the end of my micro flop era.

recovering from functional freeze, thawing off my creativity & my summer reset.

not to be dramatic, but… did anyone else feel like the first half of the year was giving micro flop era?

yagirlaley

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i’m not gonna hold y’all—I’ve been in a creative, functional freeze for a while now. from March through May, I genuinely felt like I found my flow. i was creating consistently, continuing my “decoding 30s” series, and felt like i had finally hit my stride.

but somewhere around mid May, life got heavy—mentally, financially, spiritually — and it became too much for my brain to bear. that creative rhythm I’d tapped back into came to a sudden halt, and survival mode took over.

there were no fresh ideas, no spark, no motivation. just survival.

yagirlaley

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but the thing is, I’ve been here before.

in 2021, after moving back home from LA, I hit a personal rock bottom. i was living on my sister’s couch, unemployed, depressed, and had not a SINGLE club of what was next.

in hindsight, that chapter stole the final years of my twenties. until then something clicked in my brain—a shift I can only describe as radical delusion.

i started to dream again, like a mad woman, and without limits. i like to say I maladaptively daydreamed my way out of the darkest pits of hell. and ultimately, I packed up and moved to Chicago to start over.

now, in 2025, I found myself in a familiar place.

i don’t talk about this much, but when I got my (read: short-lived) role at Essence Magazine in 2022, I truly thought I had stepped into a long-term dream of finally becoming the lifestyle editor I had always wanted to be.

but for reasons I’ve had to release and make peace with, that chapter closed much sooner than I expected or wanted it to. quietly, I’ve been grieving that loss—of the title, the trajectory, and the identity I had wrapped around it — and that grief created distance between me and my writing.

which in turn, created my extended hiatus from Substack and writing in general — and that’s been hard to admit out loud.

in the time since, I’ve been rebuilding a new entrepreneurial path from scratch, and it's been disorienting. writing, my first love, became something I felt estranged from. it started to feel like an ex I couldn’t look in the eye. and until recently, I hadn’t fully acknowledged that heartbreak.

that’s why I stepped away—from substack, from social media, from showing up publicly. it wasn’t to be mysterious or to plot this major rebrand, it was because life offline was demanding so much of me that I couldn’t even hear my own voice.

somewhere along the way, I realized I had started creating from obligation instead of overflow. and that’s never been how I’ve moved as a creative.

there’s a quote that circulated in 2020 that said, “sometimes creatives need to do nothing.” but I’d take that a step further: sometimes creatives need time to not be percieved. to press the reset button. to retreat inward. to create without pressure or performance. and to remember who we are off-camera, offline, and outside the algorithm.

that’s what this break was for me.

and i’m glad I did. for myself, of course—but also for you, my community.

in the short time I’ve been back (literally just a few days), I’ve received the kindest messages from people saying how much my honesty and vulnerability have resonated with them. and while I’m filled with gratitude, I also want to be transparent: authenticity comes with a cost.

to some, it looks like flakiness or inconsistency. but for the feelers? the seers. the intuitive. we can’t fake the funk. we can’t produce like robots. we know when it’s time to retreat. and we also know when it’s time to reemerge—different, wiser, more grounded, and creatively refreshed.

that kind of growth takes solitude. it takes stillness. it takes realignment. and if you’re a content creator, a multi-hyphenate, a dreamer, or just someone trying to stay inspired while navigating real life—please hear this: stepping back isn’t flakey. it’s healing. sometimes, the best glow-up doesn’t come from a rebrand. it starts with remembering who TF you are.

so here we are—the second half of the year, and I’m calling this the soft summer reset.

a season of melting away burnout, unfrosting the freeze, and making space for creativity to flow again. no pressure, just you and your creativity becoming friends again. if you’ve been feeling stuck or uninspired—I got you.

i’m picking the pen back up to share the lessons, the unlearning, and just anything I’ve been obessing over, to getting our spark back.

let’s do this together. 💌

are you following me on IG + TIKTOK? you should be :) @yagirlaley

— ya girl, Aley <3