There Is No Syllabus for This Part: A Morning Walk Download on Self-Authorship, Old Rubrics & Learning to Trust a Path Still Being Paved

I caught myself doing something on my walk this morning that I thought I had gotten better at.

I have a tendency of trying to make my life make sense from the outside, even if it has all come fully into form or clarity for myself.

I was smiling thinking about everything currently moving at once…the art, media projects, applying to residencies and fellowship programs, building out my Creator-in-Residence model and the platform for The Exit Strategy Network.

At some point, the joy of it all turned into a familiar little tension and a taunting voice, “Does this all make sense? Would someone else even understand this? Aren’t you doing too much? Would one thing make another thing look less serious? Was there some cleaner version of this path that I should be following instead?”

I stopped under some trees to take a few breaths and pause the noise.

Eventually that pause helped me make sense of what I was doing. I was trying to evaluate my nontraditional life using a traditional rubric. It was kind of silly after that clarity hit me. For most of our lives, someone else supplied the instructions for how to get through things.

School provided the syllabus and someone else decided what we needed to learn, when we needed to learn it, what the assignment would be and how well we had performed.

Then we enter the workforce and the structure changed names but not necessarily form. There were job descriptions, key responsibilities, deliverables, KPIs, performance reviews, promotions, etc. Somebody still had a framework for what counted.

But now, I’m in a season where much of that external scaffolding is gone.

After exiting the life I knew, it took a while to adjust and realize there is no syllabus for this part. There’s no professor standing at the front of the room saying, “Yes, Marisha, these six seemingly different interests do in fact belong together.”

There’s no manager telling me which experiment deserves thirty percent of my attention this quarter, no rubric confirming that taking a walk instead of forcing another hour of work might actually be the more productive choice.

There’s no job description telling me that an idea which becomes a piece of sound, another that becomes an artistic experience and another that becomes a company can all come from the same person without making her unfocused.

It took time to discern that, but apparently, some mornings, I have to still remind myself, which is partly why I walk.

Walking creates enough distance between me and whatever I’ve been staring at to hear something other than the urgency of the task in front of me. I don’t go out there demanding an answer, I simply walk. I look around, greet the animal and plant life along my path, let my body move, and just become receptive.

And almost like clockwork, the thing I’ve been trying to think my way through finally has enough quiet to introduce itself differently and this morning the reminder was simple:

Run YOUR race. Play YOUR game.

My dad would always say that to me during my track meets or basketball games. It was his way of reminding me that I have practiced and I have my own rhythm so find my flow despite whatever’s going on around me. And after processing that, something else surfaced. I was reminded that with all the things I’m doing, the outputs may not look alike but that doesn’t mean the throughline isn’t real.

When I move beneath the surface of what I’m building, my patterns, my process becomes clear and consistent.

I witness or experience something that either bothers, fascinates or stays with me for whatever reason, then I start to notice a gap. I internally begin asking questions and pull from what I’ve lived, studied, taught, created or observed to imagine other possibilities. Then I try to give that possibility form. Sometimes the form is conversation, other times it becomes a piece of writing, an educational resource or curriculum. Sometimes it’s an experience, and recently it’s become art, media and a startup.

The form changes. The intelligence of my own process underneath it doesn’t.

As I started reflecting on the last two years, it became evident that this is one of the things this season is trying to teach me. Coherence and sameness are not the same thing. A life can be coherent without being easily categorized. A body of work can have continuity without every piece belonging to the same industry. A person can be serious about multiple expressions of the same underlying inquiry, and a path does not automatically become irrelevant simply because no institution has already created a title for it.

I think part of what I am unlearning is the belief that uncertainty means I am doing something wrong.

Sometimes uncertainty is simply what it feels like to be somewhere before the evidence catches up with the intuition.

This doesn’t mean intuition is always correct, but that’s the point of researching, testing, documenting, inviting feedback, intentionally seeking out relationships and rooms where there is support, structure, and resources for experimentation. 

I’m not replacing rigor with vibes, but I am learning that alignment is not the absence of effort. It determines where my effort belongs.

But finally embodying that understanding has required a discipline of deep listening when I would normally override myself, resting before depletion makes the decision for me, taking seriously the environments in which I think well, allowing pleasure, relationships, movement, money, health, creativity and contribution to all count when I evaluate whether something is actually working.

The point of this season is to build evidence instead of demanding certainty, which is why my life feels so different.

For the first time, I’m not simply trying to figure out what I can do professionally. I’m trying to understand what conditions allow me, the human being, to thrive and what kinds of opportunities become possible from there.

There is a difference.

So when that old urge returns, the one that wants the entire architecture explained, validated and legible before I allow myself to keep walking, I try to remember that I do not have to prove the whole vision today. I only have to build the next piece of evidence.

None of us are required to stand at the beginning of a nontraditional path and somehow possess the retrospective clarity people usually acquire only after they’ve walked it.

You’re walking it! I’m walking it! And that’s likely why I heard my dad’s voice on my walk this morning, “Run your race, Marishaaa!!” It was just a little reminder that I have my own pace and process and to just lock in to that while blocking out everything else.

My priority lately has been to document the trail because when I think about my life, both personally and professionally, that documentation usually becomes a roadmap for me and eventually someone else to benefit from later.

Today, it was simply the reminder I needed to keep going.

Hi, I’m Ms. Marisha. I’m an educator turned Creator-in-Residence, storyteller, and founder of The Exit Strategy Network.

I partner with brands, schools, cities, communities, and institutions ready to move beyond content and build regenerative culture through storytelling, enrichment, experience design, and community-centered strategy.

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