity, but creativity itself is something far more fundamental. It is the human capacity to imagine alternatives. To improvise. To generate possibilities when the map no longer matches the terrain.

And heartbreak, at its core, is a crisis of the map.

Psychologists often talk about grief as a response to loss, but increasingly researchers understand that grief is also a process of identity reconstruction.

When we lose someone or something important, we aren’t only grieving the thing itself. We are grieving the future that existed in relationship to it.

The routines.

The assumptions.

The plans.

The story.

The brain is constantly creating predictions about what comes next. It wants continuity. Coherence. A sense that the world is understandable and that tomorrow will resemble today.

Heartbreak interrupts all of that.

Suddenly, the future you had imagined disappears. The narrative you’ve been living inside no longer makes sense. You wake up in a life that looks familiar from the outside but feels completely foreign from within.

Which is why heartbreak can feel so disorienting. You’re not only mourning a person or a possibility. You’re trying to orient yourself inside a reality that no longer behaves the way you expected it to. You are now walking with a map that has been suddenly rendered useless.

And this, I think, is where creativity enters the picture.

Not as a distraction or self-improvement.

Not even as healing, at least not in the way we usually talk about healing.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur believed that human beings make sense of their lives through narrative. We understand ourselves through stories. We are constantly constructing meaning from experience, weaving events into an ongoing account of who we are and where we are going.

Heartbreak doesn’t just hurt because something ends.

It hurts because the story breaks.

And once the story breaks, we are left with one of the most terrifying and liberating questions a person can face:

Who am I now?

For a while, there is no answer.

Only fragments. Confusion. Grief.

But eventually — and I think this is one of the quiet miracles of being human — the imagination begins to stir.

Not all at once.

Maybe it starts as a daydream.

A conversation.

A poem.

A business idea.

A trip.

A class.

A walk around the block where you notice something beautiful despite yourself.

Tiny moments in which the psyche begins testing new possibilities.

Not because we’re ready. We’re not.

Not because we’ve moved on. We haven’t.

But because some part of us remembers that the story is still being written.

Every act of creation asks the same question:

What if?

What if this line leads somewhere?

What if I try another color?

What if I rearrange these pieces?

What if something unexpected emerges?

Heartbreak asks us those same questions, whether we want it to or not.

Creativity Doesn’t Have to Be a Solo Practice

I’ve spent much of my life believing creativity was something you did after you figured things out.

You got clarity. You healed. You found an answer.

And then you made something.

What I’ve discovered instead is that creativity is often what helps us find our way through the uncertainty itself.

The notebook isn’t where I go once I know what I think. It’s where I go to discover what I think.

The walk isn’t a reward for having my life together. It’s often how I remember that I’m alive when my life feels like it’s falling apart.

The conversation isn’t the conclusion. It’s part of the process.

Again and again, I’ve found that creative practice gives me a way to stay in relationship with myself when the future feels unclear. It helps me tolerate uncertainty. It helps me imagine possibilities I couldn’t previously see. It reminds me that I am more than the worst thing that has happened to me and larger than any single chapter of my life — thank GOD.

Which is why I’ve been creating Creative Reset Studio — an expansion of the work I do with my 1:1 clients.

It’s not a productivity program or another place to optimize yourself.

This is a weekly practice space for people who want to slow down, reconnect with themselves, and remember that creativity is not a luxury. It’s one of the healthiest ways we can navigate change.

A place for reflection, embodiment, conversation, experimentation, and community. A place to ask bigger questions. A place to get unstuck.

A place to remember that there is still more life available to you than the story you’re currently telling yourself.

Because if there’s one thing heartbreak and grief and uncertainty and disappointment and reinvention have taught me, it’s this:

The goal isn’t to avoid having your heart broken.

The goal is to keep creating, to keep allowing yourself to live, anyway.

Reply here or send me a message on Instagram @bowierowie if you’d like to learn more about the Founding Membership that will be opening this summer.

Three months into our relationship, my partner and I had our first big fight.

Not the kind of fight where one person sleeps on the couch and everything is fine by morning. The kind of fight that leaves two people staring at opposite sides of an emotional canyon, wondering whether they have fundamentally misunderstood each other and whether love is enough to bridge the distance.

We immediately broke up.

Looking back, I’m almost grateful.

Not because it was fun. It wasn’t. Obviously.

Not because I enjoy being confronted with my deepest fears of abandonment, rejection, and loss. I do not.

