On Self-Knowledge + Starting Over

How to make time for joy to be the form you become.

Jul 26, 2025

Keeping Creative Time
it’s never to late to be the creative person you want to be 💖

Left: Taking up space with star pose. Right: Balancing in tree pose on the sand of Surf City, New Jersey. Both: The author doing her yoga thang, thanks to Yoga Bohemia Studio, July 2025.

“What the bodily form depends on is breath (chi) and what breath relies upon is form. When the breath is perfect, the form is perfect (too)”

—Chinese adage from 700 AD

Dear Creative Friends,
There are two times per year when we collectively aim to start again—January and September. But what happens when you are forced to start again outside of those culturally structured times?

How do you create the necessary systems and structures to move yourself forward?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as someone who is new to entrepreneurship. When you work a salaried job, it’s your employer’s role to create the systems and the structure in which you perform your job. But when you work for yourself, you must build the form in which to function. Burnout recovery taught me that the same is true for your life. It forced me to look—often for the first time—at how the ways I was operating in the world didn’t align with how I wanted to show up, the work I wanted to bring forth, and the joy I wanted to share.

It took time for me to accept the truth, that my current systems and structures were actually working against me, before I could begin to make the necessary small changes to work toward new goals.

Those small changes, I’m happy to report, do add up over time. It was that system reboot and structural realignment that supported me as I gradually moved beyond burnout, and have now gotten to a place where I facilitate workshops and coach creatives in how to let go of what isn’t working and rewrite the code that powers their systems. It all starts with finding the tools that work for you to pry open the mind and get access to some basic self knowledge.

I call this your Creative Essentials.

The things that you need in your daily and weekly life in order to feel . . . like the creative you that you want to be with. Another way to think about it is, if you were dating yourself, how would you want to feel with that most creative version of you?

I want to feel at home in my body. One of my creative essentials, that helps me access this is yoga. I’ve been practicing since age sixteen, when I first attended a yoga class at the YMCA in my hometown. Yoga, I learned during my burnout recovery, is one of the constants in my life that I’ve used to help me return to myself, especially during times of great upheaval (like the Covid-19 pandemic). It reminds me that my body is mine and that I receive pleasure from awakening the energy inside of it to create shapes and move the breath, and if I’m able, calm the mind.

The author in a warrior two pose on the shores of Surf City, New Jersey after a early morning yoga class with Yoga Bohemia.

I’m delighted to share, that next month I am further committing to my relationship with yoga by enrolling in a nine month (200-hour) yoga teacher training at West Asheville Yoga to deepen my personal practice and become certified to teach. The training will provide the structure I’ve been craving as I develop my own system to further integrate a yoga practice into my daily life.

I’m already dreaming up the possibility of sharing yoga and journaling (one of my other creative essentials), along with yoga flow practices specifically designed for busy, stressed out creatives. Embarking on this path, feels like a true homecoming, after years of DIY’ing my burnout recovery to reclaim my body from the harmful effects of chronic anxiety, panic, and trauma.

Having made peace with my mind, I want to meet joy in my body.

In yoga teacher training, I’ll be deepening my asana (movement) practice but especially the pranayama (breath). The breath is where all life begins. So if you think there are only two times per year to start again, or you are forced to face a new beginning, remember that you already know how to do this.

Every breath we breathe, is the body restarting the cycle.

And that’s what this week’s story is all about—how we start again when we’ve been lost for awhile. And how we make time for cultivating the very things that speak to our soul, that keep us joyful on the inside.

Enjoy reading, and take care y’all,
<3Faye

This Is How You Start Again, When You Don’t Have Time for That

This essay was first published in this newsletter on August 4, 2024.

Too busy or too tired to read? Or just want to hear my human voice? Check out the audio version.

0:00

-6:10

Carol, age 50, visiting Asheville, NC, from Queens, New York, makes time to pose for a photo about their shirt, and unknowingly, facilitates writing from a writer who doesn’t have time to write. Photo by the author, 2024.

Meet Carol! Carol is a New Yorker visiting Asheville from Queens, whose shirt I spotted while getting off the bus this morning on my way into my cowork office. Like a hawk finds a vole in the wild, a clockmaker’s daughter is trained to look for messages in the world that reflect our complicated relationships with time.

