Rowan Blake

Writes for Inner Light Daily

About

I am a freelance illustrator in Portland, twenty-nine years old. I work alone from home, which means no commute, and also a lot of hours with nobody around to interrupt my own thoughts. That was roughly the condition I was in when things shifted.

Two years ago, partway through a freelance drought that had gone on longer than felt normal, I woke up one ordinary morning and the volume on everything had been turned up. I still do not have a clean word for what that was. It did not feel like a breakdown, and it did not feel like a crisis I could point to and name. It felt like waking up twice in the same day.

The year after that was mostly trial and error. Meditation apps I deleted and reinstalled more than once. A breathwork class at a studio a few blocks from my apartment. A crystal shop two blocks the other direction, where I bought things I still cannot fully justify. A sound bath that made me cry in front of a room of strangers, mortifying in the moment and genuinely something afterward. Journals filled faster than I had shelf space for, and enough midnight YouTube rabbit holes that my search history looks unhinged.

Paloma, a friend from art school who lives somewhere else now, was the first person I told any of it. She mostly listened and sent me research on creativity and the brain instead of advice, which turned out to be exactly the right amount of help. Talking to her, and then writing things down on my own, is how I started trusting that something real was happening instead of just something strange.

These days the practice is smaller than it started out. Part meditation, part journaling, part just paying closer attention to ordinary mornings than I used to. Some of what I tried that first year stuck around. Most of it did not, and I write about both kinds here, because the failures tell you almost as much as the wins do.

What I actually do is document my own experience as it happens, try things other people recommend, and report back honestly. I have no training in psychology, no certification in energy work, no teaching credential of any kind. Every piece here is one illustrator's real session, real practice, and real result or non-result, written in first person because that is the only vantage point I actually have.

Posts by Rowan Blake

Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you purchase through them, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only share tools and programs I have personally used in my own practice. Commission does not change what ends up here. If something did not work or felt overhyped, I say so.