Writing to Find Yourself

Writing To Find Yourself

Learning To Be More Authentic Through The Art of Writing

Allison Vesterfelt

Copyright © 2014 Allison Vesterfelt All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the author, Allison Vesterfelt

Interior Design by: Author Launch of Nashville, Tenessee Cover Design by: Author Launch of Nashville, Tenessee Cover Photo by: Author Launch of Nashville, Tenessee Editing by: Stephanie May Wilson Proofreading by: Daniel Weatherby

Contents

Introduction: Writing To Become .......................................................... 5 Chapter 1: Learning To Show Up ........................................................... 10 Chapter 2: Learning To Listen To Yourself ........................................ 20 Chapter 3: Learning To Wrestle ............................................................ 33 Chapter 4: Learning To Be Okay With Imperfect ............................ 47 Chapter 5: Learning To Let Go Of Control ......................................... 55 Chapter 6: Learning To Speak Up ......................................................... 66 Chapter 7: Learning To Connect With An Audience ...................... 76 Chapter 8: Learning To Rest & Play ...................................................... 86 Chapter 9: Learning To Hope ................................................................. 91

Introduction Writing To Become This is not a book about writing to sell. It’s a book about writing to become. That is the goal here. To write and to become ourselves. This is not a book about how to write a bestseller. So, if you’re looking for that book, you might not find what you’re looking for here. Don’t get me wrong. I hope you do write something beautiful, maybe even something with such universal meaning that millions of copies are sold. Nothing would make me happier. We need more books like that in the world. But, if you ask me, selling a million copies of your book is not the most rewarding part of writing. And unless your goal is to get rich quick, it doesn’t need to be your first priority. Our first priority must be to find ourselves on the page. Then, if we sell a million copies, or if we don’t, we’ll be okay. We have something money can’t pay for—a sense of who we are and where we fit in the world. Everybody wants to be a writer. But not everybody wants to do what it takes to become a writer: to show up without pretense, to listen to themselves, to lean in and wrestle, to let go of control, 5

to speak up and connect with an audience. The act of writing won’t change you, it won’t even necessarily help you. But the art of writing, the practice of writing—that will turn you into a better you, if you let it. Writing is healing. Writing is cheap therapy. Writing can help you find yourself. That is what brings me back to this terrible, treacherous, incredibly painful, slowly-but-surely process day-after-day. Not the number of copies I’ve sold. It’s the knowledge that writing is intrinsically valuable. I tend to get out even more than I put in. This is what I try to stress to the writers I work with on a daily basis. I spend over half of my time working with writers to help them brainstorm ideas, craft their writing, re-craft their writing, edit their writing, re-arrange or reorient their writing or just plain overcome creative blockages. Most often, writers confide the main thing keeping them stuck is that there are already so many people ‘out there’ who are saying exactly what they want to say, in exactly the way they want to say it. “There’s no point in my writing” they tell me, “It’s just going to add to the noise.” Due to the number of writers who tell me this, and the number of times I’ve felt it myself, sometimes I wonder if writers are born with this insecurity embedded into their bones. Or maybe we are just people—and this is a people problem, not a writer problem. But let me tell you what I try to look in the mirror and tell myself, daily: “You are altogether unique. There is no one else like you. Saying, ‘my voice is unnecessary’ or ‘It doesn’t really matter’ is equivalent to saying, ‘I am unnecessary’ or ‘I don’t matter’.” If you 6

