Artist Recovery Podcast
Artist Recovery Podcast is Bringing Light to the Darkside of Art. I’m Rich Wright, your host — and here we're redefining recovery as Renewal, Resilience and Creative Transformation. Because for artists, it’s more than survival… it’s Remembering.
This show is about the real journey of being a working creative — the highs, the lows, the pivots, and the reinventions that shape who we are. Together we’ll explore how setbacks can spark transformation, how loss can open new paths, and how resilience fuels the heart of every artist’s story.
If you’ve ever faced doubt, setback, or the call to reinvent yourself, you’re in the right place. Let’s recover — and create — together.”
Want to be a guest on Artist Recovery Podcast? Send Rich Wright a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/artistrecovery
Artist Recovery Podcast
Artist Recovery Podcast S2 Ep. 30 | Vanessa Younts on Burnout, Reinvention & Amplifying Humanity
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Vanessa the Vivacious Younts is a podcaster, filmmaker, video journalist, musician, and founder of Vanessa the Vivacious Productions, a female-owned, Latina-led creative production company.
As creator of the series and podcast Humanity 2.0 and the former managing director and contributing video journalist for Are You Happy (a platform with four million followers), she has traveled coast to coast interviewing thousands of people about happiness while overseeing a network of 3,000 contributing video journalists.
Born dirt poor in San Antonio, Texas, with dirt floors and windows that would not open, Vanessa learned resilience early. She started working at 13, tended bar at a Christian rock venue selling pop and water, waitressed through high school, and eventually became a first-generation college student before life pulled her in a hundred directions. She talks openly about experiencing homelessness in Seattle, serving in a soup kitchen one week and receiving food from those same volunteers the next, and how that lived understanding of both sides of the line shaped her lifelong servant's heart.
This episode goes deep on creative burnout. Vanessa shares how absorbing other people's energy as an empath made her exceptional at her work but also drained her, how her income and acknowledgment stopped matching her output, and how she spent months in her bedroom doing nothing before returning to the corporate world as a claims adjuster.
She describes the tingling face, the nightmares, and the moment she realized she would be furious with herself if she died at her desk. Her advice on knowing your worth, raising your prices, and refusing to let creativity be undervalued is essential listening for every freelancer and creative.
Along the way, Vanessa and Rich explore music as a lifesaver, self-taught piano and classically trained flute, singing concerts to the grass as a child, analyzing films at 13, and the freedom of never asking permission and never subscribing to a formula. They discuss reinvention at any age, why the real education happens in the life lived between classes, and the belief that you are never done until you are gone.
The conversation also touches grief and the loss of Vanessa's brother and mother, the belief that our loved ones' energies never truly leave us, her Native heritage and the documentary she is making to find her family's tribe, and her survival of mental illness. She opens up about a bipolar diagnosis, a doctor who told her she would never get better, and how that fueled her to become an advocate and to write her book, Complications and Metamorphosis.
Vanessa is more than an amplifier of voices. She is a warrior for humanity, for creatives, and for compassion. Her mission is simple and urgent: remind us that we are all human, all valuable, and worthy of being heard.
Connect with Vanessa:
Website: https://vanessathevivacious.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessathevivacious
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vanessathevivacious
Artist Rich Wright’s WOW Essential Spirit Paintings: https://www.theartistrecovery.com/white-owl-wisdom-1
Shop Art Rec Merch: https://www.artrecshop.com
Join Podmatch: https://www.joinpodmatch.com/artistrecovery
Dyslexia Classes: https://www.skool.com/dyslexia-classes
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Always remember, Listen to your Heart and Be Kind to Your Mind! -Rich Wright
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