An Inspired Chat with Arcadia Page

We recently had the chance to connect with Arcadia Page and have shared our conversation below.

Arcadia , it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
First I wake up and do some stretches while in bed. I have chronic pain, so doing simple stretches in the morning really helps to soothe my body before I start my day. Then I check my email (I know this is considered a “bad habit” but I don’t get that much email, so there’s nothing there to stress me out), and then if I had any interesting dreams overnight, I write them down. If I don’t have time to write out an entire dream, I’ll just jot down the main things I remember from it and fill in the details later.

After that I get out of bed, make some breakfast and tea, and pull out an index card where I write out all tasks I want to do for the day. I call this card my “inbox.” It’s just a brain dump of stuff I think I need to do. Then I review what I wrote and rewrite the things that I need to do today to a new card labeled “Today.” I try to limit the things I put on that card to about 4 to 6 items at a time.

I’ve learned that everything that I want to do today doesn’t need to be done today. So focusing in on only the things that need to be done reduces a lot of pressure. After creating my todo list, I run the dishwasher, and then get working on the things I want to do for the day.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Arcadia Page, and I am an intuitive writer/artist. Through sharing my dreams, intuitive insights, and daily creative life, I help others to reconnect to their inner creative voice and universe. I do so mainly through my Substack newsletter, nonfiction books, and blog where I share my thoughts and stories on intuitively discovering different parts of myself as a creative and how that impacts my process and business. In these spaces I invite readers to slow down enough to feel their imagination again and remember their own creative depth.

Recently, I’ve also started a tech podcast, entitled “Random Musings on Creative Tech,” where I talk about how I use tech tools along with my creative practice. I also have a membership called “The Listening Library” which I’m working towards shaping into being an ongoing “studio access” space.

In the past I mainly positioned myself as being a productivity writer for INFPs, HSPs (Highly Sensitive People), and Multi-passionate creatives, but I realized that defining myself this tightly really stifled my self-expression. So over the past year I’ve made a slight pivot to mainly putting myself out there as an intuitive writer and artist. This shift is a lot more freeing and true to me, while allowing me to still have room for the things that I’ve written and created in the past.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. Who were you before the world told you who you had to be?
What immediately comes to my mind is what I was like from ages 4 to 6.

I loved fashion so much. I owned a pair of hot pink, star-shaped sunglasses, and when one of the lenses popped out, I decided to pop out the other lens too and wear them like that. This was surprisingly attention grabbing, and when I went to stores with my mom, people would be like, “Look at that little girl.” I also really liked talking to strangers and telling them about my life. I talked incessantly.

I also enjoyed coloring, drawing, and having my mom read stories to me over and over again. I loved looking at picture books and imagining myself being able to draw like that one day. I loved dancing, and after learning how to perform splits and turns in ballet class, I would do that whenever and where ever I felt like it. When my parents had friends over for dinner I would entertain everyone with my flexibility tricks. I learned to read and write early, so as soon as I could write, I was writing stories and creating these little handmade books. I also was a voracious learner, but fortunately I had some kind teachers in elementary school who would give me extra books.

I’m pretty much the same, but I’m way more selective with my words, I’m not nearly as physically flexible at all, and I listen to audio books instead of having my mom read to me, lol. But I do love to dance, and even with my chronic pain, that’s my favorite way to get in some cardio. I feel like I’m at the point of my life where the precision of being an adult is softening into the more flexible view of life I had as a child. Since embracing more of who I am as an intuitive writer and artist, I approach my everyday life with more wonder than I have in the past.

What have been the defining wounds of your life—and how have you healed them?
I have two major defining wounds in my life. The first one is centered around enoughness–the feeling that what I do isn’t good enough in general. The second wound surrounds my self-expression. I am an intense person, and even when I’m quiet, my face shows everything, and when I speak my voice shows everything. I laugh loud and cry hard.

Stepping into understanding how I work as an intuitive writer and artist has really helped me to heal my wounds around self-expression. On my blog, I share some of my favorite nocturnal dreams, and by doing so, I’ve removed myself from the idea that self-expression must be perfect. Dreams are messy and beyond our conscious control. By sharing these experiences in creative ways, I’ve removed myself from having to perform creative expression to simply sharing what I’ve seen. This has opened me up embracing the irregularities and strangeness of my creativity without shame. It just is what it is, and that can still carry a lot of power.

