Creating Without Expecting Growth

Letting go of follower counts and other KPIs.

When we make growth the ultimate goal, the result becomes paramount, and the process that should be the heart of our creative journey loses its significance. When the drive for creation is coupled with the pressure to grow, those small, delicate whispers of creative ideas that come to us in moments of quiet introspection often get squashed.

I’ve thought a lot about goodbyes this year. You may have caught wind that after a 24-year run, this season will be the last one for fashion brand Mara Hoffman. Another bites the dust, I thought. In a moving note to her fans and customers, Hoffman shared this:

“Maybe we all need to see someone make this choice. To show us that endings of cycles are also beautiful and that there is so much grace to be had when we lovingly LET GO when it is time. When we can trust in a new version that is forming even when we cannot see it yet. When we actively choose something else, something embedded in love, healing and Truth as opposed to staying put in something that has run its course. I take solace in knowing that if I move in the direction of what is true to me it will help inspire others to do the same for themselves.

My work is far from done. I am looking forward to resting for a moment and then welcoming beautiful new invitations into my life.”

It is important to witness things coming to an end. We like to gloss over this inevitable part of the cycle of things because we fear we’ll catch a fragment of our own reflection from those in the throes of evolution. I witnessed this in the year I went through a divorce and also when I decided to step away from Wit & Delight for a while. 

We love beginnings. Take new love, for example. We obsess over the meet-cute, courtship, and wedding but prefer to end at “happily ever after” before the love transforms into something entirely different. The same goes for new ventures, start-ups, and shiny new apps. This sensitivity to subtle shifts in the complexities of love and affection is something I have learned to attend to. It’s breathtaking how quickly a marriage can unravel, and so I apply a level of care and attention to mine today because what happens after the chemicals of new love wear off requires an entirely different set of skills. 

I hadn’t realized the same care would be required for my creative work. Before Wit & Delight, writing and designing were practices I could lose myself in—ones where I felt most myself, the outlets that sustained me during the darkest times in my life. Through those dark transition periods, I poured all my energy into what would eventually be named Wit & Delight. Through that pain, something valuable was alchemized and recognized by others. 

The Evolution of My Creative Practice

I realized after it was too late that I had made my creative practice the sole source of my income. I signed over my livelihood (and the livelihood of others) to “grow” Wit & Delight using the skills that both excited and healed me, because that’s what one does with one’s “gifts,” right? I remember feeling absolutely terrified and trapped with no way out. I outsourced creative work because I felt uninspired and scared, and of course, one can always tell when someone's heart isn’t in it anymore. 

In recent conversations with my therapist, we got to the heart of “why” my creative endeavors became the source of such angst. We identified two reasons why this happened. 1) They had become deeply connected to my self-worth. 2) Anyone could comment on them, devalue them, or publicly shame them. The latter is part of life. The former showed me I didn’t have a solid foundation of self. 

I was creating for others to sustain a business that supported others and it was a rock and a hard place I couldn’t squirm out of. There was no room built for creative exploration, and the heart of the brand slowly faded. That is why closing the chapter on Wit & Delight as it formerly operated had to happen the way that it did. When you’ve lost yourself, you can’t just suddenly find yourself—you have to get out there and search. 

This search brought me full circle, back to the practices I used to love but no loathed. It felt like reopening my wounds daily, but I knew it was the way back. I started searching for myself through writing and designing. The expectation to turn this process of searching into a growing business was so ingrained in my mind that I kept finding myself burnt out anytime I made headway. 

Having sat in this period of start/stop stagnation for 12 months, I now realize there is more than one way to “grow” the thing I love so dearly. I will do things differently this time— in fact, I have to remind myself that I already am doing them differently. As the seedlings I’m planting for future growth start to sprout, I’m tending to them in a very different way this time around. Today, I want to talk about what I’ve learned from this cycle of loving, loathing, and rediscovering my relationship with my creative practice.