welcome to the creative club
Seven years ago, I found my freedom in Siberia. I’m in a third-class rail car because, according to a guidebook, it is where real Russia is experienced. Right now, real Russia looks like a man with a yellow armpit-stained T-shirt punching the steel car while cradling a bottle of vodka. Thanks to my New York City upbringing, this scene doesn’t faze me.
A young Korean woman hurries toward me, hands tightly clasped, and takes a nearby seat. “Are we okay?” she whispers. “Is this man dangerous?”
I soften my gaze. “It’s going to be okay. Just avoid eye contact. He’ll sleep it off soon enough. You can sit with me if it makes you more comfortable.”
I look out the window into the blurred white landscape, avoiding the socks swaying on the rail of a bunk bed and the man clipping his toenails beneath them.
She nods, jaw clenched, and walks back to her bed.
I’m traveling on one of many trains I take across China, Mongolia, and Russia over four weeks. I left the shell of a relationship, dark Copenhagen, and the six-figure creative director and partner job I was fired from behind. I receive severance pay, so technically, I shouldn’t be out of the country, which means no selfies. I don’t know how my soon-to-be-official ex and I will sell our apartment. But I know this: I had to leave. I was caught in a jail cell I put myself in. This Trans-Siberian rail trip was my handmade Get Out of Jail Free card.
It is liberating. I stop scratching the side of my right thumb until it is pink. I fall asleep without Advil PM. I no longer have to pause, breathe deeply, and brace myself before unlocking the door to our apartment. I don’t have to steady myself on the banister every morning as I climb to a workplace I don’t feel comfortable or right in.
When I was fired from my job as creative director, fear lost its chokehold on me. I stopped and saw that every aspect of my life, from my relationship to my career, looked like the inside of a toilet bowl after a night drinking tequila from a bottle with a little hat. I was forced to let go of my tight grip on life, and instead of drowning, I float.
Now, I stare at clouds outside a dusty window on a train hurtling through Siberia. This drunk, vashe zdorov’ye shouting, knuckle-bleeding Russian man is my beautiful white flag. It’s here, in this metal dormitory, among the clink of bottles, smoked fish, and sour perspiration, that I realize I’m creatively directing my life. Somewhere, in my bones and the enamel of my teeth, in the most solid parts of me, I know I am going to be okay.
I find God while eating sweet chili Cup of Noodles outside a yurt. One evening, in the Gobi Desert, a retired drama teacher based in Thailand but originally from Australia points to star nurseries in the Orion belt and tells me the word for sky in Mongolian, tengri, also means God. Staring at an endless velvet sky pin pricked with starlight, I understand why.
I don’t eat mutton, so yet another Cup of Noodles warms my thighs. I dig my shoes into the sand, nod at the camel to my left, and feel the goose bumps of freedom. I created this experience. I brought myself here, and I am not alone in it. Wild dogs yelp as if on cue. Despite the shiver in my spine, I feel stronger and more alive than I’ve felt in years. Somehow, I forgot how damn powerful and creative I am. This forgetting kept me strapped in the passenger seat of a rusty Buick—not daring to ask “Are we there yet?” Waiting to arrive at that place where life feels safe, fulfilling, and free.
I used to think life was happening to me.
I accepted what life threw at me, usually with a gapped-tooth smile. As a nomadic only child cycling through eight different schools, I learned to squeeze into any space. I never knew I had a say in my life’s design. After all, I was just a kid. As I grew, I made the best of it but became disconnected, stumbling in the dark for the light switch. I lived on autopilot, informed by inherited stories and beliefs, surviving on chaos and Cheerios and sophisticated childhood programming because that’s what I knew. I didn’t know there was another way.
Until things started to break and the cracks helped me see.
It started when I blew up my marriage to escape, ran for cover into an unhealthy rebound relationship, fell head first into building a creative agency, got lost in the glow of parties and late-night smoke, and luckily stumbled into the office of an amazing therapist. Getting fired was the final break in a series of crashes. It made the growing pile of unhappiness I swept under the rug impossible to ignore. I was thrown through the windshield. Sitting among the shards, I was forced to take a good, hard look at myself and my life. Nothing felt right.
On my four-week solo Trans-Siberian rail ride, I not only found but created myself and my life again. The active, conscious choice to leave and follow a bucket list desire, to take a risk, stick out my tongue, and give fear the middle finger was my first act as the creative director of my life. Not bad, right? I was a passenger on the train, but I was no longer willing to take that seat in life. No more running, no more moving, and no more hiding. No more knee-jerk reactivity, or following someone’s script, or activating cruise control. I started applying creativity to design my life.
