I told y’all that I rebuke the word “witch” as a joke, but you know what I REALLY rebuke? The starving artist.
I’ve never worn it, and I don’t accept it as some rite of passage you have to survive in order to be taken seriously as an artist.
But I’ve watched plenty of people wear it. I know exactly what it looks like to sit on a mountain of raw genius and still be completely undone by the logistics of existing — rent, groceries, the small humiliating math of being alive. And it is almost never a talent problem. Most artists understand the act of creation and were never taught a single thing about business. I happen to live at the intersection of both (there has quite literally, never been a moment where I didn’t get paid from my art) and I’m devoted to helping y’all make some actual money.
So, you’re a multi-passionate, multi-hyphenate creator. A writer, a designer, a healer, an artist, a strategist, maybe all of it inside the same week. You’ve lived through different creative eras, picked up knowledge from worlds that have no business touching each other, and mastered separate modalities that all feel connected even though you could not explain the thread to save your life.
And yet you’re tired. Because the dream was never just to create. The dream was to create freely.
Especially now, when traditional employment feels increasingly disconnected from anything resembling the human spirit. So many people are looking for the exit — decades spent building somebody else’s vision, trading time and energy for a paycheck, hoping there’s something left at the end of the day to give to yourself. Usually there isn’t.
This is why so many creatives turned toward entrepreneurship. Freelancers, coaches, consultants, content creators, business owners. They decided that if the system wasn’t going to make room for their gifts, they’d build their own room. And there’s something real in that.
But there’s a trap. A lot of people leave traditional employment and rebuild the exact same labor model in a cuter outfit. You own the business, but you’re still the employee. You’re the CEO and the marketing department, the sales team, customer service, the content, the product itself. (The creator economy is actually downstream of the transition into a post-laborious society, where human value stops being measured by labor output.)
You’re tired of promoting yourself into the void, performing for an algorithm, getting on camera when you have nothing to say, cold pitching in DMs, quietly praying somebody likes your work enough to click a link and buy something. And when they do — $10. $20. Maybe $50 if the moon is right and Mercury isn’t retrograde.
And listen, there’s something deeply validating about money that comes from your gifts. That first moment of someone saw what I made and decided it was worth their resources. I’m not going to pretend that isn’t a feeling. But the excitement burns off fast, because a single transaction cannot hold up a life. So you end up in the loop. Make the thing, promote the thing, find the next person to convince, repeat until you’re a husk.
The problem is not that you lack talent. The problem is that you were taught to treat your genius like a pile of separate products instead of a living ecosystem.
You’ve fought so hard against being reduced — against the rigid structure that would flatten you into one legible thing — that you’ve been hiding out, waiting until you figure out how to package yourself just right. Meanwhile you’re watching people with a fraction of your skill and all of the audacity sail straight past you, hitting numbers you can’t look at directly, doing things you could do in your sleep. The only real difference between you and them is that they made themselves legible.
You resisted the box so hard that you removed yourself from the vicinity of the box entirely. When you could have been sitting on top of it.
You’ve been building a museum. What you actually need is a cathedral.
“Okay Mikayla, what the fuck are you talking about?”
Fair. Who am I to stand here and tell you how to structure your empire?
Growing up, my mom handed me that phrase I’m sure everybody’s heard a thousand times: If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Which sounds naive to a lot of people, because we’ve been conditioned to believe work has to hurt in order to count. That struggle is the receipt. That making real money from your gifts is a lottery a handful of people win.
But I took it literally. Not because loving your work makes every day effortless — there are slow seasons, the creative fog rolls in, there are mornings I question what I’m even doing with my life. The difference is between working for something you believe in and surviving inside something that eats you. When you’re building your own thing, the energy you pour out comes back around. It is easy to remain fired up when it’s something you thoroughly love.
I’ve built my entire life outside of traditional employment. I’m a full-time nomadic creative, typing this from a high-rise condo in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I am my own proof of concept.
This is exactly what I want for the multi-passionate creatives in my ecosystem.
You do not have to force yourself into a tiny box just because the world understands categories better than it understands complexity. You don’t have to choose between writer or designer, healer or strategist, artist or mystic. But you do need infrastructure around your vision. The resistance to the box was never the problem. The absence of architecture was.
The goal was never just to make money from your art, but rather to build something people can walk into — something they can be inside of and contribute to, because they believe in the world you’re making. Your audience shouldn’t feel like they’re purchasing a product off you. They should feel like they’re leaving an offering toward the preservation of your vision, your version of heaven on earth. You are an extension of God, and God has never been one size fits all.
The Exhibit and the Immersion
We live in a digital age where anybody can create and publish and monetize an idea. Most artists stop at the surface. They build museums.
A museum displays things. You enter, you look, you appreciate, you learn something, you leave — and the art stays an object separate from the person experiencing it. That’s how most creatives have structured their businesses without ever deciding to. Make the thing, post the thing, hope somebody connects with it, move on to the next thing.
So every piece becomes its own exhibit. Every offer fights for attention alone, every launch requires a fresh push, every product sits in isolation from the vision that produced it. The work can be beautiful and still have no world holding it together. That’s the starving artist trap: an endless production of exhibits with no institution around them.
Cathedrals were built differently. A cathedral was never just a building, it was an entire world. The architecture, the music, the stained glass, the rituals, the craftsmanship, the symbolism, the stories passed down between people who would never meet each other — every element served the same central vision. Nothing was in there at random. Every detail pointed back to the same source.
People did not enter a cathedral to look at the walls. They entered to experience a reality.
Your art is an extension of how YOU experience reality. Your art is your spirituality. It’s how you perceive God, run through the specific instrument of you — nobody else is going to render it the way you do, which is the entire point of you existing at all. But spirituality by itself isn’t something anybody else can enter. It’s yours. It lives in your body. Somebody can admire it from across the room and still have no way in.
The cathedral is the religion you build around it. The structure, the language, the rituals, the way people gather and the thing they gather around — that’s what turns your private perception of God into something another person can stand inside of and feel for themselves.
When somebody perceives God through your work and likes what resonates there, they stop wanting to purchase an object and take it home. They want to keep it alive. The money stops being a transaction and becomes a contribution toward the preservation of the thing. That’s just what people do when they find something worth protecting.
Your work needs stone.
Your body of work cannot stay a collection of things you made. It has to become a world people can step inside of. And when you build that way, your multi-passionate nature stops reading as scattered interests and starts revealing itself as a complete ecosystem, which is what it always was. You just didn’t have a floor plan.
Your book isn’t separate from your podcast, and neither one is separate from your readings, your philosophy, or whatever you make when you’re avoiding all of it. Every medium becomes another expression of the same central truth. Everything belongs to something greater, which means nothing you make has to justify its own existence in isolation ever again.
Stop presenting. Start institutionalizing.
If you want your gifts to generate income without you trading your time and presence for every single dollar, you have to stop thinking like someone presenting their work and start thinking like someone building an institution. You keep breathing into it until it can stand up without you in the room.
You don’t need another marketing calendar. You need an architectural blueprint.
The goal was never to force you into a niche. The goal is to reveal the architecture that was already there. The thing you keep hiding isn’t too big for a container — it just hasn’t met the right one yet.
We are entering a new era of creation. Artists are no longer producing content for consumption. We’re building domains, making worlds that people can orient themselves within. What you build right now, in the name of what you serve, is the architecture of what comes next.
So stop building temporary exhibits for an algorithm to scroll past. Build the monument your life’s work has been asking you for. Because what you build in honor of what you serve is the only proof that any of it was real.
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