When the world defines your worth by how productive you are, making space for wonder & creativity is an act of beautiful resistance.
Be More Creative. Feel Less Alone. Find Wonder Every Day.
Welcome to my best-selling Substack where I write about wonder, resilience, and the power of finding beauty in everyday moments.
Overwhelmed by all the noise in your news feed? Feeling drained and disconnected in the places you most want to be inspired? Lost in an online echo chamber, longing to find your creative center again?
Then, welcome friend. You are in the right place.
I’m Michele. I write words of courage and paint whimsical things. Creative business strategist & coach. Lover of open roads, blank pages, and wild spaces.
I write from the stories that have left stretch marks on my soul and the beauty I have found along the way in unexpected places.
Because being brave is contagious.
That’s why I’m here… Carving a space for courage and connection to help you be more creative and feel less alone.
Wonder is an act of resistance to everything that would diminish our dreams or weaken our worth. And we’ve never needed it more.
See if any of these sound familiar:
➡️ You wish you could slow down in the middle of the rush and find a place to breathe long enough to get fresh perspective on all the things happening around you.
➡️ You want to feel more creative, but feel stuck in the mud and overwhelmed instead.
➡️ You are looking for courage to meet the challenges of our day, but feel frazzled by the relentless noise and chaos in your newsfeed.
➡️ You wish you could harness inspiration to show up practically when and where you need it.
➡️ You're tired of feeling frustrated and disconnected from the things that matter most to you.
➡️ You want to live a more curious, connected, creative life… but right now the only thing you have energy to change is what show you’re binging on Netflix.
Yes? Then… You BELONG Here.
These Times Are the Wild Rollercoaster Ride You Did Not Sign Up For.
And *taps screen* you are tired of white-knuckling your way through the week.
Do I ever get it. January 28, 2018, I woke up after a car accident with what felt like a stranger's brain in my head.
Overnight, I became a writer who lost her words.
The first months of brain injury recovery were spent in a dark, silent room watching my life crumble around me.
I promised myself as it was all falling apart, that even if I had to learn language all over again, I would find better words than the ones I lost.
So I immersed myself in poetry, in small moments of beauty, and slowly, one line, one rhyme, one paint stroke at a time, my brain began to heal.
Wonder became the path back to myself and to depths of connection and creativity I could not have then imagined. And it saved my life.
The Wonder Habit™ is my best-selling Substack where I write about the practice of cultivating simple everyday moments that deepen our creativity and strengthen our wholehearted connection to ourselves and one another. It is a framework of building resilience in an uncertain world.
So Here 👏🏻 We 👏🏻 Are 👏🏻
And this ⬆️ is an accurate depiction of how I feel about it. 😉
Yes, that’s me. If we haven’t met, I navigate life with 3 legs (ok, 2 of them are crutches), 1 hip, and a 96.3% fused spine. No, that isn’t a super scary fifth-grade math word problem I promise.
I’m a creative to my core. Wandering along shorelines and through forests feeds my soul. My art and writing explore the connection, courage, and curiosity rooted in wonder as a daily practice, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of our unfolding stories.
And since this journey got started, my art and writing has been seen over 7.6 million times in 2 years.
The more stories I hear from you, the more I believe wonder can change the world. Especially here. Especially now.
What Can You Expect Around Here?
Wholehearted courage, practical resilience, creative prompts & more…
Start with a free subscription that has helped 11K+ creatives make wonder a habit ⬇️
With original writings & content that you can't get anywhere else.
In 2025, I'm making this Substack and writing my biggest focus from here on out.
Given the historical events we are currently living through, this is my way to take positive action sharing strength, beauty, inspiration, and kindness, as well as practical insights and practices for resilience-building.
I'll be writing 2-3x weekly about things like:
🎨 Building the courage & creativity we need as an act of resistance to anything that would diminish our dreams or weaken our worth
✨ Finding wonder in our daily lived creative experience
🌱 Proactive ways to grow and connect more deeply to our unfolding stories
🪄 Sharing practical inspiration & resources for the times we are in. You don't have to figure this out alone.
📚 Sneak peeks at The Wonder Habit book I'm writing.
🎥 I'm working on adding in video as well!
🗞 All delivered to your inbox and housed on Substack.
And you can have all this writing delivered to your inbox for free.
Save it, file it in a folder in your email, and it’s yours to read and refer to whenever you like.
And for less than a Starbucks run, you can also get VIP access to The Wonder Habit's entire archive of encouragement, wonder prompts, & creative resources.
Plus, you'll become a VITAL part of supporting this ongoing work. The Wonder Habit® is a 100% reader supported publication.
For $10.99/month or $98/year our paid subscribers also receive ↴
➡️ The Wonder Drop Our monthly curated email sent right to your inbox, that includes things like:
A creative deep dive, mini-workshop, or special set of prompts
Special behind the scenes on projects
Hand-selected image inspiration you can use for creative references & visual prompts.
Lovely seasonal surprises & slow living details
➡️ A growing archive of beauty and words that build you up in a world that seems too often to want to tear things down.
📚 Our Original Prompt & Project Library with over 500 Prompts and more being added all the time
🖥 Monthly Third Thursday Live Zoom Check-In Calls exclusively for paid subscribers.
🗄 Full, unlocked access to the Wonder Habit archives
💬 Access to the Conversation on all Substack posts to connect with the community.
All for you. So you can be more creative in an age that seeks to shut us down with overwhelm, and feel less alone when so much feels siloed and divided.
You also get to be part of supporting me to do this work and make this space possible. You are the reason I get to do this & I am deeply grateful. I believe that WONDER holds the keys to connect us back to ourselves, and to one another. It is a way forward to a better future. And it begins inside each one of us.
So welcome to a place where I hope you feel: Seen. Significant. Celebrated. Empowered.
Because you aren’t on the outside looking in. You are the first pick, not the last. You are invited into a space you don’t have to fit into because you already belong.
There’s a seat with your name on it at this table.
Your being and becoming are celebrated in this space. Because you are full of wonder and worth celebrating.
Say it with me: “Be more Creative. Feel Less Alone. Find Wonder Every Day.”
Wonder is your birthright. I can’t wait to help you step into it more each day.
Questions? Please drop me a note ⬇️.
Other Places You Can Find Me
DMichelePerry.com, my fine art website where you can find all the latest on art collections, commissions, and studio behind-the-scenes.
Across social media @dmicheleperry
