Hey y’all! I’m back with an update. After careful deliberation, I’ll no longer be moving forward with The Whimsy Workshop. All current paid members have been fully refunded (photo added for transparency).

I’m so grateful for everyone who took this part of the journey with me and who applied for scholarships. The initial interest wasn’t quite there to run it in a way that felt sustainable right now, so I’m making the call to step back from it now rather than force it.

Wielding Whimsy is still here, and I will be posting more posts down the line. You can expect more thoughtful personal essays on my journey crafting a creative life that feels good not just one that looks good online when the time feels right to return. For now I’m taking a bit of a breather, and I trust I’ll return to this work when the timing feels more aligned.

This is not goodbye, this is a see you soon.

With love and loads of whimsy,
Divinity Rae

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

Memberships for The Whimsy Workshop are now live! Here is everything we are getting up to for our first month of crafting a life that feels good not just one that looks good online.

What We Are Co-Creating In August 2026

If August had a theme song for The Whimsy Workshop it would Olivia Dean’s So Easy (To Fall In Love). There is no better time of year to slow down and ask the question “What do you really want out of social media?” And that’s exactly what we will be doing as Autumn rolls around.

If you are a creative person who puts so much pressure on yourself to show up consistently but you’ve never considered that you may not know what consistency truly is and maybe that’s the reason you always feel like you’re falling behind or not doing enough? Consistency has nothing to do with being able to follow a posting schedule or posting every day to stay relevant. This is why we are starting the first 30 days unlearning everything we think we know about:

• Social media

• Algorithms

• Consistency

• The origin of Burnout

• And the fear of being seen authentically (and dare I say whimsically!)

Over the next 30 Days with 4 Live video sessions, I will walk you through:

• Auditing your account

• Carving out the Real Work and discarding the sh*t that doesn’t actually matter

• Rediscovering your whimsy and authenticity

• And how to package that into a repeatable short-form video series and content system so you can stop starting over from scratch every time you need to share your creative work online.

Not only will I be teaching you the system and strategy, I will be creating it for you in Notion as a template that comes included in your membership. And even if you can’t make the lives, you will have access to replays and our community chat where you can ask questions, stay accountable, and celebrate your wins!

As I’ve said before, I’ll bring the strategy, and all you have to do is bring the magic. Over the next couple days I will be sharing more details of the adventure awaiting us on the other side of August, for now, check out memberships and pricing you can get started! All new monthly memberships will automatically receive a 20% discount during the first week of subscribing. So don’t wait! Join today!

Memberships & Perks

Members will receive:

• Everything available to free subscribers

• Weekly live social media chat and Q&A (Substack)

• Weekly accountability check-in for your pilots and creative projects (Substack)

• Weekly space to share and celebrate your wins (Substack)

• Monthly live video content reset and prep session and access to replays (via Zoom so we can yap on camera together!)

• Exclusive posts and video tutorials

• Access to a growing resource library

• My personal archive of tools and resources for creating content and caring for my inner and outer self along this journey

• Quest-style transformation sessions where we build something together, beginning with Signature Series in August

Membership is $25 to subscribe per month, $195 for the year (approx $16/month)

Founding members don’t just get more—you give more. Part of what you pay helps to fund free access for creatives who need a little extra magic. You won’t be just building your own work, you’ll be helping someone else start theirs.

Founding members receive:

• Everything in both the free and paid tiers

• An opt-in opportunity to be featured on our Magic Makers page, where we can all celebrate you for supporting and making this space more accessible.

• Beta Access to new tools and resources when available

• Discounts on any additional courses, cohorts, or material.

The Share The Magic Scholarships are intended to increase access for those of us who historically and currently systemically face barriers to creative education and resources. This includes but is not limited to Black and/or African Americans, BIPOC communities, queer and disabled people, and low-income creatives. Scholarship recipients will remain anonymous unless they wish to disclose their acceptance.

Share the Magic Scholarship

You can also apply for a free full-ride scholarship with my Share the Magic Scholarship!

My Goal is to grant 5-10 new scholarships a month, depending on resources available. For the first month, there are 10 scholarships ready to go! Here are the two tiers:

• 90 Day Scholarship

• 12 Month Scholarship

Please apply by clicking the button below.

Apply For Scholarship

Must be 18 years or older to apply; terms and conditions may apply.

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

Nowadays, it feels like sharing your creativity is harder than creating the thing itself. What’s the hook? What’s the format? How many times should you post a week? What metric should you aim to increase to get some damn traction? And the list goes on and never seems to stop.

I want to bring creatives together to stop this daily spiral. That’s how The Whimsy Workshop was born—a place where we could come together and learn how to reach and retain our target audiance without having to become an influencer in the process if that’s not what we want to do.

