I’m building new communities of people and relationships with others to support people in their creative ventures. I'm also thinking about how to have more joy in writing. What might shift for us as writers and people if we looked for those moments in which writing feels joyful and creative? What if we allowed struggle and joy to overlap? Struggle and joy in the creative process might be better thought of as a both/and than an either/or.
Sometimes you just have to take The Flying Leap, engaging in some big inspired action that would otherwise make no sense under ordinary circumstances. The Flying Leap occurs when your inspiration and desire for change become bigger than your fear.
Reclaiming trauma stories and telling those stories as our personal truths is different from creating victim narratives. They might sound similar, but victim narratives almost always involve blame, either explicit or implicit. Reclaiming your pain and trauma story means standing tall in your truth, no matter how much it hurts.
If you’ve ever felt helpless, you may have been the sitting-on-hands-and-complaining-loudly person. You refuse to accept any solutions to your problem. You reject any solution as ridiculous and preposterous at best, and downright foolish and risky at worst. At this point, you’re not actually trying to solve problems, even though you pretend you are. You're in the grips of the "Yes, but..." syndrome
The grief I felt when I conceded defeat on the job market was the real deal. I cycled through every one of the Kubler Ross model’s stages of grief several times. And as anyone who has been through the five stages of grief knows, they are not really stages at all, but rather suggestions. Grief is a full body contact sport that involves cycling and recycling through the stages of grief, moving forward and backwards and sideways at the most inopportune moments until the heart and soul decide there’s nothing more to be done and they’ve let go. There’s nothing rational about grief and no time table to “get over it.” It’s insanely confusing and consumes massive amounts of emotional resources. Grief is involuntary and wild and frightening.
I’d thought I’d let go of academia when I decided that I absolutely would not ever go on the academic job market ever again. In truth, I’d done nothing of the sort. I’d simply continued participating from the sidelines. Academia-lite.
And here’s what I’m learning: saying yes to new possibilities, especially ones that seem risky and thrilling and exciting and make me feel dizzy and like I’m going to throw up often involves letting go of that which is no longer serving me.
Routines are amazing tools to deal with shame and fear. I literally spend no time at all overthinking, because getting up and getting some writing done is just what I do. My routine has created a sense of predictability and safety, which has freed up my brain to think loftier creative and analytical thoughts.
