When it’s Time to Leap into Your Next Life

Poet Joy Sullivan quit her corporate job, moved out west, and wrote a National Bestseller. But big leaps aren’t always what they seem.

I’m stopped at a red light in a rideshare in Portland, Oregon, around the corner from the co-working space where Joy writes. I see a slightly run-down store sign that says “More Joy.” Or so it appears. 

The light turns green and I turn the corner, and once we get past the streetlight that was blocking part of the sign I see it actually reads “More Joyful Dentistry.” 

The driver drops me off. I circle the building twice trying to find an entrance. I get distracted by flyers stapled to wooden poles. There’s a Reptile Expo happening this week, and a Rising Star Open Mic. Beneath the fresh flyers are maybe 50 or more old flyers, most damp and curled in. No one seems to take the other flyers down. They’re all just stapled over each other, a kind of artists’ bark.

I finally find the entrance and walk in. The receptionists tell Joy I’m here. I wait just a few minutes in the brightly lit plant-filled buttery-wooden lobby until Joy walks in.

She walks in smiling, wearing a cute stretchy denim one-piece I see weeks later in an Anthropologie or an Urban Outfitters. Her bright pinkish-red lipstick is almost enough to make you not notice her icicle blue eyes, but then of course you do. Her hair seems to be made of actual light ray: fluffy and weightless, the kind of hair that makes you finally understand what hair stylists mean when they say it should “frame” your face.

Joy is calm and what I might describe as the opposite of effusive, but she exudes kindness and curiosity and her voice is like a cup of chamomile with honey. We say hello and she leads me to a small table nearby for the interview.

Before I start with my questions, I tell Joy how giraffes brought us together and point to the giraffe tattoo on my right arm.

The tattoo, I explain, is inspired by a scene in The Last of Us (the game and the TV show) that deeply resonated with me because of a past traumatic event.  About a year after I got that tattoo, I tell Joy, a friend sent me an Instagram story she posted during her trip to Africa; in the Instagram story she’d shared how she’d just learned that a group of giraffes are called a journey.

I watched the Instagram story a year ago and then clicked on Joy’s profile and followed her immediately. People send each other Instagram stories and reels all the time, I tell Joy, and at best you stop what you’re doing to watch, reply, and then move about your day. But this time, I tell her, I didn’t move about my day. I stopped. I followed. I bought her book. I read her book in one sitting, on my porch on a Friday. 

I tell Joy the reason her giraffe Instagram story made me do all of those things was because in that Instagram story I saw a woman who seemed free.

I tell Joy I want to profile her because I want to know how she became so free, how a poet can make a living in 2024, and how she keeps going when the world is so often unkind to women who seem free.

“Growing Up” (p. 19)*

The writing started in a church in the Central African Republic, where Joy grew up because her parents were medical missionaries.

The service was in a language Joy didn’t understand, so her parents let her bring a notebook.

During each multi-hour service, Joy wrote spy stories in a notebook.

The movie Harriet the Spy made me want to become a writer, even at nine years old. I loved how intensely Harriet wrote notes about real life in her black and white composition notebook. I loved how, when her friends asked what she was always writing she answered, “I want to remember everything. I want to know everything.” I loved how Rosie O’Donnel walks into the scene in a red hat and red coat and says that knowing everything doesn’t matter unless you use it to put beauty into the world. Harriet then says, via voiceover, that Rosie (or rather her character Golly) “sees things other people barely notice.”

Joy’s spy-story-filled  notebook was Joy’s first taste of freedom.

She also has two older sisters and says, laughing, “the page was also the first place I wasn’t interrupted.”

As Joy got older, she began to write poetry inspired by breakups. She jokes at first about her angsty high school breakup poems, but then pauses thoughtfully and says:

“Pain activates us in a lot of ways. It brings a lot of people to life. I don’t think you have to have traumatic experiences to be a poet, but I think you have to find your edge with discomfort somehow, because that’s what makes us want to express and move that grief or pain or discomfort out of the body. I’m not looking for suffering as a motivator or as an inspiration, but I’m always trying to find that edge.”