Art has a rhythm that we rest and return to. It is not a daily discipline of manufactured consistency. It’s not supposed to be. The Whimsy Workshop is designed to help creatives build the right system and structure around their shared work so that your social media keeps bringing in your people even when you need time to rest or go into deeep work on your projects.

For example, I hit a really rough mental health patch this year from April 2026 to about mid-June 2026, and yet, during that time I had a post generate 34K views, had multiple newsletter sign ups, grew my following account over 500 new followers, and maintained over 111K views monthly while I took a break from posted for nearly 3 months to look after my mental health.

In that time, I wrote and published a new novella which has out sold my previous book and I don’t think I would have been able to produce it if I was hyper-focused on posting everyday.

Those 60-90 days of just being with my feelings and pouring it into my writing ended up being some of my best work yet. At a dark time in my life I didn’t need more likes to feel better, I needed to create something with my own mind and hands that would bring the whimsy back into my life. But I also needed an audience I could return to and still have my hard work seen. And there were there to support me when I did 🥺💗

I’ve spent 6 years as a freelance digital marketer telling stories for brands like Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, Lexus, NYX Cosmetics, and more.

And now I am creating an all inclusive space where I can share everything I’ve learned with you so we can continue to grow our creative practices together! Here’s a little sneak peak of what’s to come.

The Website

The membership sign up page is underway!!! I am building the website myself (shout out to being a multi-passionate babe haha!) This is where newsletter subscribers will be sent to snatch up the available memberships when they go live. I am launching the community with a capped number of Founding Members that will recieve a one time offer upon signing up for a year. My goal is not to have thousands of members. I want to be able to get to know you all and respond to questions and give feedback etc. So we’re going deep before we go wide!

Newsletter subsribers are automatically added to the waitlist by subscribing here on substack and you will recieve first dibs on getting into the community before it caps off for the next few months so make sure your emails are going into your inbox and you are opening them (I will send out an email about registration before it goes out so you know exactly when to look for this email)

The Community

The Whimsy Workshop is coming together and I am so so excited!!! One of the key features I love is badges!

As someone who has built communities with over 1500 women and queer people, I know how overwhelming it can be to feel like you have to show up every single day and I didn’t want the whimsy workshop to feel that way. One the days and weeks that you can, I want you to be recognized and rewarded for your contributions. So I designed some fun badges that you can both unlock with certain actions, and be recognized for by your new co-creatives!

Maybe it’s just the cozy Nintendo Switch gamer girly in me but I love this for us! Here’s a little sneak peek of what that looks like!

Founding Member Offers and Scholarships

Right now I am working on putting together our founding member offers and scholarship applications. The founding member offers will include a Quest (or a co-hort if you’re using un-whimsical and boring business words lol). This is a one time offer that will be capped off for a limited number of seats and never offered again.

As far as scholarships go, early on as this community started to come to life I knew I wanted to prioritize access that centered marginalized communities. As someone who knows first hand what it feels like to have the ideas but not the resources to access the tools you need to make them come to life I promised myself I would find a way to be who I needed when I was trying to learn to support my own creativity. I am so excited to see how everything is coming together and extremely grateful that I get to do this. I will share more about pricing and scholarships closer to registration so be sure to check your emails.

Thank you for taking this journey with me

I can’t quite describe how good it feels to have finally found the thing I know I want to do with all the skills and knowledge I’ve gained over the last couple years as a digital creator.

When I became physically disabled and could no longer show up for myself in ways that I used to be able to, it felt like my life was over. My ideas and desires always seemed to outpace my body—it felt like my ideas had nowhere to go.

The Whimsy Workshop isn’t just a place for tips and hacks, not for me, it’s where I get to share the overflow of all the passion my body can no longer carry on it’s own. It’s where I’ll get to cheer from the sidelines like a proud coach watching you win again and again and loving every moment of it!

I used to think that the saying, “Those who can’t do, teach.” was an insult but now I see that sometimes your body and your ambition stop can moving at the same speed, but that does not erase everything you’ve learned. It just makes you more precise with how and where you direct your time, energy and effort. I am someone who had no other choice but to get real smart about how I used my spoons everyday. And because of that I have discovered systems that allow me to focus on creativity when I need to and still have some where to share my work when it’s time.

To everyone who has shown interest in my dream, thank you so much! It really means the world to me!

As someone who has lived the biggest and best versions of myself, my greatest joy is other people finding out it’s possible for them too. And I’m so honored that you would entrust me to be a small part of your story.

If you’ve read this far and have about two minutes, I made this short form so you can tell me what you’d want from a space like this. Your answers will help me build The Whimsy Workshop with real creatives like you in mind!

Start Survey

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

Let me tell you something you already know. If you post more, you’ll get more engagement—you might even go viral. But then you’ll have to do it again tomorrow, and again the day after that. And sooner than you realize, you’ll have less time to create the very thing you’re creating content to share.

