About that marathon moment

I speak to Anne Helen Petersen about her running journey through The Portal.

One of the writers whose work resonates with me the most frequently is Anne Helen Petersen in her Culture Study newsletter. I’ve linked to her marvelous 2023 piece on The Portal before, where Anne documents and helps explain the creative surge that arrives for many in midlife.

There are descriptors such as “crisis” and “awakening,” talk of big events such as illness or building a family driving a reassessment of one’s life, or maybe, simply, a push out of the stagnation of day-to-day life.

That piece resonated with me because I think I’m in my Portal. Since moving to L.A. in 2014, a couple of kids and a pandemic slowed my writing career down, but ultimately I never really found job satisfaction as a copywriter and content editor. I’ve had jobs that have paid well, and jobs that have been corporately creative, but nothing that felt truly meaningful. Nothi…