On Creatively Shaping a Life

or an origin story if you will?

Jun 25, 2025

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Dear Reader,

I’ve been speaking about the healing power of the creative force/the transformative power of words and holding workshops in support of the voice and craft of others for years.

When I started forging this work into a praxis to be shared, there wasn’t really anyone I could think of in this field who did it exactly as I had. There were a kaleidoscope of references, but no exact blueprints that occupied the space in fullness. There were some niche art book authors, the one off book from writers I admired, a speech here, a class there. Some focused solely on writing and others who focused on visual art. The fusion of the two? No one that I could think of. A myriad of creative thinkers and ideologies combined to occupy the space I was choosing to embody that I didn't see anyone filling but me. I made the decision to be the expression I wanted to exist in the world.

I first made the commitment to dedicate myself to the lineage of this shared mission because I lived it. I brought myself back to life with my imagination- with my urgent words and my steady hands cutting, painting, gluing onto paper- time and again. When I named my workshop Written into Being, it wasn’t a catchy slogan. It was autobiography. It was guiding force. It was my center.

The day I committed to doing this work in public, not just as a creative arts practitioner facilitating workshops in grade schools, universities and museums but as a creative philosopher you could say, I was in the center of emergence from a dark night of the soul.

At the time, I had just moved back in with my mom (to a 1 bedroom apartment in the Bronx) after an attempted west coast move went south. I took a risk that didn’t work out, and as a result was forced to rebuild my life from scratch.

I felt so lost.

I was asking, “Who am I when everything I made for myself is gone?”

I no longer had my artsy Bed Stuy apartment, equipped with with exposed brick, central air AND a dishwasher (I literally made it according to NYC standards IYKYK lol, but I couldn’t recognize that at the time, still full of my own personal ambitions).

That apartment was filled with fellow artist/organizer roommates I collaborated and curated shows, film screenings and poetry readings with (RIP #hummingbirdhouse), where I hosted creative friends from out of town, had jam sessions late into the night and family meals. It had walls covered with art and prisms in the windows. After I left, the hummingbird house scattered across the state and country. Relationships changed. As a result, that vibrant ecosystem of brilliant artists working together to create something greater than each of them as individuals also took new shapes as well.

With all of that gone, having to humble myself by moving into a place that had no room for me (literally and spiritually) until I could get back on my feet, I was forced to ask who I was then, with no embellishments.

I had given away or put most of my possessions into storage. I had no room. I barely had any clothing left that I felt represented who I was in the moment or funds/space to rebuild my closet. That detail might seem trivial to some, but I don’t see fashion in the way most probably do. Perhaps one day I will write more about my ideology as it pertains to adornment. It isn’t superficial consumerism to me. I consider it an extension of language. A spiritual tool. A way of making manifest the inner reality. It’s deeply embedded in my confidence. In the way I command the day.

Without my ability to dress how I wanted to or nest in a home of my creation, I fell into the deepest depression I had experienced in my adult life. I went into seclusion. I was feral. Unmade. Stripped of all my armor, a too soft skin now exposed. This question continued to rise up from me-

Who am I?

Is my validity as an artist making a way for herself contingent upon:

how I adorn myself
the space I live in
who I live with and how we create together
what I’m making for the world
who is hiring me

Or is there something more?

From that collapsed place, started small shifts so quiet they could be mistaken for stillness. I journaled almost daily. Aggressively. At times, stray lines on scraps of paper. At times, 10 pages in one sitting. I poured all my angst onto the page. These questions I had about validity, identity, belonging. These fears I had about being an impostor, my best days being behind me. Ending up back where I started with nothing to show for the journey I took.

I made vision boards. I built altars.

I resuscitated myself from collapse.

And then, like magic, the depression eased its grasp a bit and the art returned. The poems found me again. I started collaging. I made zines. I started having dreams of possibility again. I started thinking about love again. And mortality. And the possibility of my “one wild and precious life.” This path I developed for myself took shape again, and I felt confident in walking it.

That’s when I started sharing my journey online in a new way. Writing public notes to myself on the potential for creativity to shape a life. How it had shaped mine. On the importance of trusting in the seasons as they shift our output. On being a faithful steward of this gift I believe we have all been given. From that place, I developed my Written into Being workshop with the intention that it would reverse engineer everything I did for myself in that time and hold the same safe and transformative space for someone else.