believe that—and sometimes I wonder if we all do, in a way—you are not alone. See if, for today, you can just show up. That might be enough. You’ll see why you matter so much.” This is why I write, ultimately. Not to sell books or to get a bunch of traffic to my website. The minute I lose sight of this is the same minute I lose my will to put words on the page. Have you ever noticed how desperate everyone is to get traffic to their website? If you’re a blogger, or if you exist in the online space at all, I assume you have noticed this. How could you miss it? Everybody wants it and all of us are pandering for it like a gaggle of elementary kids after the explosion of a pinata. There’s only so much of it. We must have it. We’ll do anything to get it. We’ll write best headlines, concoct the smartest copy, have the most brilliant SEO. We’ll tweet and Facebook and pay for adds. But have any of us stopped to ask why we want all this traffic anyway? Has anyone considered what we want to say before we try to get people to listen? This was a frustrating and demoralizing realization for me recently: I spent years trying to get people to listen to me before I knew what I really wanted to say. This isn’t much different, really, than a middle school girl trying to get the popular kids to pay attention to her before she really believes she’s worth the attention she’s asking for. She buys all the right clothes, says all the right things, puts herself in all of the right social circles and situations. But when it really comes down to it, she has no idea who she is. I’m thinking of my own inner-middle school girl as I write this. Perhaps you are too. If that’s the case, ask yourself: What is going to make you happier—being “popular” or being known? Being known, of course, is deeply satisfying in a way being popular could never be. I didn’t used to know that, but I’m discov7

ering it as I discover myself. There’s nothing wrong with wanting or getting a lot of traffic on your blog. There’s certainly nothing wrong with wanting to sell, or selling, a lot of books. Getting traffic can help you secure a book contract, it can help you make money from ads, it can help you get your message out there—which are all important. Selling books can bring you income, which can allow you to keep doing what you love. The more books you sell, the more people you entertain, the more people you inspire, the more people are changed by the courage it took to tell your story. But book sales are not the point. Book sales are simply the fruit, the natural by-product of understanding yourself and your message. This is true for the middle school girl I mentioned above. The sense of belonging she craves isn’t wrong. It just won’t satisfy her the way she thinks it will. The same is true for you, as a person and as a writer. Getting traffic to your site, or even selling a million copies, won’t fulfill you if you don’t know who you are and what you want to say. A sense of belonging is the natural by-product of becoming oneself. If you try to belong first, and become yourself later, you will lose yourself. If you find yourself, you will discover, remarkably, exactly where you fit. That’s what we are going to do here, together, over the course of the next nine chapters. We are going on a journey to discover ourselves. The result may be that you sell a million copies of your book—or not. But by that time, my gut says sales simply won’t matter to you quite so much. You’ll have what you were looking for all along. Maybe there’s a formula for writing a bestseller. In fact, I’m certain there is, although I don’t know it. Even still, I would not gain any pleasure by sharing it here with you. A “Bestseller” in8

struction manual may be valuable, but let me tell you what is more valuable: knowing yourself. Seeing yourself. Feeling comfortable in your own skin. Understanding the value you have to offer to this world. For that reason, this is not a book about writing to sell. It is a book about writing to become. That is the goal here. To write and to become ourselves.

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1 Learning To Show Up I’ve spent most of my life trying to be the funniest, the smartest, and the most interesting writer. Now I realize the best writers in the world are the ones who show up— exactly as they are. It was a slow realization, really—I had no idea who I was. You would think a person would wake up to this rather quickly, the way you realize you’ve lost your keys or you’ve misplaced your favorite sweater (when was the last time you had it? Tuesday, you think. Yes, it must have been Tuesday). But it wasn’t like that at all. If you had asked me about the last time I’d “had” myself or known myself, I couldn’t have told you when. This impacted every corner of my life, no matter how much I tried to pretend it didn’t. I always felt a little lost in relationships, first of all—like I was going with the flow of what everyone else wanted, but didn’t really know what I wanted or needed; and even when I did know, I didn’t know how to communicate what it was. I always had this underlying sensation I was invisible. At first, writing and blogging felt like the most incredible solution to this problem—like I finally had a place in my life where 10

