Turns out I’d been doing something valuable for decades. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
I’ve been working on a website recently. Not just a website — a proper attempt to represent what I actually do and have done, in a way that’s coherent and useful and makes the value visible to someone who doesn’t already know me.
And the process of doing that — sitting down to write the About page, the course descriptions, the biography that’s supposed to explain in a few hundred words why you should trust someone with your creative development — has forced me to do something I’d never properly done before.
Account for my own experience.
Not list my qualifications. Not arrange my CV. Actually sit with the breadth of what I’ve learned and done and taught, and understand it as a coherent body of work rather than a scatter of separate things.
What I found, doing that, surprised me.
I’ve been qualifying my experience in all sorts of areas for years without quite realising I was doing it. Teaching art, yes — that’s the obvious one, the thing on the tin. But also: digital illustration. Sketchbooking. Urban sketching. Plein air painting. Portrait work. Children’s book illustration. Creative writing. The business of running a creative venue. Online course architecture. Content creation. The psychology of creative confidence and how to help people develop it.
When I was doing each of these things, they felt separate. The plein air painting was one thing. The digital illustration was another. The teaching was a third. The business was somewhere else entirely.
Looking back, they’re not separate at all. They’re the same thing, seen from different angles.
A creative practice at scale, built across multiple disciplines and mediums and contexts, that adds up to a genuinely unusual body of knowledge. Not narrow depth — I don’t have thirty years in one speciality. Something different: wide, interconnected, practical wisdom about what it actually takes to live a creative life in all its dimensions.
The difficulty, when you’re in the middle of building something, is that you can’t see the shape of it. You’re too close. The individual pieces are just the things you’re working on right now, this project, this course, this new skill — not a coherent whole that means something.
I didn’t know I was becoming a person who had useful things to say about creative life transformation when I was spending a year obsessively learning digital illustration. I didn’t know the fitness side of things — the 10,000 hours of thinking about how physical practice connects to creative practice — was going to become core curriculum for something called H2BA². I was just… doing things that interested me, following the threads that were there.
The shape emerged. It wasn’t planned.
There’s an Austin Kleon line I keep returning to, which I’ll get to in another post properly. But the short version is: you can only connect the dots looking backwards. The future you are building is being built by your current curiosity and your current habits, whether you can see it as building or not.
Which means two things.
First: trust the curiosity. If you’re drawn to something — genuinely drawn, in the specific way that means you’d do it even if nobody was watching and there was no obvious outcome — that draw is informative. It’s telling you something about where the value is. It may not make sense now. Give it time.
Second: capture everything. Because when you eventually need to account for what you know — for yourself, for a website, for a course description, for a conversation with someone who needs to trust you — the material is in your experience. But only if you’ve been paying attention to your experience.
The website forced me to do an audit I’d never done before. What do I actually know? What have I actually done? If I were trying to help someone make a meaningful creative life change, what is the actual toolkit I could offer?
The answer, when I wrote it down honestly, was more than I’d been giving myself credit for.
I think this is common among people who’ve spent years doing creative work across multiple contexts. The expertise doesn’t announce itself. It accumulates quietly, distributed across too many different areas to feel like expertise in any single one. The tendency is to see the gaps — the things you haven’t done, the formal qualifications you don’t have, the experts whose knowledge dwarfs yours in any given narrow area.
But the person who needs a general practitioner is not helped by seventeen specialists who can each only see their own corner of the problem.
The breadth, properly understood, is the thing.
I was building something, for decades, that I didn’t have a name for. The name I have for it now is a creative life — the full, integrated, sustainable version of one, not the hobby version or the struggling-artist version, but something that actually works and earns and teaches and continues.
I’m still building it. But I can see the shape now. And seeing the shape makes the building more intentional.
Whatever you’ve been doing for the last decade or two that you haven’t quite been able to articulate as a whole — start looking at it as a whole. The pattern is probably there. You might just have been too close to see it.
What would you find if you actually sat down and audited your own experience — not just the formal bits, but everything you’ve learned and done and built? What shape does it have when you look at it all together? This is worth an hour of your time. The answer might surprise you.
CP52 Stage: Stage 1 — The Realisation (something has to change) / Stage 2 — The Decision
Series: What I Didn’t Know I Knew
Image note: A timeline spread across a table — sketches, notes, printouts. The shape of a life’s work becoming visible.
