Laura Warshauer Knows —
The Struggle is Real When it Comes to Being a Creative
By Christina Eichelkraut
Laura has turned those trials into an accessible creative workbook, My Creativity is Killing Me, which she co-wrote with Kohn Glay.
The creative life as a songwriter was inevitable for Laura Warshauer.
At 5-years-old, she walked up to a microphone that was just a touch taller than she was. Wearing her mom’s siren red lipstick and a black velvet dress with white trim, she sang I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus to the wide acclaim of 500 people.
From that moment, “I was all in,” Warshauer said.
“At some point…I realized something both surprising and heartbreaking. My creativity was killing me.”
Laura Warshauer Knows —
The Struggle is Real When it Comes to Being a Creative
By Christina Eichelkraut
Laura has turned those trials into an accessible creative workbook, My Creativity is Killing Me, which she co-wrote with Kohn Glay.
The creative life as a songwriter was inevitable for Laura Warshauer.
At 5-years-old, she walked up to a microphone that was just a touch taller than she was. Wearing her mom’s siren red lipstick and a black velvet dress with white trim, she sang I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus to the wide acclaim of 500 people.
From that moment, “I was all in,” Warshauer said.
“At some point…I realized something both surprising and heartbreaking. My creativity was killing me.”
When she was 12-years-old, Warshauer’s dad got her a guitar. Before long she had mastered a few chords and knew exactly what she needed to be.
“I was like, ‘Hello World! I’m a songwriter!” Warshauer said.
Warshauer offered to play a song for anyone and everyone she met. Yet for all her effervescent joy in bringing music into people’s lives, Warshauer had an early innate understanding of the value and importance of what she was doing, too.
“It always felt like the stakes were very high,” Warshauer said. “Like, ‘I’m going to play you a song and it’s going to change your life.'”
Like all creative professionals, Warshauer’s artistic soul was balanced by a focused work ethic.
She continued to write own songs as a teenager, even booking money in a studio to record them. After a romantic, idyllic period in Scotland during which Warshauer studied art history at St. Andrews University, she returned to the states and briefly studied at NYU.
Throughout it all, Warshauer was constantly creating and playing music. She went to open mic nights, cafes, and played her songs for anyone who would listen. To hone her natural talent, Warshauer took guitar lessons and studied with renowned vocal coach Don Lawrence.
Eventually, a producer for Sony Music Studios reached out to her and Warshauer found herself practically living in a writer’s room. It was a different era and back then the studio was open 24 hours and artists had their choice of top-of-the-line equipment they borrowed from a mic locker.
Warshauer was in her element.
“I was this girl from New Jersey running around Sony Music Studios in my socks raiding the chocolate drawer on the third floor,” Warshauer. “It became this time warp, where time stood still in a way.”
The more immersed Warshauer became in that world, the more she fell in love with it.
“My love of recording and passion for that entire world was something that just came to life,” she said.
At the studio she met other artists, including a sound engineer who supported her vision and efforts to get a record deal.
Then, it finally happened: she was signed to a major record by Antonio “L.A.” Reid.
It was a dream come true, but like all dreams, was filled with unexpected twists and turns.
A Mixed Blessing
Warshauer still appreciates the joy and happiness of the night she signed the record deal, but today looks back on that moment with a more tempered and nuanced perspective.
“There is so much beauty in it, and it brings me so much joy to recount that night, but it’s also painful for me in a way because it was the beginning of this wild roller coaster that led me to a place where I had to write My Creativity is Killing Me,” she said.
Warshauer was dropped from that first record deal but, ever undaunted, continued on her quest for success. In her case, that journey took Warshauer literally all over the world.
She decamped to L.A., then Nashville, then London and eventually found her way back to the United States. Throughout her journeys, she continued to work as a professional musician, playing in national tours and getting some songs on the radio. Her music has been on Netflix and featured in Motorola and Ralph Lauren commercials. Respected industry producers worked with her.
She even created an alter ego persona, Gigi Rowe.
Gigi Rowe was born during a photo shoot in Las Vegas. Warshauer wore a ton of different wigs for the shoot and had to adopt a number of personas. She found the experience so inspiring it launched an entirely new creative era for her.
Living as Gigi, Warshauer changed outfits six times a day and, as she put it, “just playing.”
“It became a creative free for all,” Warshauer said.
Gigi also enjoyed some creative success. Playing Gigi, Warshauer had three of her songs featured on the Just Dance video games and performed with the Just Dance team at Rock in Rio. Gigi Rowe even published a children’s book titled Gigi Rowe Wishes.
Ultimately though, even Gigi didn’t get the breakthrough Warshauer for which she hoped.