After high school, Joy graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. “What are you going to do with that,” people said. So Joy decided to get a Master’s in Poetry.

She also hoped getting a master’s would buy her more time before having to get a “real” job. “It was both this escape,” she says, “and sense of coming back to self.”

Joy’s graduate experience pushed her to experiment and opened her up to ways of expression she says she wouldn’t have found on her own. But the particular program she went through at the time was competitive in a way that didn’t always serve her.

Joy graduated with her Master’s in Poetry in 2011.

And then she didn’t write for seven years.

“In the Office” (p. 32)

Well, ok, she did write, she clarifies later. But not much. And very slowly.

After getting her master’s in poetry she didn’t know what a poet should do next, other than more school, so she got a teaching license and a job as a high school English teacher.

She burnt out after three years, realizing it wasn’t the career for her. She didn’t know what to do next. So she did what she always does when she’s lost: “I turned back towards writing to help me survive.”

But this time, it was copywriting. She got a job at a creative brand agency.

“My experience as a poet actually helped me write better headlines,” she says, “and helped me know how to better communicate and write really emotional copy.”

But the job was all-consuming: “All of my creative brain was going to copywriting and marketing. I was writing all day long and it was really hard to come home and do my own creative work.”

Joy still wrote for herself sometimes, like in 2017 when she took her first solo trip to Joshua Tree (after a breakup) and started sharing poetry on Instagram. Of those first Instagram poems she says: “They were terrible. They were awful. They were the worst.”

But people read them, which surprised her. It was only a few people, but it was the first people other than professors and fellow grad students to respond to her work. It was an audience other than a notebook.

She kept the Instagram account active for a little while, really only to promote the small side business she’d started as a live typewriter poet for events like weddings and leadership conferences.

Her Instagram account had 100 followers, and then went mostly dormant.

Until she wrote and shared something that upended her life.  

“Giving Notice” (p. 35)

It happened in 2020, when Joy found herself working from home for the first time and communing with a new kind of isolation, a new silence.

Feeling lonely anyway, she decided she might as well go to the loneliest place she could think of. She went back to the desert. 

She lived and worked from Arizona for a few months.

She wrote more on that trip, and shared again on Instagram, including her poem “Instructions for Traveling West” which begins, “First you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living.”

Within 40 days of writing that poem, Joy quit her corporate job and sold her house.

“It performed this really wild, dark alchemy,” she says. “After writing a poem and posting it to Instagram, I was in my Subaru with my two cats driving west where I didn’t know anyone. I tell people to write in holy fear because it is this beautiful, mysterious sort of spell that moves you into some other world. It’s a little terrifying and amazing at the same time.”

In the years before Joy quit her job and moved out west, Joy was jolted awake at 5am by the same dream almost every night:

“I was in a barrel of water slowly decomposing. The day I left for Portland, Oregon that dream was gone, and it never returned. I think sometimes our bodies instinctually know it’s time to go. Birds have this instinct to migrate. Salmon go back upstream, to the first place they were spawned. I think we all sort of know when it’s time to have some other life.”

Joy recognizes the privilege to be able to leave like she did: no kids, no attachments (save a partner she broke up with and a house she sold), and savings because of the years she spent in her corporate job. But it was still scary. It was still unknown. She still had more questions than answers. But she went west anyway. 

“I thought there’s another life out there for me,” she says, “and I became really obsessed with the question of, What happens if I just chase that instinct? What if I answer that question with my life and see what happens?”

Joy says she found the courage to answer that question with her life when she was finally honest about the fact that she wasn’t happy where she was. It came down to this: if she stayed she wasn’t going to become the kind of person she wanted to be.

“I felt,” Joy explains, “like I was slowly morphing into somebody I didn’t like.”

Joy moved to Portland and started writing commissioned pieces for people, continued her typewriter poetry events, freelanced, and kept writing for herself, sharing much of that work on Instagram. “When I started writing whatever I wanted to write,” she says, “that’s when my account kind of took off.”

Then one of her poems went viral, which slowly but surely began to change her life. 