I could really be myself. Hidden in my room, with the door closed, I could say whatever I wanted without worrying how anyone else would respond. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized showing up in writing wasn’t any easier than showing up anywhere else. First of all, the hardest part about writing was simply doing it—just sitting down at my computer and putting words on the page. This is the hardest part of just about most things in life, if you ask me. When it’s time to go to the gym, the hardest part is putting on your shoes. When it’s time to get up for the day, the hardest part is getting out from underneath the covers. When it’s time to write, the hardest part is putting your butt in the chair and actually opening the computer. The first step always feels like the biggest step. Don’t you think? And when it came to writing, I always felt this tremendous resistance right about the time I was supposed to get started. Suddenly the laundry would feel very pressing, or someone would call who I hadn’t talked to in a long time or I would realize it had been at least six months since I’d updated my Twitter bio. I’d clean the bathroom or go get coffee or stare at the ceiling for hours before I would get started writing. Second, even if I could convince myself to sit down to computer, I couldn’t necessarily convince myself to be perfectly honest once I got there. I would show up to writing the way you show up to the first date—all clean and polished, in a good mood and with my best foot forward. But “first date” me wasn’t the real me, obviously. The real me was the bad attitude, morning-breath, smelly armpit me. So even if I could convince myself to open my computer, I couldn’t always convince myself to show up, smelly armpits and all. I could make a good first impression, but when it really came 11

down to it, the “me” who ended up on the page wasn’t the real, actual, authentic person. I didn’t even know who that person was. When I read through my old writing now—especially writing I published—I think to myself how distant and lost I sound, how the true, authentic, intimate version of me was hidden behind the thick wall of words I was putting out. I felt so small and invisible in those days, despite my growing audience. I wanted someone to come find me, but I didn’t realize I was the only one who could find myself. Showing up might seem simple, but it is incredibly difficult. It takes strength and insight and practice; and I’m starting to think it happens in layers. We show up as much as we can right now. We learn. And we show up a little bit more honestly later. Writing teaches us to do this by teaching us to see ourselves. Writing is like getting naked. When you show up to the page, really show up, you can’t hide anymore. The white thighs you wish were a little tanner, or a little thinner—there they are. The cellulite you usually cover up with loose-fitting pants... there it is. The blemishes you tend to cover with make-up—all right there. When we come to the page, naked and honest, we hear things we don’t want to hear. We discover things we may not want to discover. What we learn there is going to turn our world upside down. It’s really going to screw us up. Not to mention, if we ever share what we have to say with the world, we open ourselves to criticism and ridicule and shame and guilt. Anytime I tell someone what I’m really thinking or feeling, I give them a tiny bit of power. I hand them the gun. They can shoot me with it if they want to. No wonder we hide. It’s a natural reaction to a protect ourselves. It makes perfect sense. The problem is, hiding doesn’t protect us like we think it will. It just keeps us stuck. 12

Although choosing not to show up might feel safer or more comfortable, it leaves us trapped and claustrophobic. If you choose not to show up in your friendships or in your marriage, you will feel invisible, like your preferences or ideas don’t matter. If you choose not to put on your running shoes, you will continue to feel bogged down and tired. If you choose not to get out of bed and open your computer, your story will stay untold. Showing up can be chaotic and sometimes awkward. Sometimes I spend an hour writing something I’ll just delete. Sometimes I step on someone else’s toes. But every once and awhile—if I’m lucky—it is like magic. There I am. I find myself and I begin to love myself—smelly armpits and all. A week ago, there were no words on the page of this document. Today, there are hundreds. There is resistance, but I’m pushing into it—the way you push into a conflict with a friend or co-worker, so you can get to resolution. You don’t give up. You don’t force your hand. You just lean into it, giving it your weight and trusting the weight of the other, trying to find balance. This is the thing with resistance and balance. Most of us are looking for balance and trying to avoid resistance, but they usually come together. Resistance actually helps us establish balance. If you are leaning against a wall, for example, it is the resistance of that wall which allows you to find your balance. You can’t balance against thin air. Showing up is not easy. But we don’t have to fear the resistance anymore. The resistance is expected and necessary. Showing up changes everything. If you decide to show up with me here, as I work to show up with you, I have a feeling things will begin to change for us. I have 13