The trade-off of consistent content is often inconsistent art. But the social media gurus rarely ask what consistency costs your art, your attention, your time, and, if you’re anything like me, your body.

And perhaps, what’s most frustrating is that the advice you’ve been following is not designed for non-service creatives. You don’t have a funnel. You have a new romance book, a painting that took you three months to finish, a love for crocheting, and patterns to share.

You may even be a thought leader seeking a platform and community to share your ideas. You’ve been trying to adapt online marketing tips, tricks, and hacks from someone holding a tiny mic, assuming that you are selling a service, and often that you have a team helping you behind the scenes. And when those methods do not work for your creative practice, you feel like you’re failing.

When the value of what you create lives in art, entertainment, curation, storytelling, commentary, and writing, you don’t have the same ‘pain points’ to solve as a coach or consultant. Sure, that reader definitely wishes their new favorite fictional boyfriend was real, but that’s not exactly a funnel you can build.

Posting more makes what you do visible, but that visibility is always subject to the cycles of trends that never stop. So what happens to your body of work when you can’t compete with the demands of the algorithm? What happens if your body or your time can’t keep up with the latest trends?

As someone who’s been chronically ill since I was a child and now also disabled as an adult, I have still been able to build a creative online presence and business as a full-time content creator, and I didn’t do it by listening to the get-rich-quick MLM courses. I didn’t do it by focusing on vanity metrics like followers.

Creatives overemphasize growth because it seems like the more obvious way to stabilize their creative practice. But the more people discover you, the more you have to explain what it is that you create and why they should care.

I am not arguing that growth is bad, but I am telling you that if the only way your target audience understands you is by watching you explain yourself again and again, you will have to introduce yourself every day—you will become a content machine—a living, breathing, exhausted funnel. This is exactly what leads to burnout.

Even after nearly six years, I still don’t have all the answers, but I know there are resources that would have made my journey a lot less confusing along the way.

So that’s what I’ve created. The Whimsy Workshop is not another hub of hacks or a rusty tin of tips. You will not find quick monetization rituals or viral manifestations in our community.

Back then and even now, more “what to do” content is not what I need—there’s plenty of available online. What I needed was a way to take my multi-passions and give them enough shape that other people could understand them without me having to explain myself from scratch every day. I needed to be able to take long breaks from social media when my body needed care and rest, and come back to an audience that not only remembered me but was excited to see what my new season of creation would bring them.

That is why I built The Whimsy Workshop.

This is for the writers, artists, and makers. For the commentators, crafters, yappers, and recovering perfectionists. The Whimsy Workshop is built for multipassionate people who are tired of being told to shrink themselves into a single niche.

People like us are not always trying to be hired. We are trying to be understood, remembered, read, watched, collected, supported, quoted, recommended, subscribed to, bought from, and returned to.

We are not building online service businesses with a little bit of art sprinkled on top.

We are in the business of bringing art to the world and building bodies of work that create more space, time, and support for our future art to exist—a living body of work that exists as evidence that we all belong.

If you are ready to move away from hustle culture, if you miss the feeling of excitement to share what you’ve created, if you know there’s something you want to make, but you don’t have the time or capacity to compete with trends and algorithms, then you are in the right place.

You don’t have to flatten your magic into a niche and turn yourself into a one-person production team if what you want from your art is to be experienced and supported.

So welcome to the side of the internet where we are not becoming more visible at any cost—where we build a little bit slower but more deeply with our audience—where we lead with care for the artist as much as we hype the art. Because you’re right: marketing your art should not be harder than creating it.

Welcome to The Whimsy Workshop, where creatives learn how to share their work without losing their magic. I am launching in 7 days, be sure to subscribe so you can be added to the waitlist.

Follow along on Instagram if you want to watch me build and launch this new whimsical place for creatives just like us online!

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

In December of 2024, I found myself alone in my studio apartment creating a vision board with all of my New Year's desires. One of which was hiking, or what I called, frolicking with the trees outside.

I filled up my online shopping cart with all the gear I’d need and had multiple tabs open researching how to keep myself safe while trying to find the faerie circles deep in the national parks in California.

After finding all the safety tools that would give me a fighting chance against the ill intent of a man’s mind, I started looking into animal safety. I had seen videos of mountain lions, coyotes, and bears—and well, my first instinct is to pspspspspsps to any animal I think is cute, so I needed to know what to do and what not to do.

The safety instructions about bears are the ones I found most interesting, given that most women would indeed choose the furry little guy. I had no idea that there are different safety protocols depending on the kind of bear you come across.

If you happen to run into a brown bear and it tries to attack you, the best mode of defense is to lie on your stomach, guard your neck, and play dead. But if you’re ever approached by a black bear, you must do your best to appear bigger while backing away slowly to avoid being attacked.