“(Luck III)” (p. 44)

When one of Joy’s poems first went viral, she thought, “I should sell prints.”

She reached out to a local print shop and sold prints of her poems. “I literally paid my rent for a year just on print sales,” she says.

Joy was invigorated by the possibility of  making a living from the work she wanted to write, versus all of the freelancing she was doing writing what other people wanted her to write.

Sometimes, freelancing felt too much like her corporate job. She was looking for something else. Something that felt connected to her own voice. 

So when her followers started asking questions about craft, Joy decided to try hosting a paid online writing workshop. And then another. And another. They sold out every time, and people kept asking for more. 

Because of that, Joy created her now popular writing community Sustenance (of which I am now a paying member). 

Teaching and selling prints was working well. But there was also this other dream, one Joy declared to a friend on a couch ten years ago now, that hadn’t left her: to write a book.

“When you really get honest about the thing that you want,” Joy says, “the next step is to tell somebody. I think just saying that out loud is its own kind of alchemy. You set something in motion that you can’t take back.”

As more and more people began responding to Joy’s poems on Instagram, Joy started looking for a literary agent so she could try to pursue her book dream.

“I kind of stalked online anybody who had a book deal and wrote poetry that was anything close to mine,” she says. “I’d find out who their agents were and put them on my list.”

She sent out a dozen query letters, but, like most writers, her queries were rejected. Again and again.

Then one day Joy received a message from a writer asking permission to include one of Joy’s poems in her book. Joy happily said yes. “I’m a girl’s girl and a writer’s writer,” she says.

Being an active part of the writing community is something Joy inherently believes in: buying other writers’ books, going to their talks, and shouting them out on social media. She does this because she wants to, not because she expects anything in return. But sometimes opportunities come from the seeds we sow in generosity, without expectation. 

After Joy told that writer she could use her poem in her book, the writer was so grateful and said, “let me know if you need anything.” Joy replied, “Well, actually, do you know any agents?”

She did know one named Joanna, and offered to pass Joy’s query along to her.

Then, Joy got an email from Joanna that said, “Can I give you a call at 3pm this afternoon?”

Joy said yes, and then spent the next two hours googling “has an agent ever offered to call you to tell you she’s not going to accept you?”

Joanna called at 3pm to offer Joy representation.

Joy wasn’t able to process much after that. She hung up and went out for oysters and sushi, and then she told her mom.  

From there, Joy got offers from multiple publishing houses for her book, and while she had about 40,000 followers on Instagram at the time, Joy’s agent said that it was less about Joy’s follower count and more about the feeling of momentum, energy, and enthusiasm of the community that was responding.

“I also had a lot of data around selling out workshops and paying my rent every month with my print sales,” she says. “I think if you can show momentum, it’s less about follower count. My publisher always says social media does not ensure sales. It just doesn’t. And it certainly doesn’t ensure the quality of the book that is put into the world. It helps, but I think you can show data of readership in a lot of different ways.”

Joy signed a deal with Penguin Random House and the imprint Dial. Now she just had to meet their request for her to double her 70-page manuscript in eight months.

“Why Read Poetry if It Won’t Make You Rich?” (p. 71)

Joy struggled with writer’s block during those eight months.  

“I think it’s necessary to rest and just give yourself time,” she says, “but I didn’t have time. It was a different level of pressure than I was used to putting on my work.”

Out of necessity, she got really good at finding strategies to overcome writer’s block, like going to new grocery stores and picking out fruit she’d never heard of before to spark sensory inspiration. “I had to get pretty intense about my strategies,” she says, “but what was really beautiful is that the book got written.”

There are also a few poems in the book, like “When the Queen Dies” and  “What Eve Knew”, that are from the slow years when she was barely writing.

“I took seven years off,” Joy says, “and was teaching and then was in the corporate world, and I came back to it. It sounds cliche, but it is never too late to come back to yourself and to your own practice.”

Part of what helped Joy come back was learning how to be a writer in the small pockets of time.

