This post is for you if you admonish yourself for being behind in your career, for hitting your stride late, for belatedly working out the professional skills you “should” have developed years ago. Or if you’re pivoting in how you work.
Do not compare yourself to the creatives who are successful in their 20s and 30s. Do not compare yourself to anyone, in fact.
Your practice is your practice. It isn’t going to look like anyone else’s.
You may have had early career success. But maybe now you are evolving away from your earlier work.
The brilliance and luminosity of what we make in our youth is different to what we produce later. I’m always amazed by powerful young creators—I don’t want to undermine their contribution. But that’s not the wisdom of my path. My path is about going deeper as we get older, and loving that process. I don’t want to essentialise age groups or set them against each other, but I do want to make the case for experience.
With time, you gain maturity and voice. You are less pliant, less able to accommodate others, and more in touch with your own impulses. You work idiosyncratically, but you’re learning to love what you make, to feel grateful for the process, and to cherish what you produce. You’re drawn to experiences and artworks that light you up. Sometimes you find yourself doing what you’ve always wanted to do. Latent dreams may emerge that you once felt inhibited by.
I want to celebrate you for reaching this moment. How magnificent, what a great place to be. I don’t really care how circuitous your route has been, how many double-backs or hairpin bends. That freedom and autonomy you’re generating is gold.
And you were never wasting your time. You were never procrastinating. You were synthesising. You were feeling, processing, witnessing.
There is real value in making work after a process of healing. I don’t know how inspiration works exactly, but I do know this: we live, we learn, and then we make. If you were living, learning, and healing, that is a gift to your audience. What they see and feel when they encounter your work carries that healing—even in ways too subtle to identify.
So healing is a career move. It strengthens the quality of the work. It builds your confidence and creative autonomy. It allows you to take stock, to ask questions, to see who you are meant to be, how you are meant to work, and what you are meant to do. Healing is a career decision.
I write this from the depths of my own healing journey. I can cheerlead you because I am learning to cheerlead myself. These words are for me, too.
And in my mentoring work, I love supporting people who are pivoting, growing their skills, or reframing how they see themselves and their practice. Healing is always part of that. Sometimes we talk about it directly; sometimes it works in the background. Either way, I try to tune in to what you really want to do, and to find practical actions that help you recognise where you are, where you are going, and to feel supported as you go.
I’d love to hear if this resonates for you.
PS Can you let me know your thoughts on my images that go with these posts? I’ve been drawn recently to share images I’ve taken when I’ve been thinking and feeling. But then I had an idea to use artwork for my posts. Below was my second choice for this. Do you prefer snaps, or art?
