A Conversation About Everyday Creativity & An Invitation to Join Me for a Workshop in NYC
On venting, finding beauty in the overlooked, and why midlife is just the beginning.
I recently listened to the Uplifters Podcast Episode #144 (which is 100 episodes after mine, and somehow that feels meaningful!) with Mandy Fabian. She’s a writer, director, and filmmaker who is bursting with creativity and self-reflection. After listening to the episode, I have a total squish1 on Mandy.
On the podcast, she and Aransas talk about how healthy it is to vent and get feelings of frustration, disappointment, and fear out of our minds. But expressing these feelings to someone can be detrimental to the recipient. Aransas said there should be wind phones for our tantrums—I love that!
Journaling can help a lot, but a moment of frustration can strike any time, and you don’t always have the time or pen/paper you need with you. Mandy shared that she leaves herself voice memos with the intention of never listening to them again. Just the act of saying the words out loud is cathartic enough.
My strategies for fear, frustration, or anxiety range from taking a walk in nature, to painting my nails (there’s something about zooming in and focusing and waiting for them to dry between coats that somehow really works for me), to reading fiction. When I have time, diving into something creative works best for me. Sometimes that means walking, observing closely, and capturing images with my camera. Other times, my daughter and I play a game called “I’ve never noticed this before.” Recently, while waiting at a bus stop, we played our game and noticed a building across the street had statues of children on its facade. I quickly checked and learned it was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s home—the world’s first child protection agency.
When I say creativity is my form of meditation, people often respond, “That’s great, but I’m not creative,” and I argue that ANYONE can be creative. It’s about the process, not the product. That’s why this March I’ll be hosting a creativity workshop at The Uplifters Live conference hosted by Aransas Savas. I asked her to share with Fly Bravely readers about the conference and her perspective on creativity.
Thank you, Aransas, for the wise words you’ve shared below.
Q: What is Uplifters Live all about?
A: Uplifters Live is my favorite day of the year—and I mean that. It’s a day when purpose-driven midlife women who are doing big, brave things get to be in a room together and have the conversations we actually need to have. Not surface-level networking, but real talk about what it takes to create the future we want to live in. This year’s theme is Creating The Future, and we’re exploring that through creativity, capital, and courageous community. Mahogany L. Browne is keynoting, we have incredible investors talking about funding what we believe in, lightning talks from amazing women, and your creativity workshop. The content is AMAZING, but more than that, it’s the nicest, warmest, smartest, and most insanely generous women all connecting and lifting each other up.
Q: What’s the most amazing feedback you’ve received from an attendee at the event?
A: Do I have to pick just one? Someone once described Uplifters Live as “crack,” which made me laugh, but I knew exactly what she meant. It’s the kind of experience that’s so good you can’t wait to come back.
Last year, a woman named told me she came to the event feeling completely stuck in her career and her life. She left, having decided to quit her job, move across the country, and start the business she’d been dreaming about for years. She said it wasn’t any one talk or speaker that did it. It was being in a room with women who weren’t pretending everything was perfect, who were honest about the mess, the fear, and the uncertainty, and who were doing brave things anyway. That gave her permission to do the same.
But honestly? The best feedback is that women like you keep coming back year after year, seeing so many of you connecting, collaborating, and supporting one another all year long. That’s really the magic of getting like-minded women together.
Q: I am forever amazed that you put out an episode of your podcast each week and do it all yourself. Amongst the thousand other things you do. And inspire us all as you do it. How do you stay balanced? What do you do for YOU?
A: The boring answer? I just got certified in neuroscience and realized it’s probably because I have a healthy brain that I find it pretty easy to move between deep creative work and tactical detail stuff (even if the tactical isn’t where I shine). And that healthy brain comes from really solid sleep, nutrition, reflection, and movement practices.
Since I work from home now and my kids are older, I really milk my mornings. Once they’re off to school, I have a few hours to take care of myself—that’s when I move, reflect, and do the things that fill me up. That morning time is sacred.
I’ve also learned to work with my brain’s quirks rather than fight them. I write by dictation. I take notes by hand. I set only the three highest-priority tasks each day and let everything else happen in the margins. That structure keeps me sane.
But here’s the thing - I definitely tend toward overfunctioning and doing way too much. So I’ve learned to listen when I start to feel resentful or cranky, because that’s the signal that I’m overdoing it. This is my dream life that I worked so hard to create, so I want to actually enjoy it, not just survive it. When it stops being fun, I know I need to pull back.
Q: What does creativity mean to you?
A: I am not someone who sees myself as an artist, but I am definitely creative. I see creativity in pretty literal terms: if we are creating, we are creative. I’m creating when I write, of course, but also when I pull an outfit together that makes me feel something or that communicates something, when I cook and clean, or really see something. I am most creative improvisationally, which is why podcasting suits me so well. For me, creativity is rooted in resourcefulness and in the moment.