“There’s sort of this misconception,” she says, “that, ‘Oh, if I could just be a full-time writer I would write all day long and I would have this really beautiful life,’ but it’s like a writer’s cabin in the woods. If you go to a writer’s cabins in the woods, you’re probably going to want to take a nap or hike. You’re probably not going to want to write.  For me the biggest lesson in my life in terms of writing is that you’ve just got to steal little moments of time, little pockets.

“Even in those seven years when I wasn’t writing, I would just do tiny little poems here and there, in between a call, on lunch, or after work very briefly. It never added up to very many poems, but when I was finally ready to get serious about my work. I still had small moments from those years. Like quilts, after all this time, you can just go back and collect the scraps and see the journey of where you’ve been.

“That work is not lost. And if we wait to have endless amounts of time to write, we’re never going to write.”

“When All This Ends, I’ll Throw a Party” (p.115)

Joy’s book, Instructions for Traveling West, came out on April 9, 2024. Joy says the experience was exhausting and surreal.

In that first week after her book came out she went from event to event, city to city, meeting people and sharing her work. It was tiring, at times, but, she says:

“There were moments when I really felt like I’m where I’m supposed to be. I’ve only had that experience a couple of times, where I feel like I’m doing the thing I’m meant to do.”

She’s grateful for how well the book has done, how much it’s connected with people, helped them take leaps, keep going, and feel seen. She’s grateful for how it buoyed her leap as well. However, it didn’t solve all of her problems, not that she thought it would. 

“Having a book is amazing, and having a national bestseller is amazing,” she says, “but you still have depression and loneliness and laundry that has to be done and days when you don’t want to get out of bed.”

Joy says the moment she got the book deal and the moment she finished the manuscript were the moments when she felt her “hounds of restlessness” lie down. She describes this feeling as “a resting of something that is always kind of pacing inside me.” But it doesn’t last.

And Joy never expected it to.

Instead, what lasts, is the urge to write. To keep searching. To keep spying. To keep going.

Today, Joy runs her own creative business as a poet, author, and teacher, running her popular paid newsletter Necessary Salt and her Sustenance writing community.

She loves that she gets to set her own schedule and considers it a gift to have unstructured time to write. However, that unstructured time doesn’t always make things easier.

“As somebody who wrestles with anxiety, depression, and disorganization at times,” she says, “I have to get really serious about seeing my creative practice as work and not just as a luxury.

“But you don’t want to monetize all your creative time and think just about, ‘Well, how is this going to make me money?’ So I’ve really had to fall back in love with the creative process, and center myself and my artist’s voice as the direction I’m moving in.”

Joy tries to replace the “How will this make me money” question by asking other questions, like:

“What feeds me? What is exciting to me?   

“I just feel like the more I honor my choosiness and my appetite, the more I’m going find the readers that are the most excited about my work.”

“The Telescope” (p. 117)

The once-bright room we started our interview in grows dim as the sun sets. Our time is running out. But before I go I ask Joy about the one thing we probably wish we didn’t need to talk about as artists, but we do. 

To be a poet, an artist, is to have your pores open to the world. For a long time, artists could be spies, sharing their work without people knowing too much about who they were, without having to read many other people’s opinions on that work. 

As Joy wrote in her essay “Woman Behind a Paywall”, until this point in history writers only consumed opinions on their writing in reviews or at sporadic book events or signings. Never before have artists and creators of all kinds been so constantly subject to people’s real-time comments and opinions.

“I think we all feel really helpless in the world right now,” she says, “and it can feel like an immediate gratification for someone to feel like they’re taking something down, imagining some wrong and setting it right, or nitpicking something. And I think women are an easy target because we expect purity or perfection out of them culturally.

“And I think that that is very toxic for writers and very damaging to the artist’s brain.

“I always tell people it’s okay to grow slowly because going viral gave me the most anxiety I would ever have in my life. And if that had happened consistently, in too short of a period, I couldn’t have sustained it. It’s okay to grow slowly, to figure out your own boundaries.”