a feeling we might see ourselves, and each other, and that connection might very well alter us both forever. I can’t promise it will be all pretty and well-organized. In fact, I can almost guarantee it won’t. But somewhere, in the mess of it all, I think you’ll discover the voice you’ve known was there all along; and that voice will guide you home. Your first step to becoming a writer might very well be your first step to becoming who you’ve been all along. Something To Try: Morning Pages I first learned to show up from Julia Cameron. She wrote this beautiful book called The Artist’s Way which has taught me so many things—including how to be present, how to show up as a person and as a writer. The main practice that really changed things for me is what Cameron calls Morning Pages. Very simply, Morning Pages is the practice of waking up every morning and committing your first thoughts of the day to paper. You can do it in a notebook or on a computer, whatever works for you, but the gist of the assignment is this: write for three pages. Just write. Don’t edit yourself, don’t pause and think too much, don’t allow your inner-critic to get in the way. Don’t try to write something amazing, don’t worry about grammar, and don’t ask yourself if anyone is ever going to read this or not. Don’t worry that, when someone does read it, they’re going to get their feelings hurt. Morning Pages are not for your reader. Morning Pages are for your writer—for the writer inside you. Write for three pages. Cameron says that’s the amount of time it takes you to get over yourself, to get out all of the negative energy that so often prevents us from showing up in our lives. 14

This negative energy includes regrets about our past and concerns about the future (Will we have enough money? Will dad make it through the big surgery? What tragic thing is going to happen next?). Three pages is about how long we can complain about a problem without discovering a way to fix it. Three pages is about as long as we can listen to ourselves whine about something we can’t change. I started the practice of Morning Pages about ten years ago, and I use them intermittently in my life when I’m feeling especially blocked. Writers I work with always want to know if I do this everyday and the answer is, no. I don’t think you have to do them everyday, forever, in order to experience their benefit. But I do think if we consider them a tool, and use that tool with discipline during certain seasons, with a specific purpose, we’ll probably discover ourselves in a way we never knew was possible. When I first start doing Morning Pages, it usually looks something like this: Good morning. Okay, we’re doing this again. I hate this. No, seriously, I hate this. Why can’t I drink coffee before I do this? What’s the point? This is stupid. This is stupid. This is stupid. I can’t think of anything else to say except that this is stupid. But then, usually, after some time—maybe minutes, maybe days—I get to something like this: Some days I feel a little bit like I’m wandering around in the dark. I’m not sure which way to turn, or even which way is up or down. I’m just feeling my way through. There are a thousand ideas pointing a thousand different directions and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to follow. And what if I follow one, and it takes me down the wrong path? What if I follow one, and it takes me somewhere dangerous? There’s just no way to know for sure. Suddenly, just like that, I get to the real problem: that I’m try15

ing to know the end of my journey before I even start. This might not be the most brilliant thing I’ve ever written, but it informs me as a person and as a writer. When we grow in one area, we grow in both. When I’m able to be present, to bring myself to the table, to practice the discipline of morning pages even when I don’t feel like it, what I learn about myself there helps me grow—it helps me make progress, move forward, get out of my rut. Morning pages as a practice has a way of doing this for me, which is the reason I love them so much. The other things writers always ask me is, “do Morning Pages this have to happen in the morning? What if I’m not a morning person? What if I have young children? What if I have a job that requires me to be up really early?” To that question I always say: if you can get the value of doing morning pages by doing them another time of day, then go for it. I’m not sure you can, but let me tell you the two main benefits of doing this exercise in the morning and then I’ll let you decide. First of all, the morning tends to be a really private time. Chances are, if you’re setting your alarm for 5:30 or 6:00am, there aren’t going to be many other people up at that time, competing for your attention. There aren’t going to be meetings or events that “pop up” during those hours that you just can’t turn down. There aren’t going to be noises or tasks or people begging for you to take care of them instead of taking care of you. So the morning is a great time to do this writing because you’ll have enough reasons of your own not to show up at the page. The last thing you need is your spouse or dog or parents giving you more reasons. Second, I think there is a freshness to the morning you just don’t get any other time of day. I’m a morning person, so I’m will16

