Letting Go of One Creative Season to Make Room for the Next
There are seasons of life that end with a clean, satisfying click — a chapter closed, a drawer shut, a sense of completion.
And then there are the seasons that end the way mine did in Indiana: with cardboard boxes, a lump in my throat, and a Goodwill parking lot full of things I wasn’t ready to let go of.
When Brian’s job disappeared, the ground dropped out from under us. One Friday we were settled, building a life in three little booth spaces and a studio space inside the Habitat for Humanity ReStore… and the next week I was packing up treasures I’d spent years curating. Some went home with shoppers. Too many went to charity. And some just went into boxes marked “Later” even though I already knew that “later” would look nothing like “before.”
Leaving that ReStore studio was harder than I expected. They’d carved out a little creative nest for me between the aisles of donated sinks and secondhand furniture. I’d gotten to know everyone — the manager, her family, the staff and volunteers. Those people mattered to me. They still do.
Same with the small locally owned antique malls where I rented booth space. When you work with the owners directly, you’re not just a vendor, you’re part of the ecosystem. You check in, you troubleshoot, you jump in to help at the register, you celebrate their good weeks, you feel the bad ones. Packing those booths up wasn’t just labor. It was goodbye.
What I didn’t realize back then was that I wasn’t just packing up my business.
I was packing up where I thought my creative life was headed.
For years I believed the best version of my creativity was the one that involved paint under my fingernails and a camera pointed at whatever I was making. And I loved the making, truly. Creating feeds my soul. I can’t walk across a parking lot without noticing a weed blooming through cracked concrete and wondering how to share my special find.
But somewhere along the way, creating became tangled with documenting.
If you’ve ever tried to glue something delicate while keeping your phone clean, the lighting right, and your head out of the shot, you know exactly how fast joy can evaporate. And editing? Editing two hours of footage to pull out the twenty seconds that make sense… that’s not creativity. That’s logistics.
The part of creating that soothes my soul is eaten up by stepping out of the meditation to adjust the camera angle or check lighting.
There are people who greet the morning by drifting toward their craft table, coffee in hand, fingers already itching to make something. My peace has always been in front of a keyboard, checking analytics, writing stories, sorting ideas, translating chaos into clarity. That’s where my shoulders drop and my mind clicks into place.
I used to feel guilty about that.
As if being “more talented behind the keyboard than behind the paintbrush” meant I was somehow failing the very community I loved.
But a funny thing happens when life forces you to carry everything you own across the country: you start to learn which pieces of yourself are portable.
I’ve walked away from my creative communities in Wyoming, then Indiana, then Houston. Not because I wanted to, but because life demanded it. Each time, I lost the local connections but kept something else: the ability to help creative business owners understand their numbers, their systems, their opportunities. Even when I worked at a creative products company, what lit me up wasn’t teaching someone where to put their paintbrush… it was helping them build their business.
That’s the part of me that travels well. That’s the part that still feels like home.
Somewhere in all this moving, my body started sending a quiet message I didn’t want to hear. Not a crisis, not a story I want to center this post on, just a steady white flag reminding me that time is finite, energy is finite, and the years with my son under this roof are even more finite than I thought.
This past summer, our first back in Virginia, we had the freedom to explore, to make memories, to run wild. And instead, I spent too many days in bed with a migraine, watching time slip past while Red occupied himself with screens.
I don’t want the last four years with him in our home to disappear that way.
I don’t want the next version of my work to demand more of me than I can give.
I want a work life that fits in a backpack: freedom, simplicity, flexibility, relief. I want fewer boxes to haul. Less clutter pushing up against my anxiety. More space for writing, for helping fellow business owners, for building tools that support creativity instead of swallowing it whole.
And here’s the truth I haven’t said out loud until now:
I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up… but this isn’t it.
What I do know is that I’m not disappearing. I’m not stepping away from the creative world. I’m not saying goodbye.
I’m making room. Room for the part of me that notices weeds blooming through concrete. Room for the part of me that loves small business owners and wants them to succeed. Room for clarity instead of clutter. Room for work that I can carry lightly on my laptop, in my writing, in the ways I show up for you.
Clearing out my booth’s inventory is part of that. Letting go of the physical version of my business made me finally see the intellectual version of it — the part I’ve carried from state to state without even realizing it.
And here’s the part I didn’t see coming: when we moved to Virginia, I caught myself wondering if I should start over again. Should I find a new booth, build a new creative home, begin the whole cycle one more time. I even started making a list of what it would take: how to choose the right mall, how to calculate whether a space could actually make money, how to set up inventory systems, how to make it all sustainable.
And then it hit me.
I’ve done this. Not once, but over and over again. I’ve learned these lessons the hard way. Every time, I learned something that stayed with me even when the booths didn’t.
So instead of opening another space… I wrote it all down. Every question I ask. Every number I run. Every mistake I don’t want you to have to repeat.
That’s how the book came to be. Not as a goodbye to the booth world, but as a way to give you the clarity I wish I’d had when I was restarting my business for the third (or fourth) time. It’s the manual I would hand to anyone dreaming of their own retail space and no idea where to begin.
I wrote it for the small business dreamers that I love. I wrote it because I finally understood that what I carry might be useful to someone else. And, I wrote it for the people who build beauty with their hands and dream of sharing it with others.
Finishing my book, and sharing it with you, is part of that. Letting go of the version of this business that required bins and boxes and booth resets is part of that.
If any part of my story resonates with where you are in your own creative life or business, you can find the book here: How To Start A Booth
It’s a practical guide shaped by all the starts, stops, and restarts I’ve lived through — and I hope it makes your path a little clearer, too.
And I hope you’ll stay with me as this next chapter unfolds, unsure as it may be.
If you’re here for creativity, for storytelling, for the behind-the-scenes truth of what it really looks like to build and rebuild a creative life and business then you’re already part of where I’m going.
I’m still here. Just a little lighter. Just a little freer. And, for the first time in a long time, hopeful about the space that’s opening up.