A Bouquet of Becoming

Creativity isn't something we do, but rather who we are at our core, though many of us have forgotten this essential truth as we've navigated societal expectations and professional pressures. In this episode, I explore my journey from childhood wonder to self-doubt and back to creative permission, revealing how reclaiming our natural state of creation can happen without needing validation or expertise.

In this episode I discuss:

• How our innate creativity gets silenced by external voices
• The German concept of "Spielraum" (playroom) and how it represents the creative freedom we need – space to move, explore, and play
• True creation coming from following resonance and joy rather than seeking validation or perfectionism
• How moving from Switzerland to Colombia became part of reclaiming my childlike curiosity and creative expansion
• How creation can be cyclical, with periods of contraction (painful) and expansion (luscious), both necessary for growth
  
  

If this episode stirred something in you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a whisper on Instagram at @fairytea.podcast, or just write the words "fairy wings" in my DMs so I'll know you were here.

Contact Me:

• Instagram: @fairytea.podcast or @akayourfairygodmother
• Email: akayourfairygodmother@gmail.com
  
  

This episode was produced by six-two.studio

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Fairy Tea is a deeply personal podcast where I share the raw, honest messiness of life—exploring how to break free from societal expectations and follow the heart’s calling. Blending storytelling, spirituality, folklore, and self-discovery, Fairy Tea is both magical and real, whimsical yet grounded. It’s a space to embrace uncertainty, face challenges without fear, and stay curious about the possibilities ahead. Through my own experiences, I invite listeners to see that a new way of living is possible—one that is intuitive, soulful, and uniquely their own.

Instagram: @fairytea.podcast or @akayourfairygodmother

Email: akayourfairygodmother@gmail.com

Transcript

Sophie Bruderer:

0:00

Welcome to Fairy Tea, where we sip on the thorough wisdom of the fairy realm and uncover its ancient secrets for healing, pleasure and rest. I'm your host, Sophie, here to sprinkle a little enchantment into your everyday life. Think of this as one great, unfolding experiment, an invitation to dance with magic, trust the unseen and let curiosity lead the way. Crack the shell that kept you quiet, burn the chains of not enough. May your breath recall the moment when your voice was wild and rough. For those who listened to the first episode, you know I like to open each one with a little spell, something small like a keyhole, a little whisper, an invitation to lean in if it feels right. And if it does, maybe this story is meant for you. So welcome back to Fairy Tea. I'm Soph, your fairy godmother, and this episode is about art, or rather the ache of not creating. It's about the silence that forms when expression turns into doubt, and the slow, sacred return to the part of yourself you once abandoned. It's about remembering what's always been true that creativity isn't earned. It's instinct and it lives in all of us. So when I was a little kid, creating wasn't something I did, it was just who I was. I remember turning beds into stages, pillows into castles. Heck, my sister and I rewrote invisible horses through invisible lands and everything I touched turned into something. Not because I was lying, but because the world felt alive to me. I couldn't help but respond. My parents used to choke that going for a walk with me meant advancing about five meters per hour because I needed to stop and admire every little leaf, every bug, every shimmer of light. Presence wasn't something I had to learn, it was my natural, my default setting and, maybe the most important thing, I wasn't doing it to be seen. I wasn't trying to prove anything. I created because something wanted to come through me, because it felt good, because I had to. But over time I started to notice, I became aware of the fact that my way of seeing didn't quite fit. It seemed that my awe, my wonder, my enchantment. People seem to call that naive. I don't know. I was shy, I was fragile and eventually I believed them. I thought they were older, so they must know right. So I ended up letting go of the parts of me that didn't make sense to others, that didn't make sense to others, and slowly creation became something I felt I had to justify, and I guess there wasn't one moment when it all vanished, but there was one in particular. I still remember so very well.

Sophie Bruderer:

4:07

It was in middle school when we were about to change to high school and I had to choose a major and the only thing that interested me or called me was visual arts. But when I told my arts teacher at the time, he looked at me and said I don't really see that with you. And I'm pretty sure he probably doesn't even remember saying that, but I sure do, because at the time I was already unsure. I was already on unsteady legs, already questioning if I had even a right to do what I desired, because I didn't fit the mold. I wasn't the protege type. I didn't have one single gift that could be measured or labeled. I loved so very many things, but I didn't master any. So when he said that, when he said I don't really fit in there, I I believed him.