ing to admit this might be my own bias. My brother, who is a photographer and videographer, says he gets his best work done late at night because there is an “energy” to that time of day that he doesn’t find other times of day. But I still have to say there is something about the morning—especially those first 30 minutes you’re awake. I tend to capture my most honest, most buried thoughts that time of day. So if you feel like you can accomplish those things by completing your three pages another time of day, I would give you freedom to do so. If we were talking in person—if you were a client of mine, or just a friend—I would probably urge you to try writing early in the morning for just a few days, or maybe a week, to see what happens. But then I would tell you to trust your intuition and follow your gut. This is the beauty of this process of becoming. There are no hard and fast rules. When we show up and listen to ourselves, we find our way. One Last Push: Get On The Plane The last bit of pushback I usually receive from writers when I give them this assignment is this: “Okay, but I only have a few hours a week—or, like a few minutes a day—to get writing done. I can’t afford to waste my time writing something I won’t be able to publish. Should I still do Morning Pages?” I expect this response. I anticipate it. I understand it. This was my initial reaction to Morning Pages as well. And yet, here’s what I always say. If you were going on a trip to another country, you’d have to get on a plane. You’d spend 9-10 hours on the plane—maybe a little less, maybe more. Then, when you arrived at your destination, you’d take a million pictures and enjoy your vacation. This 17

is when all the “good stuff” of your trip would happen, the stuff you’d want to tell people when you got back home. Then eventually, you’d have to get back on the plane to come home. When you told people about your trip, my guess is you’d leave out the plane ride. Unless something dramatic happened, you wouldn’t waste your time telling your friends and family about how you took a dramamine or drank a Baileys in your coffee or watched a bad movie until you fell asleep. You wouldn’t talk about the microwaved food that was supposed to pass as breakfast, or the light turbulence on the way down. No. Likely, you’d focus on the museums you visited and the sights you saw or the friends you made or the food you ate once you arrived at your destination. But, you would have never made it to your destination without the plane ride. It wasn’t the most glamorous part of your trip, but it may very well be the most important. Try having a vacation in another country without traveling via plane, bus, boat or car—you won’t be very successful. Think of Morning Pages like the plane ride to your vacation. They aren’t the most glamorous thing in the world. They aren’t the most presentable part of your writing. When you “go home,” chances are you’re not going to relay every detail of the plane ride. You’ll probably never share your Morning Pages with anyone. But without your Morning Pages, you may never have anything to share at all—just like, without the plane ride, you can’t have a vacation in another country. Think of a place you really want to go and ask yourself: is it worth the plane ride? Is it worth the waiting in line, the bad movie, the microwaved breakfast? If your answer is yes, then ask yourself this: what about when it comes to writing? Is it worth the minutes, the hours, the days you will sacrifice in “travel” for the destination 18

you’re trying to reach? If so, stop stalling and get on the proverbial plane. Wake up each day and invest in the practice of Morning Pages. It won’t be a waste of your writing time. It will teach you what it means to be present (and to listen to yourself, to let go of control, to speak up, to connect with others—everything else I discuss in the remaining chapters of this book). It will be one of the most valuable things you ever do as a human and as a writer. Morning Pages is changing me. Slowly, I’m finding myself. Slowly, I’m able to speak up again. Slowly, I’m able to show up to the page and show up to my life and say the things I’ve wanted to say but haven’t known the words to match them. Slowly I’m beginning to see myself and know myself again. Will you join me?

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2 Lerning To Listen To Yourself We find our way, in the beginning, by listening to the guidance of those around us. But over time we begin to realize the most valuable guidance comes from within. The idea for this book came a few months ago. I started noticing I was having a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, and for that matter, a difficult time falling asleep at night. It was difficult for me to get myself motivated about things that had once felt fun; and activities that had at one time been second nature to me—writing, running, cooking—were difficult and forced. I never felt like I was getting enough done. Every night I would pour myself a glass of wine and praise God it was all over. Except, it wasn’t over. Usually there were emails to be responded to and last minute fixes for the blog post and dinner to be ordered (because I’d run out of time to cook again) and any other of a list of various tasks that begged to be completed. My husband, Darrell, would come home from work, we would turn on the TV, and plunk away on our keyboards until we could barely hold our eyes open any longer. 20

