The Creative Life Chose Me
On freedom, independence, and learning to follow the path that's mine.
Freedom is something I consider paramount to everything I do.
And that might pose a question: what does freedom even look like anyway?
To me, freedom is having autonomy over my own choices and what I want to do. It is not rebellion, as in I refuse to listen to someone else. It is not me trying to be difficult or intentionally go against what people say just for the sake of it.
Freedom means that at the end of the day, I know what I am responsible for and I know that I can really stand by my own choices.
That is the core of it. Freedom is where my self-trust and confidence come from.
A Childhood Itch
Ever since I was a kid, my only sibling has special needs. Cognitively and developmentally, we are both very different. As a child, I could never really make sense of it. I knew that my situation was vastly different than that of my peers, but I struggled to articulate or process the family dynamic. I just grew up inside it; which at times, felt quite isolating, especially without the resources to connect with others in a similar situation.
Subconsciously, that made me pull my defences up against the world.
I was naturally living in the shadow of someone else. I blended into the background a bit too much, moulding myself into someone who was easy to manage.
At the same time, I craved independence and autonomy before I even found the words for it. I wanted clear options. I wanted space for myself – alone and peaceful – without anybody else questioning me.
I didn’t want to keep blending into someone else’s background. I wanted to craft my own instead.
During my schooling years, I struggled to find my own footing with this inner desire. The rigidity of people and places was overwhelming. On the surface, I was being taught a particular vision of success or a fulfilling life. Under the surface, my childhood desires continued to bubble and boil…
The ‘Creative Curse’
Why doesn’t the normal path speak to me? …Does it even have to speak to me? Am I just thinking too much into this?
These were questions I grappled with internally, particularly when I was on the verge of graduating from university. It felt silly almost, to say that I live with this inner impulse of self-expression. I had to accept that this was simply part of me.
As I have told many people, you do not choose to be a creative.
The creative life picks you.
It draws you in and you do not have a choice. The creative curse, as I like to dub it. Not a curse in a literal sense, but it’s this itch where you are really destined to live out that creative urge in you. No matter how hard you try to suppress it, the more the creative forces will pull you in.
The driving force behind my own goals and ideals was always in the pursuit of freedom.
The freedom to make something out of what I see, feel, think, and experience. Not just to inherit a life, but to actively shape it.
Success = Choices
As maturity beckons, the pursuit of freedom becomes less of a chase and more of an exploration.
Freedom is really in the everyday choices I make. The choices in how I show up, where I spend my energy, what I say yes to, and what I decide to turn down. Freedom became less of a need to run away, and more of a way to describe autonomy and choices. The power of a choice.
When I knew it was time to venture into my own path, I realised I could either dampen my own urge or choose to live from that internal pull. But that required a lot of self-honesty.
It required understanding why I am the way I am. It required me to look back into my childhood and the internal narratives I had formed along the way. How many beliefs did I inherit, and how many were actually from me?
I wanted to protect the vulnerability of little me by giving myself options I previously couldn’t explore. After all, mobility and adaptability are things that nobody can really take away from me.
That also spurred me to be on this spree of not wanting to waste my time. The moment I could grab any sense of independence and navigate on my own two feet, I wanted to take it.
I wanted to spread my wings and fly as high as I could allow myself to do so.
Expression came through the channels of starting a design business, experimenting with creative outlets… anything that made sure I would not have to place my entire sense of safety in someone else’s hands.
This is where my creative urges, business, freelancing and embodiment of freedom started to blur into one another. I channel my energy purely into joy, direction, expression, and work that feels like me.
I took my impulses and condensed them into this direction where I never had to seek permission to simply be.
The process also required me to define a version of success only I could fulfil. Going back to choices – freedom is present in the path you know is truly yours.
Freedom Is Not Isolation
Autonomy doesn’t mean living life in a silo, nor does it mean rejecting help. Support and guidance are important. However, knowing the difference between support and permission is a must. No other person should have authority over your own life.
I find it so refreshing to be directly responsible and in charge of the life that I create with intention, instead of waiting for it to simply fall through from the sky. Actively participating in my own life – knowing that I can create, pivot, change, refine, and decide again – feels wildly freeing. I removed the need to prove myself to someone else.
What starts as a shock to the nervous system, as a cry for independence, eventually turns into discernment. Freedom carries less escapism now, and more of the power that comes with owning my choices.
The Good Yield Is My Latest Experiment
The Good Yield is another piece of my freedom stack. One that’s centred on expression, writing, and crafting my own narrative. My little nook of building something that reflects how I see the world.
Freedom of creating something that does not have to fit neatly into someone else’s category in order to be real.
Perhaps that’s why freedom makes everything else make sense to me. Underneath the creativity, the business, the freelancing, the writing, the pivots, the choices, and the experiments, that has always been the thread.
The essence of freedom. The jolt of excitement in the morning. The gift of a new day.
That is The Good Yield.
P.S. If you’re at Step Zero, I created [The First Freelance Offer Kit] to help you turn your existing skills into a testable offer.
It’s built for that exact moment when you know you have valuable experience, but you’re not sure how to package it or start putting it out there.
Melissa Foo is the writer behind The Good Yield, a publication about adaptive work, career pivots, freelancing, and building a resilient working life. She began as the founder and creative lead of her own design studio before moving into facilitation, education, design thinking, and portfolio work.
"Knowing the difference between support and permission is a must" that's the line I'll be sitting with. I've asked for a lot of the second thing while telling myself it was the first.
Thank you also for the part about blending into someone else's background as a kid. That's a very particular kind of quiet, and I suspect a lot of women who end up building their own thing recognise it without ever having said it out loud.
Freedom as autonomy rather than rebellion feels like the far more sustainable version. Rebellion still needs something to push against. This doesn't.
It’s crazy how sometimes living the life truly meant for you are that you truly want is found by meeting back with that child version of you. I feel like the dreams we experience as a child are often the ones that truly reflect us, before the adaptation to our environnement, before we are more centered on others, before what we experience, before we ear what everyone as to say. Combing back to it really spark something in our adult version and I find it so beautiful 🫶🏼