I never did get a chance to see if this advice is true; in fact, I never got around to hiking. Mid January of 2025, I couldn’t even stand longer than 10 minutes at a time. My chronic illness had taken yet another downward turn, leaving me bedridden, depressed, and starting over with a baseline I knew I had no idea how to manage.

I emptied my online cart of hiking shoes, bug spray, and walking poles and used the resources I had to buy myself a rollator instead.

The temptation to feel embarrassed, like I had failed somehow, was so insistent. It constantly nagged at me. So I played dead.

I stopped getting out of bed. I stopped picking up the phone. I stopped, and the world went on.

I decided that my bear was brown, massive, and too big to fight back. I shrank into a version of me that not even I recognized.

Have you ever felt like that? Maybe not with disability or chronic illness, but maybe you had a vision for your creative life, and it just hasn’t gone the way you hoped it would?

I have definitely been there, hell, I am still here now, trying each day to figure it out. It felt like the more I played dead, the more I actually felt like I was slipping away. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could change the way I felt by shifting my perspective a bit.

What if the bear was a black bear? How would I have shown up for myself then?

That single consideration sparked something inside me—it made me realize that I wouldn’t have felt so disappointed if there weren’t still dreams inside me.

It made me realize that nothing in life is truly promised, and I could wake up tomorrow and lose another part of myself to chronic illness without warning.

When I thought about what I learned about the bears again, this time I saw something different. I could choose my hard. I could choose which bear I wanted to face. I could lie down and accept it, or I could get up and become the biggest, loudest, most raw version of myself.

I’ve never faced off with a big black bear in the woods, but I could only imagine that my first thought wouldn’t be how I looked to anyone else around me trying to survive that encounter.

It wouldn’t matter if my face looked funny or if my posture was awkward. I can’t imagine that I would care if the sounds I'm coming out of me made any sense. My only focus would be to keep as much distance between me and the void of hopelessness reaching its claws out at me.

A few weeks into February 2025, I started writing a serial about Black sapphic sirens living in an advanced underwater Kingdom akin to Black Panther (Marvel Studios 2017). I never made it to hiking; I have yet to wrap my tiny arms around the base of a redwood tree and reckon with the finite nature of my existence. But I did make it to the bottom of an ocean that I created in my mind. I remembered that even though some of my dreams became out of reach, I still had others to spare. I dared to dream again, but this time I didn’t care how it looked to others.

I was facing a bear. Something that appeared so large and without warning in my life that I had two choices: play dead or fight back.

One chapter turned into two, and that turned into me becoming an indie author. Since that setback, I have published two novellas, and I am currently working on a series that has multiple books in it.

If you’re reading this and life has taken more from you than you wanted to give, I want you to know that the fear, the pain, and the betrayal of hope is valid. You get to feel all those things. You get to be angry and wonder why.

But the one thing I would encourage you to never do is to view yourself from the vantage point of someone who has never had to look a bear in the eyes. Never view yourself from a safety net that you don’t have.

You can start again. You can find new dreams or realize that there are dreams you haven’t even dared to answer. If my bear hadn’t shown up, I’d probably be popping bugs off my legs, listening to a really good audiobook and taking in the scenery, and that would be great! But I have no regrets that I am now writing my own stories, creating fantastical worlds, and sharing my grief and joy with the characters I get to bring to life.

Now I get to tell stories and share my journey with people like you. The bear comes, and we don’t get to decide how or when. We only get to decide who will become when it shows up.

So, plant your feet firmly where you are, dig deep and find the dreams still fighting to surface inside you, and become the biggest, loudest, most raw version of you that you can be.

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

I think by now we have all had a villain era or five. Something in your life doesn’t go the way it should, and you rain down your vengeance upon the world by becoming a version of yourself that deserves the respect you weren’t given.

This new version of you dresses differently, speaks differently, and probably is currently mastering the art of a very sharp winged eyeliner.

I’ve been there. As a matter of fact, I almost dove face-first into another one just a couple of months ago, but then I found myself asking why hadn’t any of the other Villain Eras worked?

Shouldn’t I be hotter, meaner, and getting everything I want right now?

To be fair, I am a cutie patootie who runs a strict program when it comes to my boundaries, but what about everything else? Why don’t I have the life that feels good to me yet, not just one that looks like I’m a badass online?

In search of the answer, I went back to visit my many Villain Eras (thanks camera roll!). And what I found was that every time something had disappointed me, I tried to manage how my pain and stress looked to others by altering how I present myself to the world. If someone hurt or betrayed me, I dug my heels in to become a version of me that they would regret mishandling.

Every piece of self-improvement slowly became about something or someone outside of me. Each carefully thought-out behavior and curated article of clothing became an attempt to instruct others how to treat me.