Sophie Bruderer:

5:05

And what I internalized at that moment was you're not real, you don't have what it takes, you're not an artist. And I waited, I silenced myself and that waiting, it became a habit. I didn't question for years. And here's the wild thing I didn't really stop longing to create, but I did stop giving myself permission. I still noticed beauty everywhere. I still imagined other lives, other paths, other stories. But I swallowed the urge to make anything out of it Because somewhere along the way I started believing that if I wasn't going to be good or impressive, it wasn't worth doing it at all. And because I wasn't producing anything that looked like what others called art art, because it wasn't polished or visible or praised I convinced myself it didn't count. So when something hurts, I tend to run in the opposite direction. I'm kind of extreme like that. So that's I did. I figured if I couldn't be an artist which is what I really wanted I would become something unshakably real, something with prestige, with structure, so no one would ever question me again.

Sophie Bruderer:

6:42

So that's how I became a lawyer, and I hated it I mean not all of it, but most of it the rigidity, the rituals, the masks. But rest assured, I made it fit, because admitting it didn't oof. That meant facing the ache of what I'd left behind, and I just couldn't do it. So I told myself it was who I always meant to be, even when I knew deep down that I was just playing a role. And the few things that did intrigue me, they weren't even about the law itself. They were about everything beneath it the mirror between inner lives and public systems, the way shame seeps into legislation, the way longing hides in cultural norms. But no one else seemed to care about those nuances. So I stayed quiet and I stayed misplaced. And don't get me wrong, like I don't regret it, because even a wrong path holds meaning. But the more I tried to fit into the mold, the more I disappeared. And, like I told you in episode one, eventually I cracked. But what broke me wasn't the law, it was the silence, the ache of not creating.

Sophie Bruderer:

8:18

I was so afraid because I didn't have a medium. I wasn't a painter or a dancer or a singer. I was just me, like a curious, sensitive, scattered soul, always chasing meaning, always chasing awe. But in the world I grew up in, that just wasn't enough. We're taught to choose one thing, to master it, to turn it into a brand, a business, a career. But I couldn't. I wanted to feel life, not categorize it.

Sophie Bruderer:

9:02

And the older I got, the more I realized no one really knows what they're doing, especially the ones who pretend they do. We tend to delay our dreams until we're ready and then wonder why we never feel free. We collect titles and trophies, but do we ever ask if any of it feels true, the systems that we inherited? They're not ultimate truths, they're just one way of seeing the world, one approach among many, I don't know. For so long I treated what the system mirrored back to me as a fact. I thought if I didn't fit, I must be the problem. But now I know it's okay to look at the map and say, hmm, this route doesn't work for me. The imaginary authority I once built in my mind, those voices I gave so much power to, none of them actually knew better than me. They just knew how to speak louder. And sometimes it seems to me that what we call expertise is just confidence wrapped in convention. So I stopped waiting for permission and I started choosing resonance.

Sophie Bruderer:

10:32

Today I try to just play around with everything that pops into my head. That sometimes is messy and I'm not consistent, and I try not to make myself have to be. Sometimes I start something and then I get totally sick of it, and sometimes there's a revival and sometimes there's not, and I just try to let myself be led by joy and peace. What feels like joy is worth exploring, like I said in the last episode. Like Alice in Wonderland, I jump into the hole because I'm curious and I try not to focus on the end result. I try to have faith that it will somehow come together like a bouquet. If something makes me happy, I share it without expectations.

Sophie Bruderer:

11:26

At this point, I don't care about likes or hearts or praise. All I care about is building a space for myself and others where softness and creation is sacred. So I want to play around with this podcast. Maybe I'll make something only with poems or a conversation style Like an interview. I don't know. I would love to play around with different languages too.

Sophie Bruderer:

11:57

All I know is I want to play and see what happens, and my hunger for creation, that quiet, aching urge to feel alive again, is what made me question everything I once accepted as truth. In fact, it's also what made me move to Colombia. I wanted to feel that childlike curiosity again. I felt so saturated in Switzerland, uninspired. I wanted to be in a place I didn't fully understand, in a language I to this day stumble through, in a culture that challenged me to soften and open up and trust me. I was humbled again and again by uncomfortable moments, by insufferable lostness, by every fear I thought I thought I'd already outgrown, but I was also expanded in ways I never imagined.

