Creative Resilience Week 2: Experimenting like a Shapeshifter
You are not your self-image. Try things unseriously!
Welcome to week 2 of SEE YOU’s 31 Days of Creative Resilience, where we’ll gently tend to our creativity during the month of January ❄️ To unlock the full list of daily prompts for each week, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.
Looking for other ways to tend to your creativity this winter? Check out my seasonal companion zine Winter Practice, full of prompts and rituals for January-March 2026.
Week 2: Experimenting like a Shapeshifter
According to today’s calculations, we are a mere 3% into the year and I already want to change my 2026 vision board.
Vision boards are touted as a powerful manifestation tool. You mix and match images of yourself, your goals, inspirational phrases, places to travel, and things to create. You place the vision board somewhere visible where you can constantly be reminded of your future dream life and envision it as already true.
Unfortunately, my brain resists static destinations and goals. I struggle to enjoy “dream life” writing exercises (e.g. write a day in your life ten years from now in excruciating detail). All of these manifestation techniques rub against my overwhelming desire for surprise. I want to toss all the seeds I have to plant and see what grows, unstrategic though it may be.
Don’t get me wrong, I still love making vibe-based vision boards. I create them not only every year, but every season! I treat these moodboards as an experimental snapshot in time, something to inspire me but nothing that I take too seriously.
Whether you have a rock solid vision of your year ahead, or you’re feeling tossed and adrift by the state of the world, you can benefit from adopting the Shapeshifter’s unserious, experimental mindset.
When you practice different methods this week to break out of the usual way of creating, you remind yourself that you are not your self-image. You are not your emotions. You are not your regrets or your future plans. You are just a being in this world, playing in the sandbox and seeing what unfolds.
Even as we regret who we haven’t become, we value who we are. We seem to find meaning in what’s never happened. Our self-portraits use a lot of negative space.
“What If You Could Do It All Over” by Joshua Rothman
Do these prompts day by day, or pick a few of your favorites to do over the weekend. I recommend documenting your responses in a notebook, dedicating a page for every prompt.
I’ll be sharing my own responses in the SEE YOU community chat for paid subscribers, and would love for you to share your image responses there as well!
Prompt for January 11
In design and illustration, negative space is the portion of the page left unmarked. While negative space is often overlooked by the text or drawings that fill up the page, the Japanese concept “yohaku no bi” honors the beauty and calm of negative space.
How can you create something on the blank page that honors negative space? Think of John Cage’s 4’33”, which held silence in esteem by giving it the container of a song.
If you’re stuck on ideas, you can create a frame for negative space, make a negative space drawing, or combine negative space portrayed through different mediums.