For Joy, that has looked like keeping her Instagram stories comment-free, getting more and more off of Instagram, and focusing more of her attention on her newsletter subscribers, those who have specifically opted in to read her work.

But Joy also doesn’t see all negative comments as a bad thing.

“If there’s not some tension to my work,” she says, “it’s probably boring work. And I’m not in any way talking about being inappropriate or using problematic language or being in any way insensitive. I’m talking about stretching into the evolution of what is interesting to me.

“We’re trying to be very nice and perfect and never say anything interesting on social media. And I think that doesn’t help us evolve as artists. We’re so worried about no one taking a shot at us on social media that we put up these veneers. Even though we demand authenticity, we are terrified to be authentic because it’s not a safe space. And I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to be authentic online. We’re sort of performing authenticity. We’re not actually being authentic.”

In her writing workshops, Joy encourages students to not be the heroes of their own work: to be a poet, not a preacher.

But, of course, those beliefs don’t make Joy immune to being hurt by the internet.

“Sometimes I do shut down,” she says. “I get my feelings hurt all the time. But I have less tolerance now. If someone wants to actively engage me in a genuine, curious way—great. If you want to come and just say mean things to me because you happen to stumble across my work, I have just started deleting or blocking people and I don’t have any problem doing that. For the most part, I leave my DMs off so people can’t reach out to me, and that has intensely helped my mental health.”

I ask her if, with a comments section now seemingly coming with the job of being a full-time writer online, it still feels worth it to have a career like this?

“Yes,” she says, “but only because I’ve gotten better boundaries. There was a time about three months ago where I didn’t have great boundaries and I didn’t know if the trade-off was great. Anything that threatens your creative process or your mental health is just not worth it. It doesn’t matter how many books you sell.

“So, for me, I worked with a therapist to get really clear on what those boundaries around social were going to be. I’ve had to have a lot better boundaries around when I’m going to let other people’s expressions and attitudes and opinions enter sort of my sacred space.

“I don’t want to expose myself to voices that make me feel less than. You wouldn’t let somebody cruel talk to you all the time as your friend, so why are you letting the internet in your bedroom before you go to sleep and when you wake up first thing in the morning?”

“In This New Life” (p. 132)

The point of all these boundaries aren’t to keep people out, but to keep something precious from disintegrating.

“I still feel like that little girl writing in the church pew,” she says. “I think I’m trying to write to her. I’m always trying to ask her what it is that she needs and wants to say. I’m just always listening.” 

Because of that listening, and sharing, Joy’s words have traveled west, east, north and south. Some of her words are even tattooed on people’s bodies.

Her words have moved people in every way a person can be moved. Her leaps, her courage, traveled too, inspiring many people to make big changes in their lives.

“I was so embarrassed,” she says, “because all I did was move. But to have that resonate and to see this sort of beautiful ripple effect when you do one brave thing—how contagious courage is. And how many women often are feeling the same experience, united over one shared hope that gives them the freedom to really go.

“I don’t know who the first goose is that’s like, okay we’re flying south, but I think that’s what the book was for a lot of people. It was like, We’re leaving. We’re not doing this anymore. We’re actually going to ask for something bigger.”

Joy is quick to say that while her big changes—quitting her job, leaving a partner,  moving across the country, becoming a full-time writer—seem to have happened in one giant leap, they were actually small “scooches” towards a ledge over a long period of time.

“I think this notion of having to burn everything down looks really dramatic and feels really satisfying,” she says, “but it isn’t how I made my big leap, and I don’t think it’s natural for most people who are trying to make a big leap.

“For me, courage was a muscle I built up over time.”

It felt as if there was another person in her that she wanted to become, and she kept trying to take small steps to move towards that, even when it was hazy.

“Sometimes,” she says, “we think ‘I have to burn everything down.’ I don’t think you have to. All you really have to do is start. I think my book found some readers because it’s not trying to tell people, ‘Here’s a blueprint.’ It’s funny because it’s called ‘Instructions…‘ but it’s not actually trying to tell people what to do other than to turn towards the things you most love.”

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*heading titles are titles and page numbers from Instructions for Traveling West.