Give me a supermarket or a cookbook, and I’m overwhelmed and uninspired. But put me in an almost empty kitchen and ask me to cobble something together? I come alive. What’s here? What can I make with what’s available that’s just right for this moment?
The core question of my life and work is: “What is this moment perfect for?” That question keeps me grounded in serving the moment’s needs while playing expansively with whatever bits and pieces are available.
I think that’s part of why I admire your creative work so much—we’re both attuned to the magic that remains in what’s been left behind. Found object art, thrift shopping, seeing possibility in the overlooked. I don’t feel creative without constraints. The constraint is what makes it interesting.
Q: In your interview with Mandy, you said:
I am a highly iterative person who likes to continually update, evolve, and change things. And I’m gonna put something in the world that’s just gonna like be there in print and final. And so that’s one of the things that really strikes me as an act of bravery for all.
That comment really resonated with me. It reminds me of how writing a Substack has helped me overcome the fear you referenced above. When I hit “send,” my words are in people’s inboxes just like that. Forever. Since you have a thriving coaching business where you support others, I’m curious: how do you coach yourself past your own fears?
A: For most things, I remind myself that done is better than perfect, and that iteration is still possible even after something’s “final.” I literally make mistakes all day long. I will never like making them, though, so I try to consciously remind myself of what’s at stake. Most of the time, it’s not anything that important. And if it is, I try to reframe it as an opportunity to practice humility and to be a human with other humans, and to apologize or ask for another shot at making it better. The book is tricky, though, because it does feel very permanent. But I know that I’m not doing this big, brave thing alone. I have amazing friends, like you, who I’ll definitely ask for feedback before it’s printed. And I really believe in my crew. When I remember that I’m not in this alone, I feel really energized to write a bad first draft and then make it better with my smart friends until it’s something we all feel really proud of and excited to share.
Q: You mentioned you just signed a book deal! HOW EXCITING! Can you share with us a snippet of what your book is about?
A:Thank you!!! There’s a really damaging prevailing narrative that after 40 or so, we should shrink to the background and use our remaining days to boost the next generation. That’s great and all, but the math doesn’t math. The average life expectancy for an American woman is 81 years. So, I took a good look at the research about what women’s brains are primed to do in midlife and interviewed almost 200 women about what it takes for them to do big, brave things in midlife and turned it into a playbook for all of us who want to make the most of the second half of our lives. It’s for every woman who has ever wondered if she’s meant for something more or who has wondered if it’s too late to move across the world or start a new relationship or write a book or start a company. I’m still figuring out how to talk about it without sounding too serious, but at the heart of it is building the courage to get out there and actually create the life you actually want.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share with Fly Bravely readers today?
A: If you’re in midlife and you feel like everything is shifting under your feet - your body, your career, your relationships, your sense of who you are - you’re not alone. And you’re not broken. You’re at the beginning of something, not the end. And, come to Uplifters Live! Lia and I will be there with a bunch of other amazing women! I can’t wait to see what we all create together on March 13.
Uplifters Live 2026: Creating The Future
Friday, March 13, 2026 in Manhattan
A day for purpose-driven midlife women to connect, uplift one another, and explore what it takes to create the future we actually want to live in.
Featuring: Mahogany L. Browne (poet laureate of Lincoln Center), investor conversations, lightning talks, creativity workshops, and deep connection.
All proceeds benefit WorkOnward Foundation and 826 NYC.
Click the link below to buy tickets and join us!
Words of the Week
“Creativity fuels our imagination, and our imagination fuels our dreams of a better world.” — Greta Thunberg
Photo of the Week
I made this little bird out of Play-Doh over dinner with Carolina one night. The eye and the lines in its feathers came from a broken stylus pen sitting on our kitchen table—a remnant of homework finished earlier that evening.
A moment after I took this photo, I rolled the bird into a ball and handed it back to Carolina. She turned it into a turtle.
Creativity—and fun—can be as simple as having a bit of Play-Doh around. And if you’re reading this on Sunday, January 25th in the Northeast, you’re probably also watching the snow fall. Making Play-Doh at home is surprisingly easy, and chances are you already have everything you need in your pantry. If you’d like to give it a try, follow this recipe, and drop a note in the comments—I’d love to see what you make.
A squish is an intense, non-romantic, and non-sexual desire to be close friends with someone—essentially a “platonic crush” or “friend-crush”.
The voice memo venting strategy is brilliant becuase it solves that immediate need to release without burdening anyone else. I've done something similar when stuck on ideas, just talking through the problem out loud, and there's something about hearing it externalized that shifts the whole perspective. That creativity-as-constraints idea really lands too, like how an empty fridge forces you to actually think instead of just follow recipes.
That "I never noticed this before" game is pure genius. A conduit to our own brains. Love it!