Something wasn’t right. I knew it wasn’t right. But I didn’t want to admit it wasn’t right. If I admitted it wasn’t right, I would have to change. Just a few months prior to this realization, I had published my very first full length book, Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage. I had dreamed about the publishing process for most of my life, and this was the moment, I figured, when my whole writing life would finally make sense. After all, I had just achieved my lifelong dream. I was a “real” writer now. This was what I had hoped for and prayed for. It was all downhill from here. Right? Wrong. Instead, I felt small and exhausted. The worst part about this season was that writing hadn’t become easier, like I thought it would. In fact, if anything, it only felt more difficult. I would put words on the page and they would seem pretentious and shallow. I would post articles on my blog like “10 ways to Be More Productive” or “Five Reasons You’re Not Reaching Your Goals” but all along I was having a hard time just getting out of bed in the morning. The gap between how I felt and what I was putting “out there” was getting bigger and bigger. Everything I wrote felt distant and hollow. For months I simply continued on like this—telling myself there was really no other way, that people who wanted to be successful had to work hard and “chin up” and “fake it till you make it” and that if I wanted to be successful, I’d just have to get a thicker skin. But slowly, over time, I began to notice the impact not noticing was having on me, emotionally and physically. First of all, there was the anxiety. I’ve always struggled with anxiety. Literally, for as long as I can remember. But there are some seasons where it has most cer21

tainly been worse than others. For the most part, it has seemed to ease in the past several years, as I’ve worked through some of my fears and guilt, in friendships and in therapy. And yet, during this season, I felt it come slowly back. This can’t be, I would think to myself. I’m over this. I’m too mature for this. This is the old me. And yet there was one particular day when it couldn’t be ignored any longer. My husband Darrell and I had driven to a conference where we’d been invited as guests. We go to at least a dozen conferences each year, usually with some kind of purpose or responsibility— one of us is speaking or presenting or coordinating something. But in this case, nothing was expected of us. We were just supposed to relax and enjoy ourselves. We needed this. We’d been waiting for it and anticipating it. This was the first time we’d slowed down in weeks. But as I walked into the conference and began introducing myself to people, I realized my heart was racing. My breath was short. My face was hot. I didn’t feel like myself. I’ve had dozens of anxiety attacks in my life, if not hundreds, so I knew right away what was happening. But why now? Why, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, after years of being relieved from these symptoms, were they suddenly coming back? I couldn’t figure it out. I motioned to Darrell I needed to leave, which I’m sure was confusing to him since we had just arrived. But as soon as he saw the look on my face, he offered to walk me back to the hotel, just a few blocks away. Once we were safely closed in our room, I told him what was happening. My dad, a therapist, says anxiety usually stems from guilt. Every time we’re feeling anxious, he says, we should ask ourselves, “what do I feel guilty about?” I’ve been through this process so 22

many times, I know the drill. So as we talked, I tried to follow my usual line of questioning. When did this start? What might I feel guilty about? When that didn’t work, I decided to try something else— another tactic I use in writing. Sometimes, when I don’t have words to explain something, I try to think in images. There are times, I find, when pictures or even “movies” in my head help me express something words by themselves just can’t seem to capture. This case was no different. I had no words, but as I closed my eyes and tried to paint a picture of the anxiety I felt, I kept seeing the same image, over and over again: my e-mail inbox. At first, the images that come in these moments seem perfectly absurd. After all, email is just email, right? Who feels guilty about an email inbox? But the more I allowed myself to stay present with that feeling, the more I realized it was true. My inbox was full of hundreds of emails I hadn’t respond to. I had “flagged” them as if I planned to respond to them someday, but if I was being honest with myself, I probably never would or could. They were just sitting there, like constant reminders I wasn’t enough. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized the email thing was just a small representation of something much bigger— feeling like I wasn’t enough. I felt like a failure for working so hard and not being able to “make it happen” for myself and my writing life. There had been no “big moment” like I had hoped for, no breaking point where the floodgates opened for Packing Light, no big fat paycheck. My book was selling slowly, steadily. It was getting good reviews. But I wanted something bigger and more flashy than that. I had expected something better than what I had been given. Anxiety. Guilt. Shame. Selfishness. Ungratefulness. Postur23

