May 12, 2025
#022: Dancing with Uncertainty Lead to Authentic Creative Expression with Anna Irvine
Anna Irvine's life trajectory changed forever when her Bulgarian aunt delivered a simple but profound diagnosis during her darkest mental health struggle: "You don't have a community." This revelation sparked a transformative journey from corporate rigidity to becoming one of Dallas's most passionate art advocates and community builders.
Born in Bulgaria during post-communist turmoil, Anna's family sought stability across continents before settling in Texas. Despite securing the "right" education and career in risk management, something was missing. When pandemic isolation triggered severe depression and anxiety, Anna found herself bedridden, hospitalized, and questioning everything. Her recovery began with a radical acceptance of uncertainty and culminated in completely reinventing her life around authentic creative expression.
What makes this conversation extraordinary is Anna's wisdom about letting go of control. She eloquently describes learning to "dance" with life rather than force specific outcomes, comparing mental health recovery to learning flexibility in both thought and action. The freedom she discovered wasn't just about changing careers—it was about shifting from external validation to self-trust and building community connections that feel like "unstoppable balls of energy."
For anyone questioning their path or feeling trapped in expectations, Anna offers liberating perspective: "You can do whatever you want in this life." Her story proves that sometimes our greatest breakdowns precede our most meaningful breakthroughs. She challenges conventional thinking about creative blocks, suggesting that rest—not pushing harder—often unlocks our best ideas and inspirations.
Follow Anna's journey as she builds spaces where artists thrive, connections flourish, and creativity becomes a healing force. Her vulnerability and insights offer a masterclass in authentic living that will inspire you to examine where you might need more community, creativity, or courage in your own life.
Anna's Profile
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For the Love of Creatives Community
00:00 - Defining Creative Community
01:45 - Meeting Anna Irvine
06:33 - From Bulgaria to Art Advocacy
13:40 - Mental Health Journey
19:45 - Letting Go of Control
28:40 - External vs. Self-Validation
40:21 - Finding Inspiration Through Rest
52:10 - Wisdom Beyond Years
WEBVTT
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How do you define a creative community?
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A creative community is an unstoppable ball of energy.
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An unstoppable ball of energy, it needs to be bursting with ideas and you know, collaborations, referrals, like just an absolute overflow of creative ideas.
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That, to me, defines a very healthy creative community.
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Hello and welcome to another episode of For the Love of Creatives, I'm your host, Comadics, and I've got my favorite co-host, Dwight, with me today, and today our featured guest is Anna Irvine.
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Anna welcome to the podcast Welcome.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm so excited to do this, having me, I'm so excited to do this.
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Well, we're really excited to have you.
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Yeah, you know, I know that, dwight.
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You met Anna at an event without me, so why don't you tell the listeners how you met her and how we know each other, because I know her through you?
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Okay, sure, Well, and I don't know if we had any interactions before, because I know that we work with the same audience.
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Maddox and I are trying to build a community for creatives and we're very active in the arts community in Dallas and I know that's kind of your mission as well, and I know that's kind of your mission as well, and so I really got to have some time getting to know you at an event you held at well, at the Tower Club while you were doing what it is that you're certainly building a reputation for, and it was a delightful evening.
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It was full of surprises and I really enjoyed getting to hear a little bit about your story, about your Bulgarian roots, and seeing that on full display.
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And I've got to say every time that we've ever been in your presence at one of your events you're a most gracious host and we always have such a wonderful time.
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Well, thank you so much, Dwight.
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I remember interacting with you.
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Actually, I don't remember if it was the first time, but I really made an impression in the Halloween event.
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Matthew's event yes, you're right.
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Just as you started to say that I realized I did meet you at the same time he did.
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I just had forgotten that.
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And it was so great because I loved the energy in the room that night and it was a lot of, you know, the creatives and the people that you know we run in the same circles with.
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And so people were like, hey, have you guys met Dwight?
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Have you met Dwight and Maddox?