But because that rupture shattered a fantasy I didn’t realize I was carrying — that the right relationship would always feel safe and easy.

I thought compatibility meant rarely misunderstanding one another. And that love would somehow exempt us from the messy work of becoming known to ourselves and to each other.

After some weeks apart, we found our way back to each other. We returned not with answers, but with a shared curiosity about what had happened between us and whether there might be another way forward.

In our mid and late 30s, neither of us wanted to keep repeating the same patterns. We wanted to do something different.

We made a commitment that felt both simple and impossibly ambitious: to learn how to understand and love each other better.

That commitment eventually led us to couples therapy. I was excited, but also nervous. Both of us had previously done couples therapy in our longest relationships. Neither of us remembered it being a positive experience.

But in the spirit of leaving the past behind and creating a different future, we said: let’s do it.

Over a year later, I’m convinced that couples therapy isn’t primarily about communication, though there is obviously plenty of communication involved. It is about becoming aware of all the invisible forces shaping a relationship — the histories, assumptions, fears, identities, loyalties, and survival strategies that quietly influence how we love long before we ever meet each other.

What follows are a few things I’ve learned while trying to build a life with another human while in our 30s.

Relationships Don’t Happen in a Vacuum

One of the most frustrating things about relationship advice is that it often treats relationships as though they exist in a sealed laboratory environment where two emotionally regulated adults simply communicate clearly and make good decisions.

This has not been my experience.

During the past year, my partner and I have navigated co-parenting schedules, career transitions, financial stress, family dynamics, questions about marriage and children, neurodivergence, old trauma, new trauma, health crises, and the ordinary logistical absurdities of trying to coordinate two complicated lives.

At various points, couples therapy has involved discussions about attachment wounds, nervous system regulation, household labor, future family planning, grief and addiction, and why I am going to lose my mind if he doesn’t stop turning on all the overhead lights in the house!

Loving him is the first time in my life that I’ve experienced a love where the sacred and the mundane arrive together.

What therapy together has taught me in a deeply felt way is that relationships are ecosystems. They are shaped by everything surrounding them. Stress doesn’t stay politely confined to one area of life. Neither does joy. Neither does grief.

When life becomes more complicated, our relationships often become more complicated too.

This sounds obvious, but as someone who struggles with perfectionism, I find it comforting because it reminds me of this: struggling does not necessarily mean something is wrong.

Sometimes it only means we’re human. Sometimes it means we’re allowing ourselves to grow. Sometimes it means we’re in the process of creating something better than we could have initially imagined.

Most Arguments Are About Something Else

One of the recurring experiences of couples therapy is arriving with what feels like a very clear complaint and leaving with the realization that you have been discussing an entirely different subject.

The argument might begin with a forgotten task, an unanswered text message, or a disagreement about plans. Yet somewhere beneath the logistics lives deeper questions.

Can I rely on you?

Do I matter to you?

Will you still choose me?

Am I safe here?

For much of my life, I believed understanding conflict meant understanding the facts.

Now I think understanding conflict means understanding what the facts are protecting.

The disagreement itself is rarely the whole story.

Beneath every recurring conflict lives an older fear trying to avoid being felt.

Therapy hasn’t eliminated those fears. It has simply made them easier to recognize when they show up wearing a disguise.

What Happens When There Is No Script?

Perhaps the most unexpected part of this journey has been realizing how many assumptions I carried about relationships despite spending much of my adult life questioning assumptions.

I’m nonbinary and queer from a blue state in a working-class city in the Midwest.

My partner is a straight-identifying cis-man who grew up in a conservative part of the South.

I’m older than he is. I’m the primary breadwinner.

He entered the relationship with a child. I made every effort before meeting him to never have one.

Neither of us fits neatly into the cultural stories we inherited about what a partnership is supposed to look like.

This narrative freedom has felt liberating — mostly. But it can also be disorienting.

Without a script, we have to make hundreds of decisions that many couples unconsciously inherit.

What does contribution look like?

How do we divide responsibility?

What makes someone a parent?

What makes someone a provider?

What parts of ourselves are we willing to change, and what parts deserve protection?

There have been moments when our differences have felt vast.

Not because either of us lacked love, but because we were attempting to understand experiences we had never lived ourselves.

What I’ve come to appreciate the most is now knowing, in my bones, that intimacy isn’t built through certainty.

It’s built through curiosity.

The willingness to remain interested in someone long after you think you understand them.

The willingness to let them surprise you.

The willingness to discover that the person you love is more complicated than the story you initially told yourself about them.

