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Welcome back to The Creative Life Podcast.

It's 23:43 on a Friday night. I'm in my studio in Mahalla. Nothing is scripted.

This is the first of a new format: the Post-it Note Sessions. My studio wall is covered in them — pink for content, blue for self, yellow for the practical. Every one is a note I wrote to keep myself moving through the hardest creative stretch I've had in years.

Tonight I take them down one by one and tell you what's actually been going on: the album, the writer's block, the book I didn't plan to write, and what I found in the dark.

What we'll explore:

• 🕳️ What the cave actually costs — Campbell turned down a professorship and read for five years. Why the dark always carries its opposite, and what it asks of you before it gives it up
• 🗝️ The one thing you can do — the "coulds" are what keep you frozen. There is always one action available. Do that, and it opens the next one
• 🎹 Do hard things — I'm learning piano in my forties and it's a disaster. Why building a new language is the only way to say the new thing
• 🐦 Scene by scene — the Anne Lamott principle that got me writing again when I had one hour a day and a book that could take ten years
• 📌 Share your journey. What are you working on? — two questions that dissolve the content block, and why your life is far more interesting than you think it is

If you're stuck, if you're between things, if the world has gone quiet on you — this one's for you.

Let's get into it.

All music in this episode is mine — stream it on Spotify.

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