For most of my life, I believed creativity and work required force.
Push harder.
Show up more consistently.
Be more productive.
Stay visible.
Keep momentum at all costs.
Like many women, I absorbed the idea that success belonged to those who could override their natural rhythms in favour of constant output. Rest became something to earn. Slowness felt dangerous. Uncertainty felt like failure.
And yet, no matter how much I tried to live this way, my body, creativity and nervous system kept resisting it.
There would be periods of inspiration and visibility followed by deep exhaustion. Moments of clarity followed by retreat. Expansion followed by collapse.
For years, I interpreted these cycles as personal failure.
Now I wonder if they were simply cycles.
Nature itself does not operate through constant expansion. The moon waxes and wanes. The tides advance and retreat. Seasons bloom, decay and regenerate. Even the ancient myths understood that descent was not separate from life, but part of it.
And yet modern life asks women to exist in a perpetual summer.
Always available.
Always producing.
Always visible.
Always certain.
Perhaps part of the exhaustion many women feel is not because we are incapable, but because we are trying to live outside of rhythm altogether.
Lately I have been exploring what it might mean to build a creative life and business in relationship with cycles rather than against them.
Not as an excuse to disappear from responsibility, but as a more sustainable and humane way of creating.
The New Moon becomes a time for visioning, listening and asking what wants to emerge.
The Waxing Moon supports building, refining and taking courageous action.
The Full Moon invites visibility, gathering and sharing the work.
The Waning Moon asks for reflection, integration and release.
And the Dark Moon reminds us that rest, grief, uncertainty and retreat are not failures of the creative process. They are part of it.
When I began approaching my work this way, something softened.
I stopped expecting myself to feel equally social, inspired and productive every single day. I became less afraid of temporary retreats and more interested in understanding what each phase was asking of me.
Some days are for visibility.
Some are for refinement.
Some are for community.
Some are for silence.
The cycle itself becomes intelligent.
I also began to realise that many women are longing for spaces where they can create and work without abandoning their emotional reality, nervous system or humanity in the process.
Not spaces built entirely around extraction, optimisation and endless scaling.
But spaces that allow for:
- creativity and rest
- visibility and retreat
- structure and intuition
- ambition and emotional depth
- growth and grief
Spaces where women are not required to sever themselves from their cyclical nature in order to be considered successful.
I do not think cyclical living means becoming passive.
In many ways it requires deeper self-awareness and greater stewardship.
To work cyclically is not to avoid discipline, but to understand that meaningful creative work often unfolds through seasons of emergence, descent, uncertainty and renewal.
Perhaps this is what many ancient myths were trying to teach us all along.
That descent is not the opposite of becoming.
It is part of it.
And perhaps the question is no longer:
“How do I force myself to keep producing?”
But:
“What kind of life becomes possible when I begin working with my cycles rather than against them?”
Maybe that is where a more meaningful creative life begins.