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Like I was hearing about y'all, and then all of a sudden I was, and then I came face to face.
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I was like I, you know, figured I need to meet you, and so, um, yeah, I I'm.
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I think that this particular mission we have, uh, it's a mission where I think multiple people are trying to accomplish the same thing and I think we all need each other and we all need the support from one another.
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You know, the Dallas creative community, from the outside looking in, can appear fragmented, but there are these strings of people and connections that connect to all of us and we just kind of need to discover them.
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So that you know, I quite enjoyed that Halloween night when we met.
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Yes, I fully agree with what you just said about the fragment and the strings, and we're all working towards a common goal.
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I agree completely, you know.
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It just delights me to hear you say that.
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You know we bill ourselves as the Connections and Community guys and it's really delightful to hear you say that people had said to you oh, you've got to meet Maddox and Dwight before you actually met us, so we're starting to get maybe a wee bit of a reputation and that's kind of exciting.
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Yes, yeah, I forgot who told me.
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Someone was like yeah, their events are great, they have a mailing list, like you need to get on this mailing list, and so, oh, and it kills me that I don't remember who said that, but I'm sure it was someone we both know.
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Yeah, somebody promoting us.
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I wish you.
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If you remember you, let us know, because we need to reach out to them and say thank you.
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Yeah, so I'm going to throw the mic to you and give you an opportunity to introduce yourself, because I know that I couldn't do it justice, so I'm going to let you toot your own horn.
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Well, thank you, thank you.
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You know.
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It's funny because, as a curator myself, my entire job is a lot of times to promote others and to talk about other people, so I need to practice talking about myself a little bit more.
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Here you are, you get to practice today.
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So a little bit about me.
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I was born in Bulgaria and if you know me for longer than five minutes I promise I'll bring it up.
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I love my country and I love my culture and so I came here when I was around five, five-ish years old, came with my parents.
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They had sacrificed a lot to bring me here.
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You know, in Bulgaria the you know communism regime had just fallen and so there was a lot of political and economic turmoil between governments and so, like in any transitional period, they were like, oh we, we need to go somewhere else and find more economic stability.
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And so they left, we, they brought me to South Africa for a little bit, because that's the visa my father could secure, and then after five years, brought us here and throughout the States I've moved around, so so much my dad's technical skills are in high demand, and so we kind of moved around wherever because we were kind of at the mercy of the company that hired my father.
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So, and then afterwards, you know, we settled kind of here in Dallas, texas, went through most of my education here and, and then I got a degree in risk management and insurance so sexy and exciting and so that that degree was was great.
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I truly I do appreciate learning about risk management and about insurance.
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Like I feel like it's a very interesting industry if you start to study it.
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But I decided that I needed to pay attention to my needs first, and so I completely just dropped everything and said I'm going to start a business, and I absolutely the people around me probably thought I was crazy.
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They didn't say it outright, but I could definitely see the reactions of people when I told them like hey, mom, dad, you know, husband, I'm quitting and they were like, oh, okay, and what are you going to do?
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And I'm like art, and so they very much you know um, and so they very much, you know they were supportive, they cheered me on, but no one in my immediate circle knew how to help me, and so I decided that I was just going to have a gallery at Tower Club Dallas fell in my lap, and I can get into that a little bit later, but now I'm a gallerist and an art advocate, first and foremost, an artist advocate.
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I like to empower artists to say the word no and to feel comfortable with saying the word no, even to me, even to me.
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And the next thing is, I love to connect people, and I'm a community builder.
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So you know, I transitioned from one area of expertise into something completely different and I felt like I built something with my own hands from the ground up.
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But I didn't do it alone, because I met some awesome people along the way that have just been here to support me and be so generous in every single aspect.
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So that's a long-winded answer.
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That sounds delightful, so long winded answer.
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Yeah, that sounds delightful and I love your determination.
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I'm just going to figure it out.