As we were about to walk past one another on Broadway Street, I felt deeply connected to this stranger and the message they wore across their chest. “I love your shirt,” I said. And then taking things a bit further I asked, “Can I take your photo in it?”

I’ve seen similar shirts before, the kind that show a rebelliousness to the constraints of time. Illuminating the wearer’s defiant resistance to a force that doesn’t seem to care about us. It flies by. We get old. Time is lost, forgotten, wasted, silent, spent—and my new favorite, empty. Is anyone over the age of seven actually friends with time, I mean really? Don’t pretend for me now. Every second we’re all one tick closer to the end.

Now Carol, age 50, tells me after the photo is taken, that they are visiting Asheville as a stopover city between one New Kids on the Block concert in Charlotte, and another in Virginia Beach, before hitting tour stops in Gilford, New Hampshire; Mansfield, Massachusetts; and Saratoga Springs, New York. Clearly, Carol does not have time to not do what brings her joy. (I mean, I haven’t heard someone geek out over NKOTB since the last time I wore pink jelly shoes. And if Carol can make the time to drive around the country for the joy of music, then what’s stopping the rest of us?)

Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, I found my willingness to start talking to a stranger on the street about time to bring me immense joy. I love talking to people! I love talking to people about subjects I care deeply about. It’s probably what I miss the most about working as a librarian in the public library. Books are a gateway topic that lead to learning so much more about a person. Time, I’m finding, is another.

And after Carol posed for a photo in front of my cowork office, I proceeded to tell her—in what felt like the most clear and succinct words and phrases I’ve ever been able to form into sentences about my work—what I write about in this newsletter, or what I’m trying to write about, or what I do write about: How we can reclaim control over our time; heal, find and keep our creative spark; and help repair our relationship with the clock—a machine we invented to connect human civilization, not productively burn it all to the ground.

In a country where 41 percent of Americans continue to suffer from burnout—even after taking time off for rest and relaxation—and where nearly half of Gen Z and younger millennials report feeling drained, with women, like me, experiencing higher levels of burnout than men, it’s no wonder our relationship with time is negative. Our short lives have been lived chronically stressed and pooped out. We thought the pandemic and its aftershocks were our breaking point. And yet, we’re expected to keep going on fumes until we retire or die—whichever comes first.

I don’t have time for that.

Available for iOS and Android

This is How You Start Again

You start again with breath, with water, then food—in that order. After my encounter with Carol, and her friend who I failed to ask for a name (hi, Carol’s friend!), I dropped my bags at my cowork desk, and made a beeline for the kitchen, hoping to find day-old everything bagels from the new community coordinator’s welcome brunch. With a few flecks of water, I knew I could give this bagel a second life before I downed it with scallion and carrot cream cheese, and slices of Kirby cucumber I bought last week at the farm stand. While the toaster performed its magic, I filled a glass of water, then made myself an iced matcha latte because I don’t drink coffee (even though they have really fancy coffee here at Cowork that smells like something I wish I could drink, but my body is like, “No. You feel like a cat that just ate a live wire when you drink that kind of caffeine. But eat all the vegan coffee ice cream you like, love.)

With cups and plate filled, I zipped back to my desk to grab a stack of books, notebooks, and files that I always think I need, and then don’t open. Books, paper, notes, they form a security blanket around my creative space, a companionship.

Some people have dogs. I have books and journals.

All it took was this everything bagel, two photos, and New Yorker from Queens to get this writer to write.

Before I sat down and got too comfy, I snapped the photo above. Two photos in one morning, that’s all it took to get my butt in this chair and my fingers to this keyboard.

That’s all it took! After another three months . . . Woman Wins Battle Over Writer’s Resistance when Faced with a New Yorker and a Bagel.

And didn’t I ask in my last essay, where I could find a decent bagel in Appalachia? What’s next—a towering basket of fish and chips? A flavorful whole milk ricotta? Sweet lobster meat? Fresh grilled okra? The perfect peach pie?

Bring it on. I’m a hungry writer in search of keeping her creative time.

Thanks for reading Keeping Creative Time with J. Faye D'Avanza! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Until Next Time

Remember, it’s never to late to be the creative person you want to be.

Take care y’all, and thanks for being here with me. Let’s cheer—to time!

And before you go, enjoy a song from the playlist I call . . . Odes to Time.

New Kids on the Block —“The Right Stuff”—Hangin’ Tough, 1988