Growing Up Without Growing Cold
The different stages of a creative life, and what it means to stop performing while you’re living it
Over the weekend, I was going through old notes in my phone about what to write about this week, what theme related to the outdoors to explore, but - in all honesty - I was stuck in the past a bit. I stumbled across old songs and expedition journals I wrote. So, it got me thinking a lot about my early 20s, how my career has shifted from epic, dirty expeditions to larger, cleaner campaigns. In going through all my old photos and journals, I realized I tried really hard to make it look like my life and job were cool.
I am twenty-nine now. I’m married, I own a home in a town I love, I have a life that, for years, felt far enough away to belong to someone else.
It’s cool, but I’m not trying as hard to make it look like that.
So much of my twenties were spent on the road that it became difficult to picture any future with walls that stayed the same color. But, to be fair, my wife likes to paint so our walls don’t stay too long in the same color now anyways.
Still, home, for a long time, was not a fixed place so much as a series of returns between departures. Airports, rental cars, trailheads, motel rooms, campsites, editing on laptops in strange corners of a borrowed space. I got used to the feeling of movement. Not just physically, but emotionally too. The road gave me a kind of temporary freedom from definition. As long as I was in motion, there was always another version of myself just ahead. The next trip, the next project, the next city, the next film. I didn’t spend a more than 30 consecutive days at my place in Boulder, Colorado for all of 2020 - 2025.
That life taught me a lot. It taught me how little you actually need, it taught me how alive a person can feel when they are cold and tired and standing somewhere beautiful before sunrise. It taught me how to work through discomfort, how to make things in imperfect conditions, how to see story in the middle of chaos. It taught me that some of the best days still end the same way they did when I was a kid: dirty, spent, sunburned, hungry, and very certain that you had lived them fully.
I am still grateful for that version of my life. I think I always will be.
But there was another side to it too, one I couldn’t fully name at the time. Constant movement can disguise a person from themselves. You can spend years in pursuit and call it freedom, when some part of it’s also a reluctance to be still long enough to hear what your life is actually saying.
That is one of the things that has changed for me as I’ve gotten older, though older is still funny to say at twenty-nine. I have become less interested in performing a creative life and more interested in inhabiting one.
In my earlier years, so much of creativity carried a faint audience with it, even when no one was physically there. I don’t just mean social media, though that certainly played its part. I mean the deeper internal performance of wanting to seem like I was the kind of person who was really doing it - thriving as an adventure filmmaker. I wanted to be really adventurous and genuinely committed. I wanted to prove (to myself and others) that what I did for work was interesting. I was all in. I think a lot of young creatives know this feeling, even if they do not say it aloud. You are not only making the work, you are curating the mythology around the self that makes the work. You create your identity as a part of that work.
Travel fed that mythology beautifully and so did risk. I sometimes prioritized sleeping badly, driving too far, and saying yes to wild things because they sounded like good stories later. There was definitely joy in that but there was also a subtle pressure in it too. A feeling that life had to keep looking expansive in order to remain meaningful.
What I didn’t understand then was that maturity, at least for me, wouldn’t look like becoming less creative. It would look like becoming less performative inside my own creativity.
In my filmmaking, I no longer feel the same urge to prove that I can do everything, endure everything, be everything on every project. I care less about appearing impressive and more about making something I’m proud of. I’m no longer seduced by complexity for its own sake. I am less interested in making work that announces its effort and more interested in making work that feels impactful and memorable.
Writing, maybe more than anything, has become a place where I notice this shift away from performance the most clearly. When I was younger, I often wrote from the edge of experience, trying to pin down a life that still felt just beyond my understanding. There was a little bit of theater in my “profound” and overly eloquent wordplay, if I’m honest. The language wanted to carry the full weight of the life and I wanted the writing to feel grandiose.
Now I am less interested in sounding like someone who has lived and more interested in simply telling the truth of what living has actually felt like.
That truth of my current creative life is smaller than whatever performance I gave before but it’s also so much richer. It includes the beauty of marriage, the dignity of owning a home and decorating it, genuinely caring that the house plants are getting enough water and taking our dog on strolls around the neighborhood. It includes waking up in a life that once seemed impossibly adult and realizing adulthood is not some finished condition after all. It’s just another landscape, one you learn by moving through it.
I think maturity as a creative is less about becoming more serious and more about becoming more who you’re meant to be. It’s learning how to carry that younger self forward without asking him to run the entire show. It’s knowing that the life you have now may be slower in some ways, more rooted, less improvised, but still deeply meaningful.
I don’t need every project to prove who I am now. I don’t need every photograph to broaden my identity to the world. I don’t need every paragraph to perform intelligence or adventure or relevance. Some of the pressure has come off and that, in itself, feels like growth.
The work is still important to me, for sure. Maybe more than ever now that I feel like I’m creating from such a peaceful place. Creative pursuits may always be the clearest way I know to pay attention to myself. I’m happy, I take a photo. I’m reflective, I write. I’m excited, I make a film.
Careers have stages and so does creativity. Some stages are fueled by hunger, some by experimentation, some by movement, some by stillness, some by the need to become and some by the relief of no longer needing to.
I’m beginning to understand that this stage of life, quieter in some ways and fuller in others, is not the end of something wild. It’s just a different form of adventure.
If growing up means losing the performance and keeping the wonder, then I think I can live with that. Maybe that is what maturing as a creative really is but, who knows, I’m still in my 20s ;)