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I don't know anybody that knows how to do this, but I'm going to figure it out.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I feel like in the world we, we underestimate how many people are faking it in day-to-day life.
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Very successful people, very high level people.
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A lot of people don't actually know what they're doing, and it's the human condition, it's the way we are as people, and so if you are able to understand that the other people in the room are probably just as insecure as you are, then things get a lot easier to to.
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You know, push forward and swallow that pill, you know.
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Oh, I love that.
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I hope the listeners are really getting that right now.
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The rest of the people in the room are probably just as insecure as you are.
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Yeah, so, anna, you just shared you know what age you were 26, when you exercised free will.
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I'm gonna, you know, go for art, but I want to know where were you?
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What were you doing?
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How old were you when you suddenly knew I want to be an artist?
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Yes, yeah.
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So my entire life I've been very creative and I've created art, and in every single stage in my life people were like when I was a kid, they were like you're going to be an artist, right.
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And then, when I was in corporate, they were like what are you doing here, like you don't belong here.
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You belong somewhere way cooler.
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You belong to be like like a famous artist or something.
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And I'm and I kind of ignored people because I, you know, I was taught to value stability in life, understandably so, and I understand why my parents instilled that in me.
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They came from extraordinary poverty, and so it's interesting because their mindset had to be one of survival and my mindset, thankfully, never had to be one of survival.
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I'm so, so lucky and privileged that all of my needs throughout my entire childhood were provided for.
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My entire childhood were provided for, and so that's kind of the next, I guess, step is, after your needs are fulfilled, you then look for emotional fulfillment, and and so I had been, you know, doing what society tells you to do go to college, get a job.
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And I went to college and I got my job, and then, and then the pandemic hit and all of a sudden, my, my brain went from you know, attacking the things outside of me, such as finish school, finish exams, get a job.
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All of my anxieties were external and I was like solving all the external problems.
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Then I got a job, I got married, I settled down.
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Everything should be fine and dandy right.
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You would think.
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That's the script.
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That's the script.
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Well, at that point my brain I like to say that it turned on itself and I got crippling OCD and anxiety and then I freaked out.
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I didn't know what to do because I had never sought out any sort of mental health support in my life.
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And I didn't know what to do.
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I was like paralyzed, and so I went to a psychiatrist and a therapist and I was diagnosed with OCD and anxiety and depression.
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And all of a sudden, you know, I started taking medications and you know, finding the right medications is a really difficult journey for many people and it was not an easy journey for me and I fell into really, really bad mental health times.
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I, you know, I even had to resign my job for a little bit, for about six months.
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Um, the whole mental health um struggle was around a year and a half, but for six months I couldn't even work.
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I was bedridden.
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I basically didn't have the will to live.
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I had zero will to do anything.
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And it really hit me one day, when this was like a few months into being unemployed, voluntarily to get my mental health together, husband walks into the room and asks me a question and I didn't have it in me to answer my, my depression and my suicidal ideation was so severe that I I didn't even have like the energy or the will to even utter a response to him and he goes on out you need to talk to me so that I know if you're alive or not.
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And that was like, even even in like the haze that got through to me somehow that, like I am, I am, something happened, something went really wrong and I don't know what it is, and something went really wrong and I don't know what it is, and I had kind of been just like going, going, going, going in life.
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Then I hit a wall and I completely crashed and I felt like a complete shell of myself and a year and a half into this mental health depression situation, I had lost a lot.
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I lost my job, I lost my mental health, I lost, like, my physical health was deteriorating, like I I had very little except for, you know and this is to me now.
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I know it's a lot I had a lot, I had people who loved me, but at the time I felt like I'd screwed everything up, that I had nothing left to live for, and I was, you know, and and I was hospitalized on a number of occasions I hospitalized myself to protect myself because I didn't trust me.
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And so I I say this for a very uh, you know tangible reason, which is I want to destigmatize this discussion around mental health.
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I don't want people to be ashamed to say that they experienced suicidal ideation, that they experienced extreme depression and OCD and anxiety.