Through sharing my nocturnal dreams, I’ve also come to appreciate that if something I create is misunderstood, I can still repackage that same message and redeliver it in another form. There are plenty more vessels that can hold what I have to share. It also helps to focus on those who love the way I express myself. I’ve had plenty of friends tell me that one of their favorite things about me is my laugh. I’ve also come to appreciate that my openness of expression helps people to trust me because I really can’t hide anything.

When it comes to my wound of enoughness, healing that required addressing multiple layers.

Since I’m also a productivity writer, one would expect that I would be all about getting more done and hustling, but actually I’m very anti-hustle. Much of my productivity writing centers around avoiding burnout because I’ve experienced so much burnout myself. So the first part of meeting this wound has been removing myself from mindsets surrounding productivity that encourage work over caring for one’s well-being and equating one’s worth with how much they can do.

I have chronic pain so I can’t do as much as other people can, but yet my presence–my laugh, my observations, my awareness–are enough. I don’t have to physically do all the time to meaningful or enough.

Another thing that has helped me to heal this wound is extending deep compassion and forgiveness towards myself on days when I can’t do or when I find myself struggling to measure up. It’s okay to struggle. Struggling means that I’m trying. I feel like the whole feeling around not being enough stems from not showing love towards the fragility of my own humanity and compassion towards living in an unpredictable world.

And then the last thing that has helped me to heal from this is just to accept my natural pace of doing things and own it. Everyone just doesn’t work in same way, so why should I expect myself to work like everyone else? I don’t rush myself to create content, write books, make art or anything. I let my projects come to a natural conclusion and then I share it. By not pressuring myself and going with my natural creative workflow, I feel like I’m enough all the time. There has been so many projects that I’ve looked back on feeling deeply happy that I didn’t rush it into being.

Sure, so let’s go deeper into your values and how you think. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
I’m a writer, blogger, and a creative, so there are quite a few that come to mind.

The idea that to be a productive writer, you must have a “butt-in-chair” work ethic annoys me. I’ve been blogging consistently for over ten years and published over ten books, and the reason why I’ve been able to write so much consistently without burnout is that I simply don’t work in a way that can cause burnout. I don’t mentally chain myself to a desk to write. This may sound a bit sacrilegious, but honestly, I just write when I feel like it. And because I write when I feel like it, I do it a lot all the time, and it rarely ever feels like work. If I was more strict with myself, writing would become work, and then I wouldn’t be nearly as productive.

Another thing that I don’t think is true and is becoming even less true with rise of AI, is that as a blogger, I have to focus on delivering information. That’s why for years many blogs have focused on delivering “How-to’s” and informational articles. The problem now is that any machine can generate information. I can get a “How-to” from Chatgpt. But what I can’t get from AI is the personal experience of a human. I think when it comes to article writing, now is the time to back away from purely delivering information, and instead deliver information that is deeply related to one’s personal thoughts, insights, feelings, and experiences.

In the online business space that I work in, besides the idea that you have to publish content daily and have a freebie to grow your email list (I’ve found that it’s not necessary at all to post daily or to have a freebie if you don’t want to), I’ve also found this idea going around that you don’t want to talk too much about yourself or should be ashamed if you do want to talk about yourself.

I want other online entrepreneurs to know that yes, I want to hear you talk about yourself. No, I don’t want to hear you go on and on about how great you are. That’s no fun. But I do want you to talk about yourself because I desperately want to learn from what you’ve experienced, the good and the bad. Please don’t apologize for talking about yourself because that is the exact information I want to hear the most.

Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I feel like what I’m doing now definitely fits more into to the “born to do” category. I’ve been writing with an audience in mind as soon as could figure out how to put two sentences together. And more recently, I’ve been experimenting more with podcasting and expressing my thoughts through my voice. Although I don’t talk nearly as much as I did when I was kid, I feel like working with my voice is an important part of how I’m meant to express myself, and I’m glad to be stepping into reclaiming that some as I experiment with my new podcast project.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://arcadiapage.com/
• Other: My Substack Newsletter: https://arcadiapage.substack.com/

Image Credits
Arcadia Page