Love Is Not the Same Thing as Understanding

When I was younger, I believed that if I could understand someone deeply enough, I could resolve almost anything.

This is the occupational hazard of being an artist and a designer.

I want the backstory.

I want the context.

I want the emotional archaeology.

I want to know why.

Couples therapy has taught me that understanding matters enormously, but it is not the same thing as change.

It is not the same thing as accountability or trust.

And that compassion and accountability are not opposites. The healthiest relationships I’ve experienced have required both.

I am continually learning the ability to hold someone’s history with tenderness while remaining honest about the impact of their choices.

The ability to say, “I understand why this happened,” without pretending that understanding alone solves the problem.

The Relationship That Needed the Most Attention

If you had asked me a year ago what I hoped to gain from couples therapy, I probably would have listed a dozen things I wanted to improve about the relationship.

Communication.

Conflict.

Finances.

Connection.

Shared vision.

What I didn’t expect was how often therapy would direct my attention back toward myself.

Toward the places where I overfunction. The stories I tell when I am afraid. The ways I abandon my own needs in an effort to preserve connection.

Toward the uncomfortable truth that loving another person and staying connected to myself are not competing goals.

They are the same goal. To love.

The older I get, the less interested I am in relationships that ask either person to disappear. I want relationships that make more room for each of us to become fully ourselves.

Relationships where curiosity matters more than certainty. Where repair matters more than perfection. Where growth is valued over being right.

A year into couples therapy, I still don’t have a formula for love.

I don’t think one exists, except maybe this: acceptance meets curiosity plus the mutual willingness to evolve together.

Either way, what I know I do have is a growing appreciation for the courage it takes to remain open — to another person, to yourself, and to the possibility that neither of you is finished becoming.

Maybe that’s what partnership is.

Not finding someone who completes the story or writes the perfect one with you. Maybe it’s just finding someone who’s willing to keep writing it with you.

Because one thing I know for sure is this: creative collaboration is one of the deepest expressions of love.

Do Something Different

One of the reasons I’ve always had a special interest in relationships is that they seem to reveal the places where we’re living most on autopilot.

Not just romantic relationships.

All relationships.

The relationship we have with our creativity. With our work. Our bodies. Our families. With ourselves.

Most of us inherit ways of being long before we’re old enough to evaluate whether they actually fit.

We inherit beliefs about love, conflict, success, and gender. About what makes someone worthy and safe. About who we’re allowed to become.

Then one day we wake up and realize we’ve been following a script we didn’t write.

That realization can feel deeply unsettling. It can also be the beginning of something beautiful.

The older I get, the more I believe transformation rarely comes from having the right answers. More often, it begins with asking a different question or experimenting with a different way of showing up.

What happens if I stop assuming this story is true?

What happens if I try a different response?

What happens if I become curious instead of certain?

Those questions are part of what inspired me to begin creating DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT, a new experience I’m co-creating around relationships, patterns, and the small experiments that help us step outside inherited ways of being.

Not because I have it all figured out. Quite the opposite!

But because I know for certain that growth happens when we’re willing to stay curious together.

If this essay resonated with you, I’d love to hear:

What relationship script are you currently questioning?

Hit reply and let me know.

Growing Up Around Disappearing

I grew up around addiction, which means I grew up around people disappearing in real time.

Not all at once. Not dramatically at first. It happened slowly, almost imperceptibly. Through emotional absence. Through unpredictability. Through conversations that circled the same wounds without ever reaching resolution. Through people who were physically present but psychologically somewhere else entirely.

As a kid, I didn’t understand what I was witnessing. I only knew there was often a heaviness in the room that no one knew how to name. I learned early how to scan moods, how to anticipate emotional weather, how to become hyperaware of tension shifts in other people’s bodies. I learned how suddenly joy could turn into chaos. I learned that adults could love you deeply and still be completely unavailable to themselves and to you.

I also learned that addiction diminishes us.

Not only our lives, but our attention. Our curiosity. Our sense of possibility.

Over the years, I’ve watched addiction move through families, relationships, friendships, entire communities. I’ve lost high school classmates to overdoses. I’ve watched brilliant, funny, deeply creative people slowly disappear into substances. I’ve loved partners whose worlds became increasingly organized around escape and survival. I’ve seen addiction hollow out intimacy, distort time, fracture trust, and make life feel unbearably small for everyone involved.

And because addiction touched my life so early, I eventually had to confront my own relationship with substances and numbing too.