Creativity is an act, a communion, an awakening. It’s a way of being with and in the world. Activating your Creative Club card is your choice. But if you do it, you reclaim agency, design your experience, and trust something beyond yourself. Whether you call it the universe, the G-O-D, the source, or the OG creator, recognize you are in a process of cocreation. There is no such thing as a lone genius. I might have bought the ticket, but the universe got tired of watching my reruns and shoved me out of a draining job so I could take stock and choose how I wanted to direct the next scene.
Let’s have a little heart-to-heart
Hopefully, you won’t need dramatic life events, from divorce to being fired, to remind you to choose what you want to do with your one precious life—and creatively direct it. Studies show that wisdom is developed by coping with and overcoming adversity. This includes intellectual humility, open-mindedness, understanding the multiple ways in which situations may unfold, and empathy.1 Now, you don’t need adversity to claim your creativity, because it lives within you. But if you have been through some shit, know it’s been strengthening your inner Yoda and preparing you to direct what’s next.
This book is an urgent nudge to stand in your creative power and design a life dripping with meaning without deferring happiness as you create it. Because if you don’t, you’ll be following someone else’s pattern, and there’s nothing more soul-crushing than outsourcing your creative agency. We all have a hidden expiration date, so you have one shot at this. This book is whispering—okay, maybe heckling—“Enter stage left.”
You won’t be creating alone.
I am not an expert, a famous person, or a guru. I am just one woman who went through a beautiful and terrifying full-flavor life hoping to remind you of your innate creativity. I’m right here with you, practicing, stumbling, and relearning while living the juiciest, sweetest version of life I can imagine. It’s more Six Flags than a walk in the park. I’m often between two places: arms waving wildly in the air or holding my breath, eyes squeezed shut.
Everything you go through, the bruises and the beauty marks, gives you exactly what you need to serve the world in the way only you can. Creativity is alchemic. It is turning lead into gold, or shit into fertilizer to grow pink peonies. As a recovering creative nomad who needed to reinvent myself over and over again, I have been gifted with the unique ability to combine imagination with action to create new realities. Now, I apply it in my work as a creative midwife for visionary executives, founders, and creatives to bring their brands, businesses, art, and dreams to life. Together, we make shift happen. Creativity is the art of transformation, taking “no-thing,” an abstract idea, and turning it into “some-thing,” whether a product, poem, book, or business plan.
I worked for over a decade in creative agencies. I’ve built a creative studio, teams, and brands, won numerous awards, and judged award competitions. Somewhere along the line, I hit a ceiling and broke through it to build my own business, Kollektiv Studio. It was time to channel my creativity into building my own dream. After being called to the adventure of coaching, I deepened my art of transformation. I learned inner shifts create outer transformation. Because once you’ve changed, everything changes, and the most creative act is designing your experience of life.
This book is an invitation to make life your biggest art project.
You might have felt the call for change for a while now, that incessant tug on your inner sleeve. Thoughts of what you could create visit you at night as soon as your head hits the pillow. You might be on the fence or the cliff’s edge in need of a guiding cheerleader. Maybe you’ve achieved success and are wondering “Is this it?” or you’re tired of building someone else’s dream and feel ready-not-ready to leap, try, and create.
You might feel lonely, stuck, or deeply aware of what you are capable of, but something is getting in your way. Maybe you downsized your bigness to fit in, play it safe, and not rock the boat, slowly and imperceptibly disconnecting from your creativity, power, and agency as routine and responsibility overshadowed risk and awe. Most importantly, you’re ready to do something about it. If any of this sounds like you, welcome. You are in the right place.
I am inviting you to reclaim what has always been yours, fling open the doors of what was once considered an exclusive club, and sit in the plush creative director’s chair sipping on a French 75 champagne cocktail, Japanese single malt whiskey, or virgin piña colada, whatever floats your boat. You get to choose.
As you move through the book, you’ll experience subtle shifts until suddenly, everything’s changed. My life experiences and lessons lead the way, and poetic pit stops give you a different view of the creative process. This anti-how-to guide is packed with neuroscience research, creative coaching talks, and applicable fieldwork. At the end of our journey together, your life will become your biggest art project yet.
You already have everything you need, which is good, because only you can create this art project. I don’t have the answers. You do. I’m simply guiding you to them.
So, let’s do it.
Take a deep breath, trust yourself, and buckle up.
Your journey to living creatively starts here.