Sophie Bruderer:

13:03

Creation, I've realized, is a cycle of constant breakdown and breakthroughs. Like I feel like I'm constantly expanding and contracting and the expansion feels wonderful and the contraction is absolutely horrible but necessary, I guess. So often it closes in on me and I feel horrible and then it expands again and it feels more luscious than ever and even though I still don't fully understand this path, it feels like mine. I guess you could call it like my own little butterfly effect. There's this word in German. It's called Spielraum and literally translated it means playroom, but it also means space to move, like wiggle room, freedom within form. Isn't that such a delicious concept? Spielraum is one of those things that holds my whole philosophy. It's how I see creativity, it's how I want to live's how I want to live, how I want this podcast to feel, not like something fixed, nothing rigid, but something alive, with room to breathe, to shift and to explore.

Sophie Bruderer:

14:30

I remember one moment in particular. It was late at night when I was already in Cali and the fan was humming. I was laying on my belly and for the first time I said out loud I think I want to record a podcast. My voice at the time it was trembling, but it felt so true and that that there. That was my opening. But there have been many others, like the first time I sang to myself out loud again, like when I stopped scripting my thoughts and just spoke. Or the first time I posted something on Instagram that made no obvious sense but just felt like the truest thing in my chest. Spielraum is the moment you stop editing your essence. It's the breath between the fear and the leap. It's also where the fairies live. So this episode is my Spielraum, this podcast is my Spielraum, and maybe, if you're here, this space can be yours too.

Sophie Bruderer:

15:41

And I think about this a lot how everything we live inside was once imagined Cities, schools, law, capitalism, even the idea of what makes an artist all of it was created. None of it is natural, none of it is fixed either. We live inside stories on a daily basis, stories that became systems, systems that became rules, and rules we forgot, we were allowed to question. But the truth is we're all creators. We shape the world in every choice we make, and that's what this podcast is for me a quiet rebellion, a new kind of architecture, one that's made of softness, of listening, of remembering, of not knowing and still showing up. I'm not building a brand, but I'm building a refuge, a shelter made of story, a sanctuary made of sound.

Sophie Bruderer:

16:56

Fairy tea is art, not because it's perfect, but because it's mine. It's not a polished product, it's a living process. It's a place to alchemize, to feel, to reflect, to wonder and to build an inner infrastructure that holds me when the outer world feels too sharp. And, trust me, I struggled with this episode more than I expected. I wrote it and then I rewrote it. I had so many doubts and I almost gave up, but I kept returning because something in me knew that this matters, not because it's new, not because it's particularly profound, but because it's true. We tend to forget the simple things, we dismiss the obvious At least I do. But when I come back to wonder, everything softens. And that's why I'm here To remember, to remind, to create something that feels like home and what I once used to envy people with exceptional talent has.

Sophie Bruderer:

18:25

I want to document and accompany other people's creative processes, because witnessing the process, honoring it, protecting it, that just feels so sacred to me. I see it as part of my calling, as a fairy godmother to accompany fellow artists while they create, to offer a safe space where they don't need to perform or explain but can just follow the pulse of their heart. I know that that's not a job that exists. So far no one hires a fairy godmother to guard their creative spark. But then again, there was once a time when accounting wasn't a job either.

Sophie Bruderer:

19:06

So I guess I'm creating it, I'm naming it and I'm living it into existence, because I believe with every cell in my being that creation needs guardians, gentle, witnesses, so that beauty can emerge freely. And and that's the kind of space I long to build, both through this podcast and beyond, a space where every petal matters, where mismatched pieces make beauty, where nothing has to be finished to be full of life, where nothing has to be finished to be full of life. To me, I swear, there is nothing more beautiful than the process itself. It's alive, it's unfinished and it's breathing. And it's the wobble, the wondering and the sacred mess of making. And the more I embrace my own ordinariness, my very human rhythm of blooming and relating, the freer I become to express what's truly unique in me. Not to impress anyone, not to prove anything, but to offer something real, something rooted, something only I could have made, because only I live this path, and that's what I'd like to call the fairy way.

Sophie Bruderer:

20:24

So, yes, I'm building my fairy universe word by word, and if you're still here, you're already a part of it. So here's your gentle reminder. You don't need permission, you don't need to be great, you just need a little Spielraum and maybe a little bit of fairy dust, who knows. So, until next time, stay close to what stirs you. Create something, even if it's messy, even if no one gets to see it, especially then. So thank you so much for listening to my meandering thoughts. You're a part of this, always. And PS, the next episode we'll be talking about something close to my heart the story on how I became a fairy. It's a story of remembering, reclaiming and redefining who I am. So you don't want to miss it. If this episode stirred something in you, I'd love to hear about it. Send me a little whisper on Instagram at fairyteapodcast, or just write the words fairy wings in my DMms. That's how I'll know you were here.

This was a 6-2 Studio production. Find us at six-two.studio for all your creative sound needs.