The Work That Comes From Living

Redefining success on my own terms

For a long time, I measured success by whether someone else thought what I was doing mattered. If the work was recognized, if the business looked successful, if I reached some level that other people respected, then I felt like I had done something right. I didn’t question that very much when I was younger because those were the measures I had been given.

One of the moments that changed that happened with my father. I had built a business that, from the outside, looked very successful, and one day he announced to a room full of people that I had finally “made it” because I had given up my ideals. He thought he was complimenting me, but the words hit me like a sledgehammer. In that moment I saw very clearly that his idea of success had almost nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with what he thought success was supposed to look like and probably something to do with what he felt he had never accomplished in his own life.

I felt exposed and totally misunderstood, but it also brought a strange clarity I hadn’t had before. He named something I had been living without fully seeing—that I had built something successful by other people’s standards and still felt no closer to myself. In fact, I was embarrassed more than anything else. 

He had always told me that if I wanted to succeed as an artist, I needed to make what other people wanted. Go commercial. Let the market tell me what to create. I carried more of that thinking with me than I realized, even when I thought I was making my own choices. After hearing him, I began to see myself differently. I might not have changed things outwardly right away, but his comment stayed with me well into the following years of change. 

When I lost that business, I didn’t try to build another version of it. I moved in a completely different direction and became a coach and trainer. That work came directly out of my own experience of regaining my health and, in many ways, saving my own life. I knew what that kind of transformation had meant to me, and I wanted to help other people experience some of that for themselves. It mattered because it came from something I had actually lived and I knew I could make a difference for others dealing with the things I now had experience overcoming. 

Later, when I started painting again, I was doing it for myself, a way to heal after a serious car accident. I wasn’t trying to turn it into the next business or figure out how to make it marketable. I just needed to paint. Then people who knew me began telling me there was something in the work that affected them deeply, and that landed very differently from being told what I should make in order to succeed. They weren’t asking me to conform to someone else’s idea of what art should be. They were responding to something that was already there.

Eventually, illness and loss made the choice even clearer. I reached a point where I knew I couldn’t keep building my life around what looked right from the outside. If I was going to find my way back to myself, I had to give my time and energy to what I loved most, and that was when I devoted myself more fully to art. Not because I thought it was the smartest business move, but because it felt necessary to my life.

That was more than twenty years ago, and my idea of success has kept changing ever since. This past year changed it again in a much deeper way. After the floods in my studio and at home, I lost more than physical space and belongings. I also lost the picture I had built of what I thought my work was supposed to become. I had paths in mind, ideas about where my books, my art, my textiles, and everything else were going. For a while I assumed I would rebuild that vision when I had enough energy, but somewhere along the way I realized I didn’t really want to.

I don’t want to force my life back into a shape just because it looks productive or successful.

Success feels very different to me now. It has much more to do with how I’m living than with what I can point to at the end of the day and say, “I did that.” Sometimes that means picking up a paintbrush because I’m drawn to color, or reaching for cloth because I love the way it feels in my hands. I write when I need to hear myself more clearly, and other times because there’s something I want to share that feels worth saying. And then there are days when there’s nothing to make at all, and I’m learning that those days can still be full.

That shift shows up in the opportunities I’m willing to follow too. All kinds of things come across my desk now—people offering to promote my work, invitations to take part in projects, messages promising more readers, more visibility, more sales. A few years ago I probably would have looked at all of them more seriously because opportunity itself carried weight. Now I’m much quicker to ask whether I actually want what is being offered. If something feels overly promotional or disconnected from what matters to me, I delete it. If there’s a real conversation there, I can usually feel that too.

I’m not interested in doing business simply because that’s how business is usually done. I want the work I put into the world to come from an honest desire to share something, create something meaningful, or offer something I truly believe may matter to another person. That is a very different filter than asking whether something might make me more visible.

That shift has changed the way I see my work too. I used to think in separate categories. There was the painting, the writing, the textiles, the books, the workshops, the conversations. I knew they were connected, but I still treated them like separate things I needed to develop or make successful. I don’t really see them that way anymore. They all come out of the same life.

If I’m moved to paint, that’s where I go. If words are there, I write. If I want cloth in my hands, I make something. If a conversation feels important, I follow it. I’m not trying to make every part of my work become something bigger than what it is in the moment. The work feels less like something I’m building outside of myself and more like an expression of what I’m actually living.

There are still things I want to create, and I still care about the books, the art, the textiles, the people I reach, and the conversations that come from all of it. Money and recognition still matter, but they no longer get to decide whether my work has value.

What matters most now is whether I actually want to give my life to what I’m doing. That has become my measure of success—not working harder or producing more, but living more fully and letting my work grow from there.

Continue the thread

Success looks very different to me now. I’m less interested in building a life around the work and more interested in letting the work grow out of the life I’m actually living.

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