Not only through drinking or drugs, but through workaholism, perfectionism, emotional avoidance, hyper-independence, doomscrolling, staying busy, staying productive, staying disconnected from my own body.

I’ve come to believe addiction exists on a much broader spectrum than we often acknowledge culturally. We tend to talk about addiction once it becomes visibly catastrophic, but I think many of us are living inside smaller, socially rewarded forms of dissociation all the time.

Addiction Narrows the World

At some point, I realized that addiction doesn’t only destroy health, relationships, careers, or financial stability. Before it destroys those things, it often destroys something quieter.

It destroys imagination.

I don’t mean imagination only in the artistic sense. I mean the ability to imagine yourself fully alive inside your own life. The ability to imagine a future different from the present and actually act on it. The ability to stay curious, playful, emotionally present, connected to beauty, connected to other people, connected to yourself.

Addiction narrows all of that.

Creativity expands it.

That distinction has become impossible for me not to see.

One of the things researchers understand about addiction is that it fundamentally alters attention and reward systems in the brain. Under healthy conditions, dopamine helps motivate us toward exploration, learning, novelty, connection, and long-term goals. But addiction hijacks this system. Over time, the brain becomes increasingly organized around obtaining relief as quickly as possible. The nervous system stops prioritizing openness and starts prioritizing survival.

The world gets smaller.

Long-term thinking becomes harder. Relationships become secondary to regulation. Curiosity collapses under the weight of urgency. Life starts revolving around cycles of craving, relief, shame, escape, and repetition.

And creativity requires almost the exact opposite state.

Creativity depends on openness. It requires enough safety to wonder. Enough presence to stay with uncertainty long enough for something new to emerge. Creativity asks us to remain in relationship with life rather than constantly trying to escape it.

The Loss of Aliveness

That’s why addiction feels so heartbreaking to witness. You aren’t only watching someone harm themselves. You’re watching someone lose contact with their aliveness.

I’ve seen this happen to people I love. People who were once playful, ambitious, artistic, curious, deeply emotionally intelligent. Over time, their personalities flattened beneath survival. Their worlds became repetitive and increasingly isolated. Conversations became circular. The future became difficult for them to imagine. Life became about making it through the day, then the night, then the next day again.

Many sensitive, neurodivergent people are especially vulnerable to addiction because sensitivity itself can feel overwhelming without support, regulation, or meaningful connection. When we feel deeply, substances can initially feel less like destruction and more like relief. More like silence. More like rest. More like connection.

But eventually, the thing that once felt expansive becomes constricting. The thing that once promised freedom becomes another kind of cage.

This is why I’ve become so interested in the interdependence of creativity, embodiment, and nervous system healing as an adult. Because the opposite of addiction isn’t simply sobriety. The opposite of addiction is presence. It’s connection. It’s being able to tolerate reality without constantly needing to flee from it.

Recovery as a Creative Act

The more I heal or expand my ability to be consistently present with myself and others, the more I’ve come to see recovery itself as a profoundly creative act.

Recovery asks people to rebuild their relationship to attention. To emotion. To the body. To time. To possibility. It asks people to imagine a life their nervous system no longer wants to escape from. And that requires creativity in the deepest sense of the word.

Not performance.

Not productivity.

Not aesthetic output.

But the ability to remain awake to your own life and make choices in line with your creative vision.

For me, meditation has been part of that recovery. Creative practice has been part of that recovery. Community has been part of that recovery.

Meditation taught me how deeply uncomfortable it can be to simply sit still inside yourself without reaching for distraction, stimulation, achievement, substances, fantasy, scrolling, work, or noise. It taught me how quickly the mind searches for escape. But it also taught me that discomfort is not the same thing as danger. That I can feel grief, uncertainty, longing, boredom, shame, fear, and restlessness without disappearing from myself.

Creative practice has done something similar. Writing, movement, art, conversation, time in nature — these practices ask me over and over again to stay present long enough for something real to emerge. They ask me to tolerate imperfection. To remain curious instead of controlling. To listen instead of numb. To transform experience rather than avoid it.

And community has reminded me that healing almost never happens in isolation. Addiction thrives in secrecy, shame, and disconnection. Recovery requires relationship. It requires being witnessed. It requires spaces where people can tell the truth about themselves and their lives without being reduced to their worst moments.

Choosing Aliveness

I don’t think being alive is supposed to feel comfortable all the time.

