She Made Life Her Art
A conversation between Sarah Stone and Claudia Whitney about creativity, participation, being seen, finding your people and why perhaps the most important thing we can do is stop watching life and start participating in it.
Some conversations begin with a carefully prepared list of questions and a fairly good idea of where you are going to end up, while others begin with two people turning up, pressing the Live button and allowing the conversation to find its own direction, and this was very much one of those.
We first met through the Substack Accelerator when we were both relatively new to the platform, and very quickly became what we now affectionately call “Substack friends”, regularly reading and sharing each other’s work, exchanging messages and saying that at some point we really needed to sit down and have a proper conversation. Between different time zones, travel, retreats, businesses, magazine deadlines and everything else happening in our respective worlds, however, that conversation kept getting pushed further down the list, until Substack September finally gave us the perfect reason to make it happen.
Sarah had made the slightly ambitious decision to go Live every weekday throughout September, Claudia agreed to be one of the first guests, and there was another rather important first attached to the occasion because, despite being a writer, retreat leader, creative and somebody who spends a great deal of time encouraging other women to allow themselves to be seen, this was Claudia’s very first Substack Live.
We had barely thirty seconds together in the Studio before we were Live, which, in retrospect, was probably the best possible way to do it because there was no time to overthink anything, and what followed was a conversation that began with creativity and Claudia’s philosophy behind Let It Be Your Art, but very quickly opened into something much bigger about how we live, what we notice, the things we take for granted about ourselves, our relationship with visibility, and what can happen when we find an online space where we feel able to show up as ourselves rather than constantly trying to perform for an algorithm.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we realised there was one idea connecting almost everything we were talking about.
Participation.
Not simply participating on Substack, or participating creatively, but participating fully in your own life.
What if your life was your greatest creative expression?
At the heart of Claudia’s work and her publication, Let It Be Your Art, is the belief that creativity belongs to far more of us than we tend to think, because somewhere along the way we have reduced the definition of being creative to being able to paint, draw, sculpt, write poetry or produce something that the outside world can recognise as “art”.
Claudia regularly meets women she considers deeply creative who immediately tell her that they aren’t creative at all, because they can’t draw or paint, yet those same women may have built businesses, created beautiful homes, solved complicated problems, brought communities together, reinvented themselves several times, raised families, designed experiences, written, cooked, travelled, dressed with extraordinary individuality or simply developed a way of looking at the world that is entirely their own.
All of that is creative expression.
Sarah recognised the contradiction immediately because she spent years earning her living as a professional photographer, quite literally creating things every day, yet for a long time never really thought of herself as “a creative”, almost as though the title belonged to another group of people who had somehow earned the right to use it.
It made us wonder how often we do this to ourselves in other areas too, deciding in advance what an artist should look like, what a writer should look like, what an entrepreneur should look like, what a successful woman should look like, and then quietly excluding ourselves because we don’t recognise ourselves in the definition.
Perhaps the more interesting question is not “Am I creative?” but “How am I already creating?”
Because creativity can be found in the way we choose to live just as much as in the things we physically make, and Claudia’s philosophy is ultimately about looking at your life through that wider creative lens, recognising that your choices, experiences, relationships, ideas, curiosity and willingness to participate can all become part of your art.
And that was where our conversation became particularly interesting, because once you begin thinking about your life as something you are actively creating, you also have to ask yourself how much attention you are actually giving it.
If your life was your lover, would it feel neglected?
This was possibly our favourite question of the entire conversation, and one Claudia had almost edited out of a recent article because she wasn’t sure whether it was too much.
Thankfully, she left it in.
If your life was your lover, what would your life say about the amount of attention you were giving it?
Would it feel loved, noticed, explored and appreciated, or would it be sitting quietly in the corner wondering why you seem so much more interested in everybody else?
We laughed when Claudia first said it, but the more we talked about it, the less funny and the more profound it became, particularly when we considered how much of modern life is designed to pull our attention away from the one life we are actually living.