I didn’t see anyone else saying what I was saying online and the resonance was immediate. I knew I had stumbled into something special. The path was clear. I was like wow this is a wide open space with barely anyone on it. No one I can see is doing this. In my mind I was going to be something like the Black Julia Cameron of the digital age 😂… which really was foreshadowing because in one of my workshops, someone later told me she trusted me more than Julia Cameron which made me cackle but also felt like a quiet inner breadcrumb that I collected to let me know I was on the right path. And this path? I really expected it to remain clear for me alone at the time lol. I’ve always been a dreamer lol. This transformation began almost 8 years ago now, and I couldn’t have imagined at the what the culminating message would blossom into- aiding in ubiquity for the greater collective.

Now, I can hardly scroll on my phone without seeing a post about the power of art, not only for its ornamental value, but its potential to heal and transform. This was not the case when I began. I can’t take the credit, it was an idea whose time had come for sure. I was just a vessel along with those that came before and after carrying it along in my way.

Today, I find myself in a similar time of transition that prompted this original transformation. Now, I’m holding myself at a different crossroads.

Now, I’m some months out of a 3 year relationship I was certain would end in marriage. Shivering at the edge while watching people swim in the dicey dating pool of 2025.

This year, I also parted ways with representation at a huge literary agency at the beginning of the year. I lost a book deal. Two things that shaped and affirmed me in a way I now feel embarrassed to admit. It gave validation of a different identity. I was finally a real artist. All those years I spent laboring over a notebook and reading on a stage got me to the place I’d always wanted to go.

Now I found myself asking something else

What makes me legitimate?

And with it came a different set of questions:

Am I still an artist if I don’t have the accouterments that affirm what a real artist, a real writer, is?
Is this path for me or am I wasting my time?
Should I quit while I’m ahead or lead myself further into the mystery even if the mystery might yield no results found notable to external societal metrics?
Is it dangerous to continue?

From experience, I know this period of questioning means I’m at the precipice of birthing a new self I’ve yet to name. Sometimes, in the heat of my feels, it’s hard to remember.

These are all things, these endings, these questions, that at times make me feel like a failure.

These are all things that feel foreign (no matter how familiar) and lonely to navigate.

All things I don’t yet have language for explaining how I’m moving through.

Carrying the grief and loss of the quiet and personal, while also zooming out and wading through the thick of a collective loss and grief which worsens by the day.

And though I know that the previous version of myself, were she to be reading this from the couch of my mothers living room, would be so proud of the challenges I’m navigating now, I still admit I haven’t been the most graceful at it.

The book deal? Don’t get me started in that. I was in shambles.

And the ex separation? I was volatile for a month as a navigated the aftermath. Volcanic to the touch. I didn’t recognize myself as I observed me snapping back at people (mostly men I later noticed) at the first sign of perceived or legitimate disrespect.

That rage and dysregulation has cooled to a quiet apathy. More and more things don’t feel worth doing these days. I just want to sleep for a decade, depression a block on my chest keeping me from wanting to leave the bed, let alone venture out into navigating the world.

I still go outside somehow. I still have fun. I still see and appreciate the pockets of beauty when they reach me.

I know that what I’m moving through is natural. I understand the phases of grief well. And still, I’m clunky in the acceptance of it.

I feel like I’m failing the ones I love more often than not, even when I’m trying my best. Especially then.

In the same breath, I’m experiencing career highs that look good from the outside. My inbox has offers from brands asking to send me things, most of which I can’t afford! At times, it’s overflowing with influencer activations- so many black tie events, cocktail hours, openings and private affairs, that I, as an introverted hermit, let alone one who is navigating the existential questions and resulting depression, hardly have energy to accept.

Some days I consider the aligned yes: What do I have energy for today? What lights me up? What threads can I see blooming from this? What feeds and fortifies the greater ecosystem I’m part of?

Sometimes, even with those answers being positive, I don’t have it in me to attend.

I worry about how much I say no, as it far outweighs my yes’ because I’m aware that at another time, there was a version of me that would have been so grateful to be asked.

