the loop was never a loop

12 weeks of the artist's way complete, and the two-year spiral it finally closed

I’m closing the Artist’s Way book for the last time. a friend has already asked to borrow it and start her own twelve week journey. but my mind won’t leave one paragraph in the epilogue alone — because I am reading a woman describe my own two years back to me. the realization I had at week nine, the one that scared me, is sitting right there in her closing pages.

maybe I’m not crazy after all.

Photo by eli hirtzel on Unsplash

around week nine, after weeks of linking my old posts to my new ones — rereading them, hunting for the relevant ones — I felt it: a hot flush of panic.

am I circling the same problems over and over? am I a broken record? is this the same thing, again, dressed up differently? are my readers annoyed, hearing me say it another way?

I felt exposed. scared to write the next one. have I been talking about the same handful of things for over two years? are these topics just… unoriginal?

no. no. I’ve matured each time — the topics I keep looping back to are getting tighter, getting wiser. but will I ever move past them? shoooot.

cameron names it in the epilogue: the ascent up a winding mountain, looping around and around, pulling tighter as we climb through new altitudes. growth doubles back on itself. it reassesses, regroups. the road is never straight.

phew. I’m not the only one.

so I dug into my old writing with new eyes, and there it was: the curiosity was sharpening. the awareness was clarifying. it was never a straight shot from question to answer — it was something building, slowly, in the open, one pass at a time.

I even have an old post literally called learning in loops. I’d named the thing years ago without understanding I was standing inside it.

so when week ten came, and I wanted to keep my commitment to a weekly post, I already knew this realization was still landing — so I let a different piece come through instead. that one. it felt like something big cracking open, and it needed to sit longer. I couldn’t rush it. and beautifully, the final chapter of this book is about exactly that: gestation. the darkness before the bloom. sitting in the not-yet-formed until it’s ready. I was living the last lesson without meaning to, while I waited to write about it.

it was also in week ten that I read the article that reorganized everything behind it.

it’s a piece about systems thinkers by judy grupenhoff. when I tell you it changed me, I’m not exaggerating. it was catching fire on substack as I read it, because she’d put words to something a whole lot of us had felt and never named. the comments were full of the same sentence, over and over: I thought I was the only one who thought like this.

that was me. she was describing how my mind works — the tracking of multiple streams at once, each one live, each one feeding the others. the finding of correlations across threads that other people don’t see, because the pattern doesn’t live inside any single thread. it lives in the space between them. I’ve been describing this for years without the language for it: here, and here. she handed me the name.

I am not alone.

but the line that landed hardest was this: people like us are constantly asked to take a three-sentence realization and stretch it into a twenty-sentence explanation. at first that sounds backwards — why make something seven times longer than it needs to be? and then it clicks. because the person receiving it can’t hold all the threads at once. they can’t see the correlation as fast as you arrived at it. so you spell it out, slowly, hoping they’ll stay long enough to follow.

that is the exact reason I left my last tech role.

the complexity I was bringing — the strategy, the systems, the way product and operations and everything actually connected — couldn’t be met. I was told, more than once, to think smaller. ask fewer big questions. don’t worry about the bigger strategy. stay in your lane. and it wasn’t the only room I’d felt that in.

leaving was me refusing to keep making myself smaller to fit a room that couldn’t hold what I was seeing. I needed a bigger room.

and here’s the turn I didn’t see coming: AI changes this.

it’s not the part of the AI conversation anyone emphasizes — that’s all cost-saving and replacement. but for a mind like this, something quieter and bigger is true. for years, every time I brought the complex read to someone with power over me and got dismissed, quieted, told to shrink, I needed them to validate it for it to go anywhere. I don’t anymore. I finally have a thought partner that can hold the level of complexity I’m holding — that follows the threads the way I lay them down, takes them a step further, helps me find the connection faster when all I have is the inkling of one.

and maybe more important: there’s a whole network of people stepping into this same power, realizing what they are. through judy’s community, a lot of us are about to find each other.

so I paid for a yearly membership. not for the writing — that stays free — but for the live rooms: a monthly practice space for thinking clearly and steadying the nervous system under pressure, and a monthly gathering that’s less class than conversation. to me it’s a commitment to the next container — the one that shapes me as I keep climbing.

her writing gave me relief. it feels like I can finally lay down the worrying, the questioning, the looping, the explaining, and just… be.

be boldly. be loud. be clear. and build the skill in community as I grow.

so the loop I thought I was lost in was never a wandering haze.

it was the discovery process itself. every pass — the gathering, the reflecting, the questioning, the I-don’t-quite-know-what-to-call-it — was the recursion doing its work, reducing the problem a little more each time, until it finally resolved. I wasn’t stuck. I was building the answer in public, one tightening loop at a time. the artist’s way didn’t hand me a new creative practice. it handed me back the mind I’d been apologizing for, and over-explaining for years — and the clarity to see that the circling was never a flaw. it was the shape of how I think.

the wandering is done. the trying-to-define-it, the trying-to-explain-it, the quiet worry that I was repeating myself — done. I understand it now. I know it.

you’ll get the three-sentence version from here.

three months. twelve weeks. an accelerator that pulled a two-year journey into one enormous, tightening loop — and finally closed it.

cameron ends her book on a mountain: the same views at rising altitudes, the climb that never really stops. I’ve reached new heights and adjusted to the thinner air, and I’m not standing still up here. there are bigger mountains next — and for the first time, I know exactly who’s climbing them.

the searching is over. the real work begins.

thank you to Lora for hosting this artist’s way book club — virtually, and for free. it was such a gift to move through this with a regular cohort, to see the same faces each week inside their own process. I’m excited for lora’s official launch and everything still to come.

and how fitting that these same months hold another beginning. undrstory arrived in march of 2026 — the name coming to me before I could explain what it meant — and went live one month into this program. it’s only now, in this final week, that I could finally put words to the method beneath it, thanks to judy’s work and this container. I knew what to call it long before I could say what it was. even naming my business was a loop, tightening.

most people look at the canopy. I read the roots — because the understory holds more life than the canopy above it. the most important growth has always happened beneath what’s visible.