The Big Magic

Seeing an idea I wrote down a month ago out in the real world triggered my memory of this book and other thoughts inspired by the 2016 challenge, and the first new moon of 2026.

Written by Elizabeth Gilbert back in 2015, it was recommended to me by Roxanne Assoulin somewhere around that time.

I met Roxanne Assoulin through her collaboration with Baja East (IYKYK) which funny enough came back into my memory over the weekend via the 2016 IG challenge (so many realizations prompted by that too). Roxanne and I ended up working together for a good amount of time. I am not sure it was actually that long, maybe only like two years, but it was significant. She was my first client as a truly independent contractor post Ganni and boy did we fucking kill it together.

Roxanne and I instantly connected. I loved / continue to love her so much. She is iconic and was such a warm and inspiring person in my life during that time. She told me she wanted to do something during Fashion Week but didn’t know what. Roxanne’s business was mainly private label jewelry at that time but she was relaunching / leaning more into her own brand.

I came up with the concept that went on to become known as PLAY RA. I went from co curating, ideating, and hosting these NYFW events alongside Roxanne and her team— which at one point was named the best stop of NYFW by literally everyone that was anyone at that time— to these events becoming privatized and bought out for brands like Chanel and Moda Operandi, as well as ticketed events for her broader community. I am still proud of the fact that we were able to create something special for industry insiders that also translated into something that could be enjoyed by thousands of fans of the Roxanne Assoulin brand.

It was my first hand at experiential marketing. Experiential marketing was not a thing yet. I didn’t necessarily see that coming— or think that the event was going to be such a massive success (seems to be a reoccurring pattern of mine)— but I also knew people would be excited to get to make their own Roxanne Assoulin bracelet and equally enjoy getting a glimpse into how the sausage gets made at her showroom / office which was no different than being in a beautifully organized, colorful, chic candy store. Holy run-on sentence.

I made little to no money on these events, at least compared to the revenue they were generating, but I considered this experience a massive personal win for me. It was a great learning opportunity and exactly what I needed at that point in my career. If it hadn’t gone as well as it did, I don’t know that I would have thought I had it in me to go out on my own and work for myself. (Yes I had just killed it with Ganni too, but are you even a young, first-generation American woman working in Manhattan if you don’t gaslight yourself into thinking your success was just a fluke?) Independent contractors and the idea of freelancing was really new and foreign at the time.

In one of our many catch ups Roxanne recommended the big magic to me. I must have been venting to her about something, I have no memory of exactly what, but I bought the book right away and ate it up.

The Big Magic talks about creativity in a way I had not heard before. It showcases creativity as a way of relating to life instead of something that you are, and not something necessarily reserved for geniuses. What really stayed with me was how Gilbert talked about ideas being these living, breathing things— things that we do not own, but they visit us, and we, the executers of the ideas, are more or less just a vessel to bring them to life.

Gilbert shares how she once had a very specific idea for a novel— the setting, the storyline, the type of story— all very heavily researched and again, specific. During that time she became friends with another writer, Ann Patchett.

I forget exactly what happened that Gilbert never finished writing the book, but years later she discovered Patchett had written a novel with an almost identical premise, around the same time she had been working on it, but completely independently to her.

The realization blew her mind (and mine) as they had never discussed this idea with one another. They did not overlap in research, travel or development, and there was just absolutely no way either of them could have “borrowed” the concept from the other.

I loved learning about this so much so that it has been permanently burned into my brain. This anecdote was (is) so refreshingly illustrative of an experience and feelings that are often quite mangled and confusing. Gilbert was able to distill ego, identity, and genuine creative instinct in a way I had never heard or thought of.

As a creative, ideas are so precious. In a lot of ways they feel like, or rather are, currency. When I lived in NY (and at my brokest), I never cared that I was living paycheck to paycheck and sometimes barely had money for rent. I knew that so long as I had ideas I would be ok, and I always had ideas. That being said, this did make me quite protective of them. In hindsight I can see how I created a dependency on my ideas, instead of living alongside them, and how that invited in a scarcity mindset (fear).

Sidebar: I do want to mention that there is a very fine line between speaking about your ideas enough to confirm a client or collaborator and giving too much of your juice away rendering you no longer valuable or necessary to hire. Whenever I am really excited about something ideas passionately spill out of me in a way that I have had to train myself to shut the fuck up. Over a decade later I still find this incredibly hard.

Ok back to what I was saying—

As someone who lives off their ideas, when someone would steal them or copy them (especially poorly), I couldn’t help but to feel frustrated. Gilbert’s perspective gave me a lot of peace. I went from feeling constantly taken advantage of, to this bewilderment in regards to ideas and how they grow into fruition. It reenergized me and helped me let go of any negative feelings I had in relation to previous bad experiences.

In more recent years I have noticed how this can show up in other ways.

For example, when I see someone working on something similar to something I have been working on, it has at times dissuaded me from continuing. I used to put a lot of importance on being the first to do something and ascribed value to being early— whether it was a designer, a trend, a song— whatever it was, I needed you to know I discovered it, did it, heard it, first.

I think maybe at that time I felt like it was all I had? I don’t know. I will say I don’t think it has been a necessarily negative trait. It pushed me even more to create work that felt different and fresh and truly authentic to me, and I think my success comes from doing exactly that. To this day sometimes I find myself fighting a crazy urge to let someone know that I did xyz first.

Part of it is of course ego, but for anyone with a genuine, natural talent— it is hard for that not to get so intertwined with your identity and self concept.