We watch somebody else grow their business, travel somewhere beautiful, write the book, change careers, launch the publication, build the audience, create the home, make the art or start again, and while there can be enormous inspiration in seeing what other people are doing, there is also a point at which inspiration quietly becomes observation and we find ourselves watching other people participate while continually postponing our own lives until some imaginary future date.
One day, when there is more time.
One day, when the children are older.
One day, when the business is quieter.
One day, when we have more money.
One day, when we feel more confident.
One day, when we know exactly what we’re doing.
Except the slightly uncomfortable truth is that while we are waiting for life to properly begin, this is it.
This is the life.
Claudia talked about the idea of creating intimacy with your own life, of paying attention to it in the same way we would nurture any relationship we cared deeply about, and that idea stayed with both of us because perhaps intentional living begins with something far simpler than a grand plan for the future.
Perhaps it begins with paying attention to what is already here.
We often overlook the very thing that makes us different
From there, we found ourselves talking about another habit so many of us share, which is our tendency to underestimate the things that come naturally to us because we assume that if something feels easy, it cannot possibly be particularly valuable.
Claudia remembered an exercise from a leadership programme where she was asked to speak to people who knew her and find out what they believed her particular gift or “superpower” was, and she was genuinely surprised when the same qualities kept being reflected back to her because they were things she had never considered especially remarkable.
They were simply things she did.
And that, of course, was the point.
The things that feel ordinary to us can be extraordinary to somebody else precisely because they don’t come naturally to them.
This becomes particularly important as we get older and accumulate decades of experience, because skills that once required conscious effort eventually become instinctive, and we forget how much knowledge sits behind our ability to do something quickly, see something others miss or know almost intuitively what needs to happen next.
It is one of the reasons Sarah talks so much about starting from zero without being zero, because entering a new chapter does not erase everything that came before it. You may be starting a new business, publication, career, creative practice or chapter of your life from the beginning, but you are bringing every previous version of yourself with you.
Perhaps, then, one of the most useful things we can do is borrow somebody else’s eyes occasionally.
Ask three people who know you well what they believe comes naturally to you, what they would specifically come to you for and how they would describe you to someone who had never met you, and then resist the temptation to dismiss their answers with, “Oh, but that’s easy.”
It might be easy.
For you.
And that distinction matters.
There is enormous power in allowing ourselves to be seen
This naturally took us into Claudia’s retreat work and the experiences she creates through Art of Hers, where creativity, play, nature, writing, hypnosis and other modalities become ways for women to reconnect with parts of themselves that may have become quieter underneath all the roles they are expected to play.
Many of the women who come on Claudia’s retreats are carrying full lives, running businesses, working, parenting, caring for other people and managing the endless invisible responsibilities that tend to accumulate, and the intention behind the experience is not simply to give them a beautiful few days away, but to create enough space for them to hear themselves again.
At one retreat in Mexico, that eventually led to an informal open mic night where women sang, danced, read poetry and shared pieces of themselves that some had never shared publicly before, and what struck Claudia most was not simply what they performed, but what it meant for some of those women to allow themselves to be seen in that way.
That word opened another door in our conversation because being seen is something we all say we want until the moment it actually requires us to step forward.
Publishing the article.
Sharing the photograph.
Showing somebody the painting.
Speaking up in the room.
Starting the business.
Saying what we actually think.
Pressing the button and going Live.
There is vulnerability in all of it because visibility always carries the possibility that somebody might not like what they see.
And yet there we were, having this exact conversation while Claudia was doing something she had never done before and allowing herself to be seen on her first Substack Live.
Within a few minutes, neither of us was thinking very much about the fact that we were Live because we were simply talking to each other, which perhaps tells us something important about visibility itself.
Maybe being visible becomes easier when we stop thinking of it as performing and start thinking of it as participating.
You don’t need to walk into the room determined to impress everybody.
You can simply join the conversation.
