Hey, hi! It’s been a minute since I showed up here. How are you, even?! I can only imagine your answer to that question is as long and loaded as mine. So let’s not even worry about “catching up.” If there’s one thing 2020 gifted us with, it’s the permission to let that nonsense go. I’ve never been much of a small talk person anyway. I’d rather just get right down to the good stuff.
So let’s, shall we?
Last year I did a creative-180 and cleared the decks in my personal and professional life. I stopped podcasting. I stopped coaching. I packed away the book proposal I’d fussed over for 2+ years, once I could finally admit to myself that I didn’t even LIKE the dang thing and that book hasn’t felt quite right for a long time. Maybe since the very beginning. I even stopped writing creatively, at least in an outward facing way.
Instead I mostly just practiced the art of Paying Attention- of getting low and quiet enough to hear the heartbeat of my own life again. I’d hit a point where I felt creatively burned out and pretty disconnected from myself in general. I was doing all kinds of work that I cared deeply about, but suddenly none of it felt like it fit quite right anymore. I was having anxiety attacks, trouble sleeping, and it was all making me feel a bit untethered.
So I took a time out. A full stop.
I had to relearn- scratch that- AM RELEARNING how to actually listen to my body, to God’s voice within me, to my desires, my anxiety, and even to the resistance I felt around certain avenues of my creative life. It felt counter-intuitive and even risky to step away from work that means so much to me and to just do nothing instead…
Also?
It felt like relief. Like healing. Like freedom. Like coming home to myself, which I desperately needed after a decade of massive transition and low key trauma (side eye to you, 2018-2020).
Now? This year? I’m simply resuscitating that old familiar instinct to write it all down. To share it. I’d be lying if I said that opening my laptop and writing you this letter didn’t feel tender and wonky. It does. Like I forgot how to do this. I spend a lot of the last year wondering-slash-worrying if I’d lost that Writerly part of me, or maybe just lost access to her.
Listen, just like you, there’s been no shortage of growing pains over here, and I’ve processed a LOT in private with my people and in my journals but I’ve missed writing as a way of connecting with other humans. With you.
In the long run, “sharing our stuff” as Laura Tremaine puts it, usually proves to be worth it. I guess the only way I know how to begin doing that again is here, on the page.
I’m sharing my words here again because I hope that in reading, maybe it’ll resonate with your own experience, make you feel seen in some small way, spark a question in you, or simply help you pay attention to the seasons of your own life.
Thanks for being here with me.
I wonder what this year holds for us, dear reader?
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