I've been trying to have this conversation for over a year.

Toya Northington was the very first person I wanted on this podcast. We set a date. The morning we were supposed to record, she texted me that she'd been laid off from her DEI role, one of the first waves of a pattern we've all now watched unfold across this country.

We rescheduled. And I'm so glad we did, because the conversation we had this March is the one we were meant to have.

Toya is an artist, social worker, and founder of Frameworks for Growth, a creative wellness practice that uses art-based experiences to help people process what they've been carrying silently, before they can even put it into words. She's also a longtime client and one of the people I admire most in this work.

In this episode, we talk about what it means to build your identity around a title, and what happens when that title disappears. We talk about DE&I professionals being the advocates taken away first, about isolation feeding anxiety, about creativity as a tool for coming back to yourself, not for creating something pretty, but for your own transformation.

In this conversation we talk about:

• What it means to rebuild your identity after a layoff
• Creativity as excavation, not performance
• The connection between speaking anxiety and the inability to hear your own inner voice
• Why isolation makes anxiety worse, and community is the antidote
• How grassroots movements have always been the thing that saves us
• Why social work is the future of work

About Toya Northington, MSSW:

Toya Northington is an artist, social worker, and founder of Frameworks for Growth, a creative wellness practice built on the belief that creativity can help us understand our lives in ways words alone often can't. She works with people navigating seasons of change, caregiving, grief, burnout, or starting over, offering art-based experiences for reflection, expression, and reconnection. Guided by both clinical insight and lived experience, she creates space for people to process what they've been carrying silently before they can fully put it into words, strengthening their inner voice and supporting them in moving forward with clarity and intention. Her work has been featured on NPR, PBS, and Burnaway, and supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Find Toya at frameworks4growth.com or on Instagram @toyaNorth.