Beyond the Dream: What Personal Projects Can Reveal About Ourselves
Written By: Jon Bregel - Founder, Filmmaker & Coach, Nourish
Some of the most important projects in my life weren’t the ones that advanced my career. They were the ones that changed me.
For years, I pursued what many filmmakers aspire toward: meaningful clients, ambitious work, recognition, and a career that could sustain itself financially. I’m grateful for much of that journey. It introduced me to talented collaborators and experiences I never could have imagined.
Yet somewhere along the way, I began to notice a quiet disconnection growing beneath the surface.
The work continued, but the deeper sense of purpose that originally drew me toward filmmaking felt harder to access. Like many creatives, I found myself asking uncomfortable questions:
Is this the creative life I actually want?
What remains when achievement no longer feels enough?
Who am I outside of my work?
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Around two years ago, I felt pulled toward a deeply personal project documenting stories of traumatic grief and healing. For nine days, I filmed inside a healing center in Arizona, interviewing individuals navigating unimaginable loss.
At the time, I thought I was simply making a documentary.
Looking back, I think the project was also doing something to me.
The experience was emotionally confronting in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Sitting with people willing to share profound pain altered something in how I understood life, suffering, and what truly matters.
When I returned home, I expected to feel inspired.
Instead, I felt exhausted.
Disoriented.
Emotionally thin.
Over the months that followed, I found myself confronting questions far beyond filmmaking. The experience led me deeper into therapy, spiritual reflection, and long periods of reevaluating who I was outside of achievement, productivity, and professional identity.
I began to realize something uncomfortable:
For years, parts of my self-worth had become intertwined with work.
Momentum felt stabilizing.
Achievement felt meaningful.
Productivity felt safe.
Without realizing it, success had quietly become one of the places I looked for identity.
The project did not offer answers.
If anything, it dissolved many of the answers I thought I already had.
But over time, something quieter emerged underneath:
Presence.
Relationships.
Faith.
Health.
Community.
The ordinary experience of being human.
I’ve wondered often whether this is one of the hidden gifts of personal projects.
Sometimes they are less about creating something for the world and more about uncovering something within ourselves. They expose what has been neglected. They force us to sit with questions we’ve avoided. Occasionally, they invite us toward a different way of living altogether.
The documentary eventually went on to receive recognition I never expected. I’m grateful for that.
But strangely, those outcomes feel much smaller than the internal shifts that occurred through the process itself.
The deeper impact was who I became while making it.
I think many filmmakers carry personal projects they haven’t started because they feel too vulnerable, impractical, uncertain, or difficult to explain.
I understand that hesitation.
But increasingly, I wonder if the projects we resist are sometimes pointing toward something we need—not professionally, but personally.
Not every project changes us.
But occasionally one asks us to become someone different.
And perhaps that transformation is its own form of success.
— Jon