“There have been some really cool moments, some really cool wins,” Warshauer said. “But it never was quite enough to really connect me in a substantial way with the audience I feel I’m meant to connect to.”
For all her professionalism, work, effort and creative energy, Warshauer was forced to face the fact that she simply hadn’t created the life she wanted to for herself.
“But a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a recording artist: label or no label, I wasn’t making ends meet,” Warshauer writes in the introduction to her book. “I was spending more than I was making, working harder than I’d ever worked, and wondering who pulled the rug out from under me.”
At the same time, Warshauer knew she would never fit into the box of a 9 to 5 job, either. As so many creatives know, sometimes a creative life isn’t optional because it truly is who you are. There is no other way for your soul to breathe.
Still, all around her, people she loved were moving on with their more traditional lives. They were getting married, having kids, and buying homes.
“I’ve always wanted that, but on my own terms, and I’m on such a different path,” Warshauer said.
Warshauer, on the other hand, was picking herself up from yet another creative project that almost made it but didn’t.
“At some point, many years down this road, I realized something both surprising and heartbreaking,” Warshauer writes. “My creativity was killing me.”
A Reset
Warshauer knew it was time to take a beat and reassess.
“On paper my life looks fantastic, but in reality it’s quiet,” she said. “My dreams feel far away. The things that I have been building towards, I feel are derailed.”
Salting the wound is the fact that Warshauer has personally seen and to a degree experienced stardom. She’s been flown first class to perform in exotic locations and many people she’s worked with are now successful people on the world stage.
“It’s so frustrating when the things that you’ve dreamed about, you’ve actually tasted them,” Warshauer said.
So, Warshauer called Patrick Carman, the New York Times bestselling author. It was during that conversation that he coined the phrase that would become the title of the workbook, a phrase that immediately resonated with Warshauer.
As she continued these discussions with friends and other mentors, Kohn Glay, a life coach and TikTok influencer, suggested writing a book together that spoke to Warshauer’s struggles. Encouraged by the fact that social media platforms offered a more egalitarian path to creative success, and the support of some amazing other creatives in her life, she and Glay began working on the book.
Having a Blast Explaining the Creative Economy
My Creativity is Killing Me is a delightfully irreverent book, filled with pithy, tongue-in-cheek cartoon illustrations that guide the user through a number of exercises that help clarify all aspects of a successful creative life.
From word searches to practical guidance to getting one’s finances straight (using one’s ROC, or Return on Creativity), the slim volume is filled with useful, actionable information. Warshauer’s voice shines throughout, and the book’s pages are brimming with a mix of Warshauer’s personal vulnerability and stone cold truths. Often, reading the books feels as though one is sitting with a friend who just gets it. Inspiration and encouragement is sprinkled with just enough snark to keep one’s feet firmly on the ground, even as dreams are allowed to soar into the clouds.
And, as an added bonus, the physical book itself is accessible, with high-contrast illustrations, a large font and an easy-to-hold size.
My Creativity is Killing Me is a book by a professional creative for other people who take the joy of creativity just as seriously as any other career, even while having a blast sharing their talents with the world.
“This has been a particularly vulnerable moment for me, and what this book represents is my road map, my way out of the situation that I found myself in and a way forward,” Warshauer.
To Warshauer’s surprise, the book has led her to a whole new creative tribe of publishers, literary agents and others in the book world. It’s been a minute, but for the first time Warshauer feels energized and optimistic about the future.
“It’s beautiful, it’s challenging, it’s entrepreneurial,” Warshauer said.
The ability to share the power of creativity with the disability community seemed to Warshauer a sign that the book was a step in the right direction. After all, art therapy and creative pursuits are vital and necessary parts for many survivors of brain injury’s healing journey.
“I think creativity is an important part of every person’s life whether you’re aware of it or not,” Warshauer. “Creativity, it’s really tied into the imagination and our ability to dream and our ability to envision the life that we want for ourselves. And that matters to every single person.”
That’s why empowering people to be creative in practical, realistic ways can be so transformative, Warshauer said.
“Tapping into that is so significant because it can change your life,” Warshauer said. “We can all become prisoners to our own lives and our own communities.”
Warshauer knows creativity is the key to freedom.

Purchase My Creativity is Killing Me: The Courage to Be Creative Workbook on Amazon (click here >>)
Christina Eichelkraut is a recovering print journalist who founded Christina Copy Co. in 2011. When her keyboard isn’t clacking, she bakes complex artisan bread, nerds out on political science, uses her fountain pens to write to pen pals the world over, and reads long past her bedtime in a joyful disregard of her alleged adulthood. Christina earned her B.A. in Mass Communications with an emphasis in print journalism in 2006 from Franklin Pierce University.
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