But what about how I was treating myself?

I can’t tell you how close I was to repeating this pattern when I lost my job in December of 2025. The loop started but got interrupted by grief. Two years ago, my father died of cancer. The anniversary of his death in February of 2026 gave way to all of the latent losses that I had experienced, and that grief stripped me bare.

As crazy as it sounds, I am so glad it did. I don’t know if I would have ever realized that I was overfunctioning—in my life, in my relationships, in my creative passions.

Because that’s what a Villain Era is, or what it had become for me anyway—an overcompensation—just another way to ask when will I be good enough and what parts of me are actually worth love and support.

During my months of grief and depression, I found myself completely drained. I had given so much of myself so freely that there was nothing left for me. Truth be told, that extreme sense of burnout and emotional depletion made it impossible for me to even attempt to pretend I was feeling anything other than pain and loss.

Grief is a clarifying emotion. It has a distinct way of revealing the things we would most like to keep hidden from ourselves. And this time I could not hide my discontent from myself with another self-rebrand. No, I had to get uncomfortably clear on all the ways I was over-functioning in my life if I wanted to pick myself up from that dark place.

There’s a quote I love that I heard that says, Do not manage what needs to be eliminated.

The more I reflected, the more I realized that I was not a victim. I didn’t have to be reactionary. I could choose to be intentional instead. A Villain Era is managing the symptoms of not operating from a strong sense of self-value in life. A Value Era is the consistent and intentional process of eliminating everything that does not align with your sense of self-worth.

Value is self-worth in practice. And that does not have an aesthetic or wardrobe preference. It doesn’t require a snatched body and expensive self-care treatments. And I am in no way saying those things are bad. My point is that they are not substitutes for the inner work.

Instead of resenting those who lacked the capacity to reciprocate, I simply stopped pouring into those connections.

Instead of glowing up to make my previous employer regret laying me off, I simply decided I would never work for free again. I decided that my gifts and skills were worth being paid for.

Instead of overexplaining what I had already communicated, I simply stopped engaging.

In my own experience, a Villain Era is a warning to posture to others not to fuck with you. A Value Era is literally just deciding that you fuck with yourself HEAVY!

I have to say, I love it here. I think one of the biggest things that hinders us from really going for what we want in life is perceiving ourselves through the eyes of those who have hurt or disappointed us. When this is our default setting, we turn to coping mechanisms like Villain Eras.

Now, I am able to extend grace to those who could not meet my needs or match my depth and decide that I value myself too much to be misaligned with the one beautiful life that I get to experience.

With each let down, I invite myself to love myself a little harder, to be even more joyous and grateful. To be more open to bigger and better. Because a Value Era isn’t about shutting people out or cutting everyone off, it’s about being accountable to the version of you that you want to be, not who you think others will respect.

If you are a soft, fun, and whimsical girly or a bubbly person, you don’t need to change who you are when things don’t go your way. You just have to decide that who you are is enough and never let someone else decide your value for you.

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

Meet Divinity (she/they)

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

When I was a kid, my mom used Reese’s Pieces to potty train me. According to her, I got a single piece of candy for #1 and two pieces for #2.

“That’s the poopoo Mama!” I’d say holding my hand out for my peanut butter flavored chocolate reward. In no time, I was going to the bathroom routinely.

“That’s the poopoo Mama!” I’d repeat every day right before lunch when I had to have a chicken pot pie, or I would throw a fit—only this day she opened the freezer to discover there were no more chicken pot pies. Not even the grocery store had any left. Naturally, she bought the beef pot pie.

It looked the same from the outside, maybe a little less crispy and flaky around the edges because she didn’t have time to butter it up and toast it to perfection in the oven. She used the microwave instead.

So there I was, legs swinging in the high-chair, plastic fork in hand, ready to pop the top and fill my little belly. Only it was soggy, and so were my eyes, spilling over with tears.

“Why are you crying?” my mom asked.

“That’s the poopoo Mama!” I screamed, staring back at the smelly bowl of brown chunks and mush.

Apparently, I lost it and tossed the bowl when my mother insisted on eating it herself to show me that I could eat ‘shit’ because she would.

Even as a toddler, I knew when someone had cut corners to serve me a stinky bowl of poop.

I was today years old however, when I found out that the word of the year in 2025 was Slop. Yes, SLOP. In preparation for this post, I decided to dig a little deeper into what slop actually means and where the word came from.

The crazy thing is, the online Merriam-Webster dictionary states that “slop” is of unknown origin and is not datable back to Old English. But I’m sure you’d be happy to know that it has been used adjacently to words like foreskin and dung… yes, literal shit. The poopoo.

The noise that generative AI has crowded the online space with is so annoying and pervasive that we had to create a word for it.