Creativity does not have to become another thing you are good at
One of the things we both loved about exploring creativity in this way was the freedom of removing the need for an impressive outcome, because Claudia is very clear that the creative work she incorporates into her retreats is not about teaching people to become technically accomplished artists.
In fact, she experienced her own imposter syndrome around this in the beginning because she had never attended art school and knew people who were extraordinarily skilled artists, which led her to question what right she had to bring art into the work she was doing.
Eventually she understood that she wasn’t teaching art.
She was using creativity as a way of accessing something else.
A hypnosis or meditation might be followed by writing, collage, colour, doodling or creating a personal oracle card, and the finished piece does not need to be beautiful because the value lies in what happens while somebody is making it, when the analytical mind quietens slightly and another part of us gets the opportunity to speak.
There was something wonderfully liberating about this idea for both of us because we live in a culture that has become remarkably efficient at turning almost everything into productivity.
If we write, perhaps it should become content.
If we paint, perhaps we should sell it.
If we discover a hobby, perhaps we should start an Instagram account about it.
If we learn something useful, perhaps we should turn it into a course.
And while there is nothing wrong with creating businesses around the things we love, perhaps we also need some things that don’t have to become anything.
Something you make badly.
Something nobody sees.
Something you do simply because you lose track of time while doing it.
Something with no audience, no algorithm, no business model and no measurable outcome.
Sometimes the point of creating something isn’t the thing you end up holding in your hands.
Sometimes the thing being created is you.
Create before you consume
Perhaps the smallest idea Claudia shared during our conversation was also one of the most practical.
She keeps a small art book nearby and has deliberately started reaching for that and a marker before reaching for her phone in the morning, so rather than beginning the day immediately entering everybody else’s thoughts, lives, opinions, photographs and demands, she makes something first.
Nothing elaborate.
No perfect two-hour morning routine.
No requirement to produce something beautiful.
Just a few minutes of creating before consuming.
Claudia described this tiny shift, together with joining Substack and spending more time in a different kind of online environment, as something that has genuinely changed the way her brain feels.
We loved the simplicity of it.
Create before you consume.
What might happen if your own thoughts got the first five minutes of your attention tomorrow morning before you handed your mind over to the rest of the internet?
It seems like an experiment worth trying.
Maybe we finally found our corner of the internet
Eventually, inevitably, we came back to Substack and discovered just how similar our experiences of the platform have been.
Neither of us arrived because we desperately wanted another social media platform to maintain, and both of us know what it feels like to spend enormous amounts of energy trying to understand algorithms, strategies, posting schedules and whatever format the internet has decided we should all be creating this week.
Claudia spoke particularly openly about the money she had spent over the years on social media coaches and programmes, hoping somebody would finally provide the formula that would make everything click, when perhaps the bigger problem was that she was trying to force herself to show up consistently in environments she didn’t naturally enjoy.
Then she discovered Substack almost accidentally and something felt different.
She could write something long without worrying that somebody would tell her it needed to be shorter.
She could find interesting people and actually talk to them.
She could arrange virtual coffee dates.
She could discover artists and writers and people having thoughtful conversations about midlife, creativity, reinvention and next chapters.
She could open the app and find something that made her want to go away and make something herself rather than closing it forty-five minutes later wondering where the time had gone.
And perhaps most importantly, she could be herself.
At one point Claudia said something that we think applies far beyond Substack:
You can’t force what you’re not naturally drawn to.
That doesn’t mean we should never stretch ourselves.
Claudia was literally stretching herself by doing her first Live as we spoke.
But there is an enormous difference between stretching yourself inside a space that energises you and continually forcing yourself to fit somewhere that drains you.
For both of us, Substack increasingly feels like a corner of the internet where we can experiment, write, talk, create, connect and follow our curiosity without feeling that every single thing has to become a perfectly executed content strategy.
And perhaps that is why relationships seem to form differently here too.
What if the best Substack strategy is simply to be a good human?
Towards the end of our conversation, Sarah asked Claudia what she would tell somebody who had just arrived on Substack, published a few things and was now sitting there wondering why nobody seemed to be reading them.