I think being alive means staying in relationship with discomfort without letting it harden us or disconnect us from ourselves. It means allowing grief to deepen us instead of collapse us. It means choosing presence over numbness again and again and again. This is how we make space for joy.

That, to me, is what a creative life actually is.

Not a perfectly optimized or aesthetically curated life, but a life where you remain responsive to experience. A life where you continue participating in your own becoming. A life where you resist the urge to disappear.

For me, creativity has become less about self-expression and more about self-return.

A way of rebuilding connection to parts of myself that learned very early how to disappear in order to survive.

And maybe that’s the deepest thing addiction takes from us in the end: not only our health or our relationships, but our ability to fully participate in being alive.

Creative Reset Studio

If this resonates with you, this is the exact territory we’ll be exploring inside the Creative Reset Studio — a weekly space for reflection, embodiment, creativity, nervous system healing, and reconnecting with the parts of ourselves that survival taught us to abandon.

Creative Reset Studio is for sensitive, thoughtful people who want more than productivity hacks or surface-level self-help. It’s for people interested in rebuilding their relationship to creativity, attention, aliveness, and meaningful change through sustainable practices and intentional community.

We work with writing, embodiment practices, reflection prompts, conversation, accountability, and creative experimentation to reconnect with ourselves and create more space for life to move through us.

I’m opening up a small Founding Membership this summer. If you’d like to learn more, respond here or message me on Instagram at @bowierowie.

A few years ago, I would have told you that setbacks were primarily about achievement.

A rejected manuscript. A workshop that didn’t fill. A project that stalled. A pitch that went nowhere.

The pain seemed obvious enough: I wanted something to happen, and it didn’t.

Lately, I’ve started to see those moments differently.

When I look back at the disappointments that have stayed with me — the ones that lingered for weeks or months, the ones that made me question myself — it wasn’t usually the event itself that caused the deepest wound.

It was what the event seemed to say about my place in the world.

That nobody cared.

That I wasn’t good enough.

That I had misread the situation.

That I was fundamentally alone in wanting what I wanted.

A failed project rarely feels like just a failed project. A strained friendship rarely feels like just a strained friendship. A difficult season in a relationship rarely stays contained to the relationship itself.

Somehow these experiences have a way of spreading. Before long, a disappointment in one area of life begins coloring everything else.

The creative work feels harder.

The future feels smaller.

We stop reaching out.

We start withdrawing from the very things that once made us feel alive.

What fascinates me is that this process isn’t simply psychological. It’s biological. And understanding that has changed the way I recover from setbacks.

The Brain Doesn’t Just Experience Events. It Interprets Them.

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. Long before we write stories, we live inside them. Every day, the brain is trying to answer a series of questions:

What happened?

Why did it happen?

What should I do now?

This tendency is useful. Without it, we’d struggle to learn from experience or navigate uncertainty.

The problem is that when we’re hurt, lonely, ashamed, or discouraged, our interpretations often become less reliable precisely when they feel most convincing.

Psychologists sometimes refer to this as explanatory style — the habitual way we explain setbacks to ourselves.

When something goes wrong, some people tend to view the event as temporary and specific:

That didn’t work.

Others unconsciously turn the event into evidence of something larger:

I don’t work.

The difference may seem subtle, but it shapes everything that follows.

One interpretation leaves room for possibility. The other quietly transforms a moment into an identity.

Why Discouragement Feels So Convincing

One of the most surprising things I have learned while studying the neuroscience of discouragement is that it doesn’t merely change how we feel.

It changes what we can imagine.

When expected rewards fail to arrive, dopamine activity decreases. Contrary to popular belief, dopamine isn’t simply the brain’s “pleasure chemical.” It’s deeply involved in motivation, anticipation, and the perception that effort is worthwhile.

In other words, dopamine helps create a sense of possibility.

When we experience repeated disappointment, the brain begins conserving resources. It becomes more cautious. More skeptical. More protective.

Possibilities that felt available a week ago can suddenly seem unrealistic.

The idea for a new project feels naïve.

The conversation feels pointless.

The invitation feels embarrassing to send.

The dream begins to look impractical.

This is one reason setbacks can feel so dangerous. We assume we’re seeing reality clearly when, in fact, we’re viewing the world through the lens of a nervous system attempting to protect itself from further pain.

The future hasn’t necessarily become smaller. Our capacity to imagine it has.

Creativity Is Relational

For a long time, I treated creativity as something individual.

A writer alone at a desk. An artist in a studio. An entrepreneur building something from scratch.

But the more people I work with, the more convinced I become that creativity is fundamentally relational.