Slop is defined as digital content of low quality that is usually produced in quantity by means of artificial intelligence—and even more broadly—a product of little or no value: rubbish.

I know moms do the best with what they have, but this is one of my mom’s favorite childhood stories to tell because, as she puts it, she was on the floor cackling because of the absolute look of disgust on my face.

You might be proud to hear that I have yet to master the art of fixing my face. With each new ‘development’ of generative AI, I am still definitely looking at the poopoo sideways.

My toddler-self would agree that no one should be forced to eat big brown chunks of smelly mush when they have known the bliss of crispy, flaky, buttery crust with hardy veggies and creamy chicken in a sizzling tin right out of the oven.

Who would want slop after that?

While the presence of AI feels larger than life, a lot of us feel the same way.

The fear-mongering tech gurus would have us believe that anyone who is not using generative AI is falling behind; people have become so sick and tired of being served the same shit that we created a whole word for it.

Slop is, after all, gathered and regurgitated information without story. The reason why it just doesn’t resonate with consciously creative human beings is because we are designed for story. And stories require authorship.

When we hear the word authorship, our minds might lead directly to books. As a writer myself, it’s also the first form of authorship that I think of, but here are some of the forms of authorship that all creatives will definitely recognize.

• Recording - music, albums, podcasts

• Choreography - dance sequences

• Drama - play, musicals, theatre

• Musical - writing lyrics, composing, producing

• Pictorial - painting, sculptures, photographs, designs, blueprints

• Audiovisual - videos, streaming series, digital content, films

• Literary - books, poems, scripts, and all other forms of literature.

Authorship is such an essential part of our society that we have entire divisions of law devoted to protecting original creative expressions.

We call these laws Copyrights.

Remember how I said human beings are designed for story—much like the one I told at the beginning of this observation? Now every time you think of AI slop, you’ll likely think of poopoo pot pies. This is how we are wired.

What we know without a doubt about the human race is that all cultures have told stories. As far back as 30,000 years ago, some of the earliest evidence of stories can be found in the cave drawings in Lascaux and Chavaux, France.

In the rich history of West Africa, Griots used instruments and songs to pass down their oral traditions and stories. This also requires high levels of skill and respect for the craft.

Even as early as 3250 BC, when writing is thought to have been invented, the Egyptians demonstrated this through their use of handwritten scripts and Hieroglyphs.

A lot of information we learn online about storytelling is packaged as a business device to convert viewers into buyers. And yes, this is an effective marketing method, but we never actually get into why it’s so effective.

It’s more than just the story itself. It’s the authorship behind it.

Hieroglyphs mean “sacred carvings”, which is a far cry from “slop”.

• Hieroglyphs required time, skill, and patience to create.

• Slop, in my opinion, is the plagiarized excrement of what other humans have already created.

In a parallel way, creative authorship as defined by copyright law encompasses the unique and original contribution of an author or creator in bringing a work into existence, distinct from mere compilation or arrangement of pre-existing materials.

The emphasis on protecting human-made art is so strict that even when someone tries to copyright AI-generated art, they can only register the parts they altered—like picking corn out of poop—it still isn’t edible. Slop.

Even our governing bodies agree that without authorship, there is no creation—there’s no story—no art.

With the rise of sameness running rampant online, creatives are looking for an edge sharp enough to cut through the noise.

Most social media gurus keep trying to solve this with volume and speed instead of value and empathy. These well-meaning pieces of advice are turning storytellers into information traders, and we are losing history under the strain of survival.

Creating in an environment where the only strategy is to outpace the machine or outsmart the algorithm, we all lose—and not just financially—we lose our confidence to the metrics, we lose ourselves to the doom-scroll, we lose our magic. We lose all whimsy.

It’s like the older we get, the more we lose authorship over our creativity under the pressure to perform, when engaging in curiosity and play is what we need the most.

That is where innovation and authenticity lives. That is what truly cuts through the noise.

Do you remember show and tell? I don’t even know if elementary schools have this for their kids anymore.

That single weekly activity when you would find the best thing you owned or even more daring, something you created, and bring it to class to show your peers and tell them why you thought it was cool.

I don’t know if my constant yapping online is a dead giveaway, but I loved show and tell.

It’s how I learned how to tell stories about the things I loved.

Even if some of the kids giggled or sighed unimpressed. I kept making things or finding little treasures in my house to bring to school because I knew that maybe someone would want to yap about it at recess and I’d make a new friend.

No matter what you call it, your show and tell existed well before AI.

Whether you traded Pokemon cards, practiced your theatre lines in the bathroom in secret with friends, or killed it like you knew you would at the talent show. You have always been the author of your own creativity.

Because in truth, there are no anti-AI artists, writers, or creatives.