ing. Leveraging. Trying too hard... This is what I found when I traced it all back. No wonder we don’t want to notice ourselves. It’s horribly painful sometimes, and embarrassing, to notice what’s really going on. As we sat there in the hotel room, I cried. It was the first time I had let myself admit how sad I was about the pace of life I’d taken on and about my disappointed expectations. So for just a moment, things were congruent again. I was congruent again. I could exist. Nothing was fixed or solved or really changed in that moment, but I was changed—because for the first time in months I allowed myself to listen to what had been true all along, whether I’d been able to hear it or not. This is what happens when we show up and listen to ourselves. We find the hidden wisdom we need to make progress. We uncover the most true and authentic version of ourselves. We receive exactly the guidance we needed to find our way home. Perhaps this is one of the reasons it is so difficult to show up to the page, like I talked about in chapter one. Because we know, once we are at the page, there will be no one else to answer our questions except for us. We will have no choice but to listen to ourselves. What You Notice When You Listen The rewards for listening are truly profound but that doesn’t make it any less challenging to do it. Listening to ourselves is difficult. It’s inconvenient. It can be embarrassing and frustrating. Think about it for a minute. My guess is you spend most of your day ignoring yourself. Your alarm goes off and your immediate response is, “I don’t want to get up. It’s too soon, too early.” Your body warns you in every way it knows how: you are not done sleeping yet. But within minutes, you’ve pushed these feelings to 24

the side and reminded yourself you do not have a choice in these matters. You have to get up, to get ready and get yourself out the door. But before you leave, it’s time for breakfast. If you were to really listen to yourself, you’d have to admit what you really want for breakfast is pancakes. Or bacon. Or both. Even more than that, what you really want is for someone else to cook this breakfast for you, so you could just read the paper and enjoy. But you quickly talk yourself out of this desire, telling yourself pancakes are too many carbs, a restaurant is too much money and making pancakes and bacon at home would take far too much time. In fact, if you’re like me, you’re lucky if you even eat breakfast at all. Then, consider what happens when you show up for work. Your boss makes a passive-aggressive comment to you about being a few minutes late. Your co-worker, for some unknown reason, moved the files you were working on and now you can’t find them. You’re furious at both of them. You find yourself stomping around the office, playing out scenes in your head where you haul your boss outside and punch him squarely in the nose (he deserves it, he’s been doing stuff like this for as long as you’ve worked here) or where you call your co-worker out in front of everyone, telling him how it should really be done. But the minute your anger is called to attention (someone in the office says, “hey Julie, you doing okay?”) you ignore yourself again. “Oh, yeah, I’m great!” you respond with a smile. “How about you?” It’s so easy and functional and expected for us to ignore ourselves. As you’re reading these scenarios you might even be thinking to yourself: can you imagine what would happen if I didn’t ignore myself? I’d be late for work—if I even showed up for work— 25

and when I got there, I’d scream at my fellow employees and punch my boss! Not to mention, I’d be broke and overweight from all the pancakes and bacon and eating out. That doesn’t sound like a very good option. Please know that when I talk about listening to yourself, I do not mean doing everything you tell yourself to do—like punching your boss or sleeping in so you’re late to work. This would be a disaster. Think back to Morning Pages from chapter 1. This assignment asks you to put everything down on paper, but it does not ask publish everything. Putting all your words on paper is simply an exercise—it’s a means to an end. The same is true with listening to yourself. Listening to what your body, mind and your spirit are telling you is an exercise. It’s an exercise in knowing yourself. Yes, it’s inconvenient to notice. It’s frustrating to notice. It’s discouraging to notice. It enlightens us to things about ourselves we may or may not want to know. But if we aren’t willing to notice what is happening inside of us and around us—if we don’t notice what our body is feeling or doing or how it’s moving, we run the risk of missing ourselves. We run the risk of losing ourselves. And there is no way we will ever be able to write anything of consequence, anything that might mean something to ourselves or someone else—if we don’t first know ourselves, if we haven’t uncovered who we are and what we want to say.