We create because we want to express something that matters. We write because we want to be understood. We build businesses because we want to solve problems for real people. We gather communities because we long to belong to something larger than ourselves.

Even our private acts of creativity are often conversations. A journal can be a dialogue with the self. A painting can be a conversation with grief. A poem can become a bridge between two people who have never met.

This is why creative setbacks hurt more than we expect. They’re not simply disruptions to productivity. They’re disruptions to connection.

Beneath many creative disappointments lives a deeper fear:

Will anyone ever meet me here?

The Same Is True in Relationships

When a friendship changes, when a partner pulls away, when conflict arises in a community we care about, the nervous system often responds with a similar set of questions.

Do I still belong?

Am I safe here?

Am I wanted?

These aren’t signs of weakness. They are ancient survival concerns.

For most of human history, belonging wasn’t merely a psychological luxury. It was a prerequisite for survival. Isolation carried real consequences.

Modern life has changed dramatically, but our nervous systems still carry traces of that inheritance.

This helps explain why rejection can feel physically painful. Research has shown that social rejection activates some of the same neural networks involved in physical pain. The body experiences exclusion not as an abstract concept but as a meaningful threat.

The result is that setbacks often trigger far more than disappointment. They awaken old fears about connection, worthiness, and belonging.

The Recovery Process Most People Skip

When something painful happens, our instinct is often to make meaning immediately.

We search for lessons. We look for explanations. We try to determine whether we should persist, pivot, let go, work harder, or give up entirely.

I’ve done all of these things.

What I’ve learned is that interpretation works best after regulation, not before. In other words, the first task is not understanding what happened. The first task is reconnecting.

Reconnect with the body. Reconnect with trusted people. Reconnect with reality. Reconnect with the values that existed before the setback occurred.

Go for the walk. Call a friend. Attend the gathering even if part of you wants to stay home. Create something small. Let yourself experience disappointment without rushing to turn it into a life philosophy.

A nervous system in distress is often trying to answer questions it isn’t currently equipped to answer well.

Community Protects Us from False Conclusions

One of the reasons discouragement becomes so powerful is that it thrives in isolation. Alone, our thoughts begin to echo.

We repeat the same stories until they start sounding like facts. In community, something else becomes possible.

Someone tells you about the grant they didn’t receive. The relationship that ended. The manuscript that was rejected twenty-seven times. The project that failed before it succeeded. The season when they considered walking away from everything.

Suddenly, your experience becomes part of a larger human story rather than evidence of a personal deficiency.

Community doesn’t remove disappointment. What it does is restore perspective.

It reminds us that struggle is not proof that something has gone wrong. It is often proof that we are participating in life.

Let the Story Wait

One of the most useful practices I’ve adopted is surprisingly simple.

When something painful happens, I try not to decide what it means immediately.

I don’t need a lesson by tomorrow. I don’t need certainty by next week. I don’t need a verdict on my worth.

Sometimes the wisest response is simply:

Something difficult happened.

I’m disappointed.

I don’t know what it means yet.

There is a strange freedom in allowing the story to remain unfinished.

Identity is shaped through repetition, and every time we resist turning a temporary setback into a permanent conclusion about who we are, we create space for a different future to emerge.

A more generous interpretation. A repaired relationship. A renewed creative practice. A community we haven’t found yet. A possibility we cannot currently see.

The setback may be real. The disappointment may be real.

But neither has the authority to define you.

Often recovery begins not when the pain disappears, but when we choose to remain in relationship — with ourselves, with our work, and with one another — long enough to discover that the story isn’t over.

What I'm Building This Summer

Over the past few months, I’ve been co-creating a new group experience called DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.

The program is centered on romantic relationships, but not in the usual “dating advice” sense. Together, we’ll explore the patterns, stories, nervous system responses, and habits we bring into our relationships — and what becomes possible when we practice showing up differently.

It’s inspired by questions I’ve been sitting with in my own life and witnessing in the lives of others:

Why do we keep having the same arguments?

Why do we shut down, over-function, people-please, pursue, withdraw, or lose ourselves in relationships we care deeply about?

How do we build relationships that feel more connected, honest, alive, and sustainable?

We’re still putting the finishing touches on the experience, and I’ll be sharing much more soon. For now, I’m looking for people who feel curious about this work and might want to learn more as the program takes shape.

If that sounds like you, reply to this email or send me a DM on Instagram at @bowierowie. I’d love to connect and make sure you’re among the first to hear more.