Her answer was immediate.
Engage and connect.
Read other people’s work because you are interested in what they have to say.
Leave thoughtful comments.
Reply when somebody comments on your work.
Follow the people who fascinate you.
Send the message.
Arrange the coffee.
Ask the question.
Share something because you genuinely believe somebody else should read it.
And perhaps most importantly, don’t enter every conversation silently calculating whether the person on the other side of the screen might eventually become a client.
Claudia said something very simple during the Live: “I’m really building relationships here.”
We think that might be one of the most useful pieces of Substack advice in this entire article.
Because perhaps we have spent so many years being taught how to build audiences that we have forgotten how to build relationships.
An audience can become a number on a screen.
A relationship requires curiosity, generosity, attention and participation.
And strangely enough, when we stop obsessing about growing an audience and start becoming genuinely interested in the people around us, growth often begins to happen anyway.
Perhaps it all comes back to participation
We began this conversation talking about creativity and somehow ended up talking about life, visibility, business, community, technology and relationships, but when we looked back at everything we had covered, the same word kept appearing.
Participation.
Participating in your creativity instead of worrying whether you are creative enough.
Participating in your ideas instead of waiting until they are perfectly formed.
Participating in your relationships instead of collecting contacts.
Participating in your community instead of publishing and disappearing.
Participating in your next chapter instead of believing you need to have every detail figured out before you begin.
Participating in your own life instead of continually watching everybody else live theirs.
And perhaps that is ultimately what Claudia means when she talks about allowing your life to become your art.
Art is not something happening somewhere else, made by people more creative than you.
Your life is already the raw material.
The question is what you choose to do with it.
6 things we’re taking away from our conversation
1. Pay more attention to your own life.
Try Claudia’s question for yourself: If my life was my lover, what would it say about the attention I’m giving it? Notice where you have become an observer rather than a participant and choose one small thing you can actually do, experience or begin rather than saving it for “one day”.
2. Ask three people what they think your superpower is.
Ask people who know you well what comes naturally to you, what they would come to you for and what they think you do particularly well, then pay close attention to the things you immediately want to dismiss because they seem too easy. They are easy because they’re yours.
3. Create something before you consume something.
Before reaching for your phone tomorrow morning, give yourself five minutes with a notebook, sketchbook, journal, camera, pen or whatever feels natural to you. It doesn’t have to become content and nobody else ever has to see it.
4. Make something with absolutely no commercial value.
Not every interest needs to become a business and not every creative act needs to become content. Give yourself permission to paint badly, doodle, write privately, take photographs, make a collage or do something purely because you enjoy the process.
5. Allow yourself to be seen before you feel completely ready.
Claudia didn’t wait until she had mastered Substack Live before joining one; her first experience was this conversation. If there is something you’ve been waiting to feel confident enough to do, consider whether doing it might actually be how the confidence arrives.
6. On Substack, don’t publish and disappear.
Read, comment, respond, share, message people, have conversations and become part of the community you are hoping will eventually become part of yours. Approach people with curiosity rather than calculation and remember that behind every subscriber number is an actual human being.
Continue the conversation with us
If something in this conversation has made you think differently about creativity, participation or the relationship you have with your own life, we’d love you to continue exploring it with us.
Claudia writes about creativity, expression and what happens when we begin treating our lives as our greatest creative work, and you can join her at Let It Be Your Art:
Subscribe to Claudia Whitney on Substack
Sarah writes at Starting From Zero about starting something new, starting again and building a life, business and authority platform from everything you already know, rather than believing a new chapter means leaving everything that came before behind:
Start here with Starting From Zero
And as part of Substack September, Sarah will be continuing the challenge to go Live every weekday throughout the month, creating more space for conversations like this one and discovering what can happen when we worry a little less about perfectly polished content and spend a little more time actually talking to each other.
We’d love you to join us.
But before you go, perhaps there is one question worth sitting with for a little longer:
If your life really was your art, what would you create next?
Sarah + Claudia
