Lose yourself in a good way

Published 13 days ago • 2 min read

Dear Reader,

There’s something I’ve been noticing—in myself, in my clients, in my friends. And it’s not exactly new.

It’s a pull.

Back to creativity.

Back to making things just to make them.

Maybe it’s a response to the way so much of our creativity has been swept into content creation—into Substacks, newsletters, and social media posts. When everything becomes a performance or a product, our energy can start to fray. That homemade card you made for a friend, the photo you took at a family gathering, the poem or song or recipe you were just playing with—when it starts to feel like a product, your energy shifts. Your joy can get hijacked. Your nervous system tightens.

Neuroscience has a word for this: self-referential processing. The more we monitor and evaluate ourselves (especially under imagined scrutiny), the more we train our brain to circle into rumination, ego-construction, and even low mood. That’s why when you stop thinking about yourself making the thing—and simply be with it—your energy returns. You lose yourself in a good way.

That’s also what Glen Phillips and I talk about on the podcast this week. You probably know Glen from Toad the Wet Sprocket, but what you’ll hear in this conversation is a musician who has reclaimed music not as commodity, but as spiritual practice. We talk about creativity, ambivalence, community singing, and how healing it can be to make things for no other reason than to offer beauty, to connect, to feel alive.

As Glen says, humans have sung at births, at deaths, at rituals and rites of passage for thousands of years. Singing together is not just performance—it’s how we be human.

This whole month on the podcast, I’m exploring creativity from different angles:

Last week, I recorded a live session with a blocked writer who realized her creative freeze had everything to do with her shifting identity as the mother of a growing son.

This week—Glen Phillips on the Wise Effort Show, the trap of measuring your worth by metrics, and what it means to become the song instead of trying to own it.

Music as a Spiritual Practice with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s Glen Phillips

Next week, I’ll be talking with poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, whose latest book was written in the wake of her son’s death by suicide. Her poems are raw, real, and an example of creative practice as grief alchemy.

Wherever you are in your own creative life—blocked, blooming, hiding, or just beginning—I hope these episodes help you feel a little less alone, and maybe nudge you back into making something, just for the sake of making.

xo,
Diana

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