There are creatives, writers, and artists, and then there are people who use AI to impersonate the life of someone who devoted their time and life to developing the skill and patience to narrate their lived human experience through art.

The purpose of art was never to be the fastest or to have the most output with the lowest effort. Those are capitalist values sold to us as a lottery for the systems we are forced to live within to survive.

Art is a narrative of our lived human experience and you are the author.

There is no need to overcomplicate things now. If you’re sick of ai infringing upon our creative spaces, it’s just time to start telling a better story. A human one.

Because sometimes the distance between who we are and the fulfillment of who we truly wish to become is a single, shaking step: the willingness to simply try.

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

Meet Divinity (she/they)

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

At some point in my creative career I realized that the milestone chasing and metrics were suffocating my love of creating and sharing my work. Wielding Whimsy was born out of my desire to bring back the joy I once felt being an artist in the making.

It’s best to think of this newsletter as an ongoing, living document where I explore what it means to be a multi-passionate human being and practicing the courage to be seen and show up without shrinking myself into a niche.

I hope to impart my findings as I move through each creative pursuit trying to answer the question: How do I create a life that feels good, not one that just looks good online.

Personal Essays

001 | What if I don’t want to be filthy rich with a million followers?

002 | Creative Authorship in the Age of AI Slop.

003 | You Don’t need another Villain Era, you need a Value Era.

004 | Choose The Bear (This Is Not About A Man)

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!

INSTAGRAM | THREADS | AUTHOR NEWSLETTER

The night before April 1, 2025 I stayed up late on Canva, staring into my blinding Mac screen recreating one of those graphics that authors share when they get a book deal. Honestly, it was giving forgery, and I couldn't have been more proud.

On the morning of April Fools, I posted my ‘book deal’ announcement thinking that it might get some likes and laughs, but to my surprise that single post accumulated more engagement from readers and fellow authors than any of the posts I’d made sharing my actual work combined.

I’ll never forget wondering what the funny feeling in my chest was. It was a joke—I was supposed to be laughing and gleeful that I’d fooled everyone with my clever little trick. But the feeling only moved into my stomach, and later, I was up all night unable to sleep and didn't know why. So I do what we all do: I grabbed my phone and I start to doom scroll and check my notifications.

By the late hour, the post had done really well, and I scrolled through the comments and couldn't help but wonder what about this post brought in the love and support of my peers and readers who didn't even know who I was?

And that's when I realized they weren't actually celebrating that the story got picked up. They were just celebrating that I had made the achievement. I don't even think a lot of them knew about my story. I would go as far to say many of them probably didn't even care.

The tears began to fall as the reality of what I couldn't name began to take shape. I had been consumed, applauded, celebrated even, but the thing I had spent my time and limited effort, creating went unnoticed.

I think this might be a common occurrence not just for me, but for many artists.

We put so much effort into making something we care about—something we feel passionate about only for that thing to go unnoticed until we're on a big enough platform when we have a big enough achievement that the art becomes valuable.

As if the achievement itself validates the thing that we've created, and without that validation it's not really worth engagement because we're stuck in a loop.

Even those who engaged with art must engage with popular art if they are to stay relevant so we fight like hell to be relevant and wonder why we have very little time left for creation after we finish feeding the marketing machine.

If I sound exhausted, it's because I am.

When I think about the seed that planted Wielding Whimsy, I think of this day.

I think about the night that I cried and realized that what I'm doing is not working and if it's not working for me, maybe it's not working for a lot of other people either.

One of my most viral posts on my author Substack is titled I went to therapy and now I have no ambition.

Nothing quite prepares you for realizing that most of what you wanted out of life was a trauma response. Even less so, no one prepares you for the frustration of going online and trying to figure out how to build what most people would just call a regular life.

Every time I pulled up a video on YouTube or scroll through TikTok and Instagram looking for advice on how I could share and maintain a fulfilling creative life, it was just a lot of advice on how to become a millionaire before 30, or how to make and sell digital products teaching others how to make and sell digital products.

I don’t have anything against creating tools for other creatives online. It’s something I do myself but since when did being an artist who shares content about their art become some sort of pyramid scheme?

What about the creative people who don't want to be filthy rich or gain millions of followers? What about those of us who are not online to learn a hundred different attention hi-jacking hooks to share what we’ve already created just to have our work and value seen?

I think the problem is that we don’t actually engage with art anymore. There’s no more love for the process and patience of becoming through what we create. We only value creativity when it has achieved something materially monumental; as if creating the work in and of itself isn’t the monument.

It's like we're living in a society where if not your goal isn’t to be the best, the richest, or the most popular then you just don't have enough drive or ambition. And I don't think that's true. Especially not coming from a person who is chronically ill, systemically oppressed, neurospicy, and just quite literally over it.