I also know that there comes a time when people stop asking. I’ve been there too in different capacities, as I’ve struggled in the past with isolation birthed from the decisions I made while depressed.

At the same time, even with these new milestones that I can’t pretend are insignificant, I (along with other Black and brown artists and cultural workers, whether they admit it or not) am also experiencing shifts in cultural attitudes around the necessity of investment in the arts, along with a greater reckoning we all need to face about who gets considered valuable and why across many creative industries, and as a result am finding that the opportunities I’m called upon for work, outside of what I created myself, are diminishing as industries find it less profitable to offer funds in exchange for our services. As we find ourselves with less space for us to practice the crafts we spent years fine tuning.

Though I created a pathway outside of this framework as a person who has always seen herself as an outlier and known on some level that I would have to build my own, it felt good- the stability of being called upon. Of this work I built, this little structure, being deemed valuable from the outside.

Regardless, I can’t pretend this is insignificant, the being asked to be in attendance, the ability to choose, and it does give way to the suspicion that even as there are things I feel I was supposed to have attained by now, and even with the shift in systems/increase in cultural attitudes that reinforce and even originate this feeling (I know I didn’t put this pressure on myself), my steps in the dark have been leading me somewhere.

Where though? I don’t know.

Now, in the aftermath of this time of loss, I find myself back to asking the same questions I was 8 years ago.

Am I still worthy?

Is this all still valid?

Am I?

Has the work I spent all these years doing, this path I gruelingly walked, been in vain?

Have I walked confidently in the wrong direction?

Is my validity as an artist based on external metrics? Am I a failure because everything I had the courage to try aloud- love, publishing, being an artist in the world- isn’t unfolding exactly as I had hoped?

I feel like a newborn figuring out legs again, just when I was growing confident in my sturdy and certain stride.

Again, I find myself in a place where the only thing I truly have to rely on is the work.

So, I am returning to the framework I made to make me. I am returning to my creativity to create me.

Because though I’ve dedicated my life and work to being in service, I unwittingly left behind the only thing in my life that has unwaveringly been in service to me. The only thing that time and again has insisted in possibility on the other side of repair.

Where people have their lines, edges, shifting desires and capacities,

where the world has its trends, fads and passing attention,

creation has only ever asked me to show up, and gifted me equal and greater presence beyond my capacity to imagine.

I can’t help but wonder if things are seeming to collapse because I shifted my own creativity from the center of everything I attempted to build. That generative force from which everything I now see and have seen thus far was imagined in my journal pages all those years ago.

I also wonder if my seeing things from the vantage point that everything is falling apart is also an extension of the misuse of my creative energy.

So I made some changes.

I rearranged my living room so that it is now my creative space.

My journal has been getting this work.

The notes app poetry has returned.

I also decided I will no longer be showing up in my life with my writing solely as a way to pour into and motivate others, though at times, if Spirit allows for it, that may be the case. Hence the realignment of my public personal

I’m making a choice to shift from Giselle Buchanan - the business, the service

to Giselle Buchanan - the artist.

I am repurposing my words as fuel for me again first before I turn and look to see whether someone else is nourished or fed enough by them.

Sometimes, we have the medicine precisely because we are the ones who need it.

I was able to create an offering for others I was confident in because it healed me first. Because it brought my creative spirit back to life.

Now, in a time when I feel like I am fighting to find myself again. In the weeds and the ruins again. Looking, once again, to build beauty I still don’t have a reference point or a map for. I already know what to do. And I already have an inkling of what beauty I’ve yet to see that will certainly be birthed from that place.

I suspect what will come will be a balm to the collective, but only because I did the work of tending to my own ruptures first.

That’s the gift I’ve always known to be present in the creative process.

It’s the reason I gave my life to it, and it’s the reason I have the life I now am living, even as it approaches seasons of redirection and refinement.

It’s why, even now, I continue to honor this work by paying it forward, even when at times, I flirt with the idea of going back to the jungle and embodying a completely different existence lol.

This wasn’t where I was going when I sat down to write, but I have just been in practice of trusting myself with the current, wherever it delivers me.

I hope that regardless of where you find yourself in your questions, you are bringing this life giving energy to yourself today. I know that it will sustain you.