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It happens and it can happen to anybody.
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It can happen no matter how much you prepared in life and no matter how resilient you think you are.
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You know went to Bulgaria with my aunt and she looked, took one look at me and she was like I know what's wrong with you.
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And I was like enlighten me please.
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And like, cause I've been trying to figure this out for a year and a half, please tell me.
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She's like you don't have a community.
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Oh wow, she was so wise yeah, and I was like what does community have to do with the fact that my brain is broken?
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She's like it has everything to do with the fact that your brain is broken wise woman she, she's like that's you have, like because of the um pandemic, you were isolated, you were.
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You had nobody to talk to.
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There was no coping mechanism and structure around you about everything happening on in the world.
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You don't have a community.
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She's like name, name, like 10 people you can call right now and I was like I can't, I really can't.
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And so you know that that really like set off a light bulb and at that point I was super motivated to get better, like really motivated.
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I was super motivated to get better, like really motivated.
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And you know, with my psychiatrist, I came back to the States and we worked a solution out with my medications and I got better and better.
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But it was a lot of like.
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I had to make decisions, tough decisions, because I knew that the status quo was not working.
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And so within three months from that meeting, I felt well enough for my psychiatrist to start deprescribing me entirely and and then, within six months, I got my job back.
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And then, you know, I, within you know, another few months, I was basically like, okay, I, I, I, my brain was back to.
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You know what it was before?
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And and then I had this job and I was like, now that I have my life back and I have everything that I wanted back, um am I living authentically?
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I'm 26 years old.
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I, you know, I I went through probably like the worst mental health experience that I've, that I've ever seen anybody go through.
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I up until that point, I had never experienced severe mental health problems with anyone else, so I was like I miraculously came back from this.
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I need to actually do what I want to do in life, and so I decided that I was just going to do it drop everything, because nothing is worse than what I experienced with my mental health struggles.
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Nothing could possibly top that in a million years.
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So I'm like, no matter what kind of uncertainty and stress and um insecurity I might face, I've already faced the worst.
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The worst like there is for myself.
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And I was like and I made it out alive, which is miraculous, like the fact that I'm alive today is like a miracle in and of itself.
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And so I was like I need to live a real, authentic life where this doesn't happen again, where I don't feel like, where I don't lose the will to live.
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I need to create purpose for myself out of out of thin air.
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I must.
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I'm responsible for creating it for me.
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Out of thin air I'm responsible for creating it for me.
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You're telling versions of our story.
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It's really hard for me to receive this and not be taken back to my own pandemic experience where I was caring for my husband.
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We'd been together for 20 years years and he had advanced liver disease.
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We had to deal with that while the entire healthcare system was under stress.
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It was the worst possible time and it drew us closer, but the thing was, we learned to cherish what we had once taken for granted and when everything started opening up, he didn't make it, he.
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He passed away, just as vaccines were, and I was plunged down into a deep, dark hole of grief.
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And if it weren't for some people who intervened you know we talk Maddox and I talk about how we were both reading the same book.
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Well, the author of the two-hour cocktail party gave me the nudge that I needed to focus on something outside of myself and to find that cure that is community to to build it.
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And and that's eventually how we both met- yeah, yeah, I'm so sorry for your loss.
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That's losing a spouse or a family member can really like alter your brain chemistry and really completely.
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you know, mess with it, and it's I.
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It takes courage to go to the next day.
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It takes courage even though, like you don't know what the next day holds.
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You don't even know if you're going to make it the next day, but it's like you make it one day at a time.
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There were so many days, I remember I would just like I would even live hour by hour.
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I would be like I'm just trying to make it to 6pm.
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If I can make it to 6pm, I can make it then to 7pm.
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I'll worry about that hour when I get there.
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And and it's just that's why, like, like, when I see people who are struggling, my first question is you know, do you have community around you?
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Because the people that were there for you, dwight, like I'm sure you're never going to forget them.