I think our relationship with the word ambition has been clouded by the collective demand for material gain and measurable success. A lot of what we call burnout probably has more to do with measuring our success by algorithmic metrics instead of defining ambition for ourselves.

As someone who had a tumultuous childhood, my ambition is to create a life of peace, and this may not even look like ambition from the outside because there aren’t any analytics that I could pull up online to show you that I'm creating peace in my life through my creative practice and having it supported.

But anyone who's has ever had to make the investment of therapy and going on a personal healing journey knows exactly how much work goes into creating peace after a life of chaos. It's ambitious, especially when all your nervous system is familiar with is stress and anxiety and overwhelm.

Stripping your life of urgency and creating something that feels safe and fun is very ambitious, especially in today's society. But, if you tell someone, my creative ambition is to live a cozy life of peace and stability. It just doesn’t sound as sexy as welcome to my ear of becoming a millionaire and getting 5 million followers.

Because think about it for a second… Our idea of ambition is what leads up to success, which is supposed to be the fulfillment of that ambition. Yet, If I asked you what success feels like in your body and not on your phone screen would you be able to answer the question?

I can.

I feel it every time I’m sitting at my desk crafting a character that moves me because they carry a part of my personal story.

I feel it when I wake up in the morning without a sense of urgency to produce anything right away.

I feel it when I get a single comment under something I had the courage to share that says, you made me feel seen.

Success is a private, intimate matter that we now treat like a public spectacle because our attention and creativity is being farmed by the platforms who have made it all but impossible for our creative lives to be witnessed without them.

At some point, we have stopped selling art and we are now selling status while pretending that we're better than the corporations we critique.

The artist with the most achievements inherently have the most algorithmic value, and therefore the most ability support in visibility and usually those artists and creators do not look like women like me.

But I think that we're reaching a breaking point, because this is not a model for creation that's going to work long-term. I would even argue that this demand for high achieving art versus inherent value art creates the perfect environment for generative AI to thrive.

When the speed, volume, and achievements matter more than the creation or the one who has created it, we step out of narrating the human experience through art and into a business where we proliferate art as a survival mechanism and nothing more.

If you were to ask me what I think the single most un-whimsical thing about being a creative person sharing their creative work online is I would say this is it.

But I am not hopeless, not anymore.

In the Spring of 2026 I picked up one of my old notebooks on a teary-eyed afternoon and read an old letter I’d written to myself. “I want to create a life that feels good, not just one that looks good on the outside to others.” I wrote on the page.

The feeling I felt after my little joke remembered what I truly wanted even when I’d forgotten. Even when I’d lost myself in the performance of fulfillment without actually feeling fulfilled.

I closed the notebook that afternoon and asked myself, how much of what I was currently pursuing was what I truly felt passionate about or desired out of my life. I had to be honest about who I was trying to become and who I wanted to impress.

I had lost sight of the 7 year old girl who read books with her flashlight under the covers and wrote her little tales under the warm light of her narrow walk in closet. She never wanted to be famous or filthy rich. She wanted to experienced—to be felt and seen for her passion.

I forgot that she’s still alive in me and her dreams are still there waiting to see if I will answer them.

She is ready, whimsical and waiting for me to wield her—to stop shrinking—to let go of what I’m supposed to want and let her have a voice.

And I know without a doubt if she could tell me anything right now, she’d tell me that the fulfillment I seek is in the becoming, not in the acknowledgements of anything or anyone around me.

She’d remind me of the joy in the process not just the applause at the end—that all of it is worth it—that it all has value.

And I’ll tell her that I’m ready to play again—to pick my whimsy up where I left it and wield it until I cut away everything that would dare minimize my joy or reduce my peace to nothing.

I’d tell her that I’m done fighting for a life I was told to chase and ready to create the one that only has to feel good to me—to us.

Wielding Whimsy
Helping you share your work without losing your magic.

Meet Divinity (she/they)

I’m an indie romance and fantasy author, a multi-passionate human, a professional yapper, and a self-proclaimed wielder of whimsy.

As someone living with chronic illness and disability, I built this space from my 5+ years of lived creative chaos as a full-time content creator, and learning how to be seen online without turning myself into a machine. Wielding Whimsy is where I turn my experience into thoughtful exploration and resources to help you find the courage to turn what you know into what you have the audacity to share before you feel ready and without abandoning the magic that made you want to create in the first place.

When I’m not writing, building systems, or talking myself into being seen debuting my latest hyper-fixation, you can find me with my face in a book, playing my Switch, doing cozy crafts, or rushing to the theater so I don’t miss the previews.

Subscribe if you have always known that you have the ideas, but you just don’t have the resources and courage to bring them to life yet. The world deserves to experience your magic and YOU deserve a life that feels good, not just one that looks good online. It’s time to let your whimsy shine!