Surviving as a freelancer in 2025 + A name change

When I joined Substack last year, I just barely had a grasp on what the platform was.

I was leaving Meta apps and wanted somewhere to send far away friends and family to keep up some kind of connection.

Ironically, almost none of my friends and family joined, but I became firmly entrenched.

In the beginning, I treated it as a personal blog. I couldn’t even figure out how to change my newsletter name, so it stayed the generic ‘Lena’s Substack’ for an embarrassingly long time. Until I finally opened Substack on my desktop instead of the app and found all the settings. 🤦‍♀️

When I finally found that elusive Publication Name box, I got stuck on what to pick. What am I allowed to write about? Do I have to pick a niche here? Who am I even talking to? What do I want to be when I grow up? A designer? An activist? A writer? A quirky creative type?

I knew I wanted to talk about resistance… but to me, that word covers a broad range. It’s about actions, what we choose to buy and not buy, WHERE we choose to buy and not buy, how we treat those around us, how we treat ourselves. It’s growing food if you’re able, calling your representatives every day, and maybe it’s also shutting down your phone and reading a good fiction or watching some trash tv before bed so you don’t lose your entire mind.

This is actually where the name ‘Resistance Garden’ popped up, because to me it represented cultivating a collection of resistance actions and ideas to choose from.

I’ve spent the last decade or so consuming all the information I can find about how we ended up where we are today in the United States. The racism baked into the system, the rise of Christian nationalism, the greed, the partisanship, the tech bros, the bro bros.

It fascinates and horrifies me, and resisting the rise of fascism in this country feels like the utmost priority to me in this moment.

My personal research project, and the increasing urgency I felt to share it, led me to make my first zine, “Resist: 75 Tiny Ways to Survive the Broligarchy, Fight Back, & Keep Your Sanity Somewhat Intact” as an attempt to help people find small, doable ways to create agency and resilience in their lives even as systems crumble.

I’ve come to strongly believe that the power of the people is stronger than the people in power, and this felt like a tiny way I could help spread that vibe.

I’m a multi-passionate creative with a business focused on brand + marketing design for entrepreneurs and organizations… that’s what I’ve blogged about for the last decade. It’s been my focus. My niche, if you will. I’ve created email freebies and written tutorials and made graphics for Pinterest and done all the things you did when you started an online business in the early 2010s.

So I originally thought I would keep my design blog and split my writing time between that, my monthly studio newsletter, and Substack.

I tried that, and quickly remembered that this is a thing I do to myself all the time… starting a new thing, but not evolving or integrating the old thing into the new. Just adding a whole new thing for myself to do, which then stretches me too thin and sucks the creativity right out of everything.

On top of that, I’m completely burned out on talking about marketing and branding. It feels like there’s nothing left to say. We’ve said it all. There’s plenty of blog posts and articles and podcasts on the subject, and I’m sure AI is writing a few hundred more right now <sad trombone>. Frankly, in light of eeeverything else going on, it all feels very unimportant.

That’s not to say I don’t still very much enjoy my work—I genuinely do. I love sitting down to come up with initial concepts for a client. Diving in to research their industry and competition, digging around on Pinterest for inspiration, then grabbing my pencil and sketchbook and knocking out a dozen or so objectively bad ideas in pursuit of a few great ones.

I clearly remember a time when I looked forward to hopefully, maybe, one day calling myself a graphic designer, and I’ve been saying it for years now. That’s not nothing.

Has it been easy? Not at all. There’s been years I’ve been able to pay rent on my own, buy groceries, and even tinker around with pretending to start a 401k (am I making artist life sound glamorous??). Other years I’ve just barely scraped by, spending half my time excited about getting a new client and the other half wondering if maybe I should get a real job.

But it’s gotten even harder the last year or two.

I’ve seen it in my own business and I’ve read it in the posts and emails of other creatives. Not all of us are struggling, some have landed in the right spot at the right time. A lot of us though are having to decide if the empty inbox is a result of something we’re doing, or the inevitable result of a society that increasingly values fast and cheap over quality. So many of us are finding we need to reorient our courses, with varying levels of backup plans and safety nets.

I’m sure design isn’t the only field this is happening in, but it’s where I find myself now. Pivoting. Reorienting. Shifting.

Right now, that means focusing more time on pitching my services to agencies and applying to jobs on LinkedIn, and less time emailing my studio newsletter and trying to get work from individuals and small businesses.

It also means adding to my skillset and looking for opportunities outside of design. It means considering how viable this career path even is for me in 2025.

And I think having a place to share that will help me make sense of what I’m doing, and possibly help somebody else who’s in the same boat.

So, I’ve spent the last few days cleaning up my website, removing the blog from the public facing side, making everything nice and tidy for potential art directors and hiring folks.

Then I changed the name here to Creative Resistance, which felt less creatively disconnected from the rest of my brand and feels like a place I can talk about resistance, resilience, and untangling from big tech, and also share a bit of what is going on here as I’m exploring new pathways.

I hope you’ll stick with me through this transition, or subscribe if you’re new here. I’m going to attempt a more consistent posting schedule now that this is my primary outlet for writing. If you have suggestions for upcoming post topics around resisting fascism, becoming more resilient, being a freelancer, being a creative, or something that hasn’t occurred to me yet, please let me know. I’m slow replying to comments but I always appreciate them.

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