00:25:12.582 --> 00:25:15.192
Oh, never and you'll never forget.
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You know, there were a handful of people that reached out to me, and it was.
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It was people I never expected.
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Um, one of them was a childhood best friend that we hadn't talked in forever and she would call me every single day and she'd be like how are you today?
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And I'm like not good.
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She's like it's okay.
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And of all the people in the world you know, I would have thought you know certain, you know whatever bridesmaids or this or that and the other would reach out.
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But it was.
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You know whatever bridesmaids or this or that and the other would reach out, but it was.
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You know, a completely like person who wasn't involved in my day-to-day life but they inserted themselves to make sure I was okay and it's like that's.
00:26:06.380 --> 00:26:28.596
It's the most random thing ever, but it's so refreshing for me now to think about that person in such a new way that if I had never gone through that struggle, I would have never known that they had that deep, compassionate side to them Sounds like a guardian angel to me.
00:26:29.176 --> 00:26:30.299
Yeah, yeah.
00:26:30.601 --> 00:26:30.801
Yeah.
00:26:30.801 --> 00:26:34.160
So, ana, you're very, very right.
00:26:34.160 --> 00:26:36.295
This is a conversation that we don't have.
00:26:36.295 --> 00:26:38.781
That needs to be normalized, it needs to be.
00:26:38.781 --> 00:26:44.840
This conversation needs to happen and you've gone deep, and thank you for that.
00:26:44.840 --> 00:26:48.460
I just want to honor the vulnerability and the authenticity.
00:26:48.460 --> 00:26:49.261
You've gone deep.
00:26:49.261 --> 00:26:51.915
Are you willing to go a little deeper?
00:26:52.597 --> 00:26:52.858
Yes.
00:26:56.955 --> 00:26:59.109
You realized that you didn't have community.
00:26:59.109 --> 00:27:02.936
Based on what your aunt said to you, you started to make changes.
00:27:02.936 --> 00:27:13.432
You knew you had to create a life that was about you and you let go of a lot of things and you let go of a lot of things.
00:27:13.432 --> 00:27:17.056
I'm wondering that internal process.
00:27:17.056 --> 00:27:21.902
You know, we have things that we believe about ourselves.
00:27:21.902 --> 00:27:26.286
We have things that we believe about the world at large.
00:27:26.286 --> 00:27:30.994
We have things that we believe about people.
00:27:30.994 --> 00:27:39.689
Sometimes we have limiting beliefs, sometimes we have limiting beliefs, sometimes we have all kinds of things.
00:27:39.689 --> 00:27:41.381
What would you say had to shift in you?
00:27:41.381 --> 00:27:57.837
What did you have to let go of and what did you have to embrace to make that shift from a corporate job and a life that was not around community, that was literally sucking life out of you?
00:27:57.837 --> 00:28:01.279
What were the internal shifts that had to happen?
00:28:01.279 --> 00:28:04.357
And please feel free to go into detail.
00:28:04.940 --> 00:28:13.402
Yeah, the overarching theme of all the shifts and I'll go deeper is is, uh, is control.
00:28:13.402 --> 00:28:24.656
Um, before I had let go of control, life was stressful.
00:28:24.656 --> 00:28:26.699
Everything was stressful.
00:28:26.699 --> 00:28:51.338
Um, I would be far too consumed with what one or two or individual people thought about me, what my parents thought, what my friends thought and what people expected of me, or even the expectations I had of myself.
00:28:51.338 --> 00:29:01.143
I was like you know, I'm going to be in control and I'm going to determine everything, and everything is going to go this exact way.
00:29:01.143 --> 00:29:12.786
And there's this one particular song that really helped me process my mental health journey.
00:29:12.786 --> 00:29:16.398
And have you guys heard of the artist Ren?
00:29:19.353 --> 00:29:39.819
I don't think so he's a UK artist and he sings about mental health struggles and he has this song called Hi Ren, where he talks to himself in this and at the very end of the song there's a monologue that is, um, basically like life.
