You Don't Have to Justify Your Creative Life to Anyone

Someone in my MomCo group asked me a simple question a few weeks ago: "So what's your thing?"

I opened my mouth and nothing clean came out. I'm a writer. I blog. I just got back on YouTube after walking away from it. I'm working on fiction in three different genres at once. Somewhere in a folder I haven't opened in three or four years, there's a half-finished family history project I still think about. I run a whole online space that's technically a business but mostly feels like ministry in the margins of being a wife and mom to three boys.

I gave her four sentences and a nervous laugh, and I could feel myself wanting to apologize for it — like I owed her a tidier answer than the one I actually had.

I know that feeling well. I've spent years having it.

Is Something Wrong With Me If I Can't Land On One Thing?

For a long time I thought the goal was to eventually narrow down. Pick the lane. Become known for the one thing, the way it seems like everyone else has. I used to run a productivity and planner channel on YouTube, and even then — even inside one niche — I felt the itch to talk about faith, about books, about the actual mess of my life, and I'd shut it down because it wasn't "on brand."

Eventually I walked away from that channel entirely. Not because I stopped loving any of it, but because I couldn't keep pretending I was only one thing when I wasn't.

What I didn't have language for back then is what I'd call myself multipassionate now — and I didn't know that not being able to pick one thing wasn't a discipline problem. It was just accurate. My brain has never worked in a single lane. It works in a house with a lot of rooms, and I go where the light is that day.

Why Does My Creative Energy Come and Go Like This?

Here's the part that used to embarrass me most: it's not just that I have several interests. It's that I don't move through them evenly.

Some seasons I have three things going at once — a blog post drafting itself in my head while I'm also deep in a short story and half-listening to an audiobook for research. Other seasons, something I love goes completely quiet. My family history research is the clearest example. I haven't opened that folder in three or four years. Not because I lost interest — I think about it more than I'd like to admit — but because it wasn't its season, and I didn't have the capacity to force it to be.

I used to read that dormancy as failure. Proof I couldn't finish what I started. Now I think it's closer to the truth to say I flow in waves. Something gets picked up when it's ready to be picked up, and set down without guilt when it isn't. The Salty Page Books fiction I write moves the same way — I'm not loyal to one genre because the story that wants to be told doesn't always show up in the genre I told last time. Mystery one round, romance the next, fantasy after that. It's the same pull, just wearing a different coat.

So What Do I Even Call Myself?

I don't have a tidy job title, and I've mostly stopped trying to build one. What I have instead is Soft Sacred Slow — one name that holds all of it. The blog, the podcast, the fiction, the homemaking, the ministry, the planning system, the parts of me that are still figuring themselves out. It's less like a business card and more like a magazine: one voice, many sections, and you don't have to read every page to understand what the whole thing is about.

That reframe didn't happen overnight. I still catch myself, some days, wanting to explain why I do so many things — like there's a version of me sitting across the table waiting to be convinced I'm not scattered, just full.

But I'm learning I don't owe that explanation. Not to her, not to an algorithm, not to whatever version of productivity culture is still whispering in the back of my head that consistency in one lane is the only kind that counts.

What If Nothing Here Needs Fixing?

I keep coming back to this: the woman who writes a devotional on Tuesday, films a video about her digital planner on Wednesday, and disappears into a mystery draft on Thursday isn't three different people pretending to be one. She's just me, moving with whatever's alive in me that week.

If you've got a folder like mine — something you loved and set down and haven't picked back up, sitting there collecting a kind of quiet guilt — I don't think it means you gave up on it. I think it might just mean it isn't that season yet. And if you're the kind of person who has five things going at once and can't explain your "thing" in one sentence either, I don't think you're behind. I think you might just be full the same way I am.

You don't have to justify any of it. Not to me, and not to anyone else standing on your porch.

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