00:29:39.819 --> 00:29:52.809
Life as he, is an eternal dance between good and evil and there is no real winners or losers in psychological warfare.
00:29:52.809 --> 00:30:07.545
There are just students and this dance between good and bad stages of your mental health.
00:30:07.545 --> 00:30:19.252
The more rigid you become, the more you're going to stumble and the more difficult this thing called life becomes.
00:30:19.252 --> 00:30:39.430
And in fact, paradoxically, as soon as you let go control, the dance becomes easier and you become, you begin to like almost flow with the waves of of life.
00:30:39.430 --> 00:30:58.532
And once you start to practice your loosening up and not being as rigid, making and this can be in small things in life making big, consequential decisions becomes much easier.
00:31:01.676 --> 00:31:08.851
You know I had already learned how to ebb and flow with my intrusive thoughts.
00:31:08.851 --> 00:31:27.339
Some days my intrusive thoughts were really really bad, really nasty, and other days that I felt great, um, but I had to let go of any expectation of how the day would go If, if I had really bad thoughts.
00:31:27.339 --> 00:31:29.789
You know I would need to just let it go.
00:31:29.789 --> 00:31:30.188
It's okay.
00:31:30.188 --> 00:31:31.861
You know it could be the most horrific thoughts you've ever.
00:31:31.861 --> 00:31:32.165
You know I would need to just let it go.
00:31:32.165 --> 00:31:32.262
It's okay.
00:31:32.262 --> 00:31:35.002
You know it could be the most horrific thoughts you've ever, you know, thought of.
00:31:35.002 --> 00:31:37.724
It's okay, it'll pass.
00:31:37.724 --> 00:31:44.492
Don't harbor them, don't analyze the thoughts, don't obsess over them.
00:31:44.492 --> 00:31:45.854
They will pass.
00:31:46.734 --> 00:32:19.943
And in that same way, when I learned to ebb and flow and dance with my thoughts almost then you begin to learn to do the dance in line and I realized that me being rigid with the way that my life was supposed to be structured was not working and it was not going to be good for sustainable happiness and longevity.
00:32:19.943 --> 00:32:28.463
So I had to learn to completely let go control of other people's perceptions of me.
00:32:28.463 --> 00:32:30.476
They don't matter.
00:32:30.476 --> 00:32:42.053
People's perceptions of me they don't matter.
00:32:42.053 --> 00:32:46.698
What matters is if I'm happy every single day of my life.
00:32:46.698 --> 00:32:50.861
My parents aren't showing up to my job for me's me.
00:32:50.861 --> 00:33:08.974
So if I am unhappy with where I'm at in life, it is my responsibility and I need to take ownership of doing the things that I can to change my life.
00:33:08.974 --> 00:33:14.404
We need to be gracious with ourselves and again, it's a dance.
00:33:14.404 --> 00:33:30.182
So there are many things you can't control and not letting those things bog you down is so, so important in this game.
00:33:30.323 --> 00:33:38.160
Life is very much like a game and if you're obsessed with everything going your way, far more things will not go your way.
00:33:38.160 --> 00:33:50.914
But if you're able to like, have flexibility in your psyche almost, and say, okay, this thing happened to me, that's okay, I have another idea, we have a plan B, plan C.
00:33:50.914 --> 00:33:52.820
We'll figure it out as we go.
00:33:52.820 --> 00:33:56.476
I often approach life almost with no plan.
00:33:56.476 --> 00:34:02.112
I approach life with like however this day happens, it happens.
00:34:02.112 --> 00:34:04.257
I have a list of things I want to accomplish.
00:34:04.257 --> 00:34:07.050
Of course, if I accomplish them, cool.
00:34:07.050 --> 00:34:10.559
Most likely I won't even accomplish a third of those things.
00:34:10.559 --> 00:34:14.432
If I'm being honest, most likely I won't even accomplish a third of those things.
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