The Power Of Your Inner Voice One day I was really struggling to get words on paper. This was not new. You’ll hear me talk about it so many times in this book 26

you’ll probably sick of it by the end. I was sick of it myself. But on this particular day my husband suggested I go for a walk and I took his suggestion. So I walked, and as I did, I tried to listen to myself. This was something I’d been practicing—being present with the sensations in my body and using them as a guide for what I was really feeling, underneath the thoughts floating through my head. I walked and listened and sort of prayed, I guess, that I could receive something clear and sturdy to focus on, in the midst of this murky season. Within a mile or two of my walking, this phrase came to me, from somewhere deep inside myself: take care of yourself first... others second. At first, I fought myself on this. On the one hand, these words felt clear and sturdy, per my request. I had felt them float to the surface, quietly and effortlessly, the way true wisdom usually does. But they couldn’t be right, could they? Consider myself first and other second? That couldn’t be good advice. Could it? All the phrases of my upbringing fought with the phrase that had come to the surface in that moment. The last shall be first, my brain argued. Lose yourself to find yourself, my thoughts challenged. But no matter how hard my thoughts fought, I couldn’t ignore the clear intention that had risen up in response to my request. I couldn’t explain it, but I also couldn’t ignore it. So I walked home with something that resembled a thought but that also felt much deeper and more powerful than the “thoughts” I usually had:Yourself first, others second. It felt more like an intention, like a meditation than a simple thought. I didn’t know what it meant or what I was supposed to do with it, but I just held onto it, trusting the rest would become clear over time. Later that day, an idea came to me I wanted to get down on paper. Feeling an energy I hadn’t felt in weeks, if not months, I 27

opened my computer and started typing. Before long, I got an email from a coaching client who had a question she needed me to answer. I got a text message from a friend who was wondering if I wanted to go for a walk. My husband was asking me what we were going to do for dinner. And yet, for some reason, this phrase kept rising to the surface of my heart: yourself first, others second. I texted my friend and asked her if we could walk later that evening, or the next day. I asked my husband if he wouldn’t mind picking up take-out for dinner. I assured him he would have my full attention in an hour or so. And I closed my email and resolved to respond the next day. Miraculously, I was able to get a few thousand words down that day. With the “myself first, others second” intention in place, I was able to clear the blockage and get moving again. It was almost like my body, my spirit, knew what I needed to do. It knew the solution to the problem even more than my mind did. But in order to get there, I had to be present—to show up—and know how to listen to myself. Follow Your Bliss? Joseph Campbell says the way to happiness in life is to follow your bliss. It’s simple, he says. Just listen to your passion, to your gut, to your dreams, and to your desires and they will lead you in the right direction. My first reaction—the reaction that comes from my brain—is to say that idea is dangerous. If I follow my bliss, won’t I eat an entire sleeve of Girl Scout cookies—Thin Mints, obviously—in one sitting? How is it possible my feelings could point me in the right direction? And yet this year I committed to myself I would to experi28

ment with this advice and discover where it would take me. I decided I would begin to listen to my body—really listen—and follow where it was leading. As I’ve practiced this advice, I’ve run into one major problem. The problem with “following our bliss,” if you ask me is most of us don’t have the foggiest notion of what our bliss truly is. I know I didn’t. I didn’t know the difference between my thoughts and my feelings. I didn’t know how to stay with my desires long enough to hear what they were telling me. Did I really want a half box of girl scout cookies? Or was that desire covering up a deeper desire, one much more terrifying to recognize? Maybe this is just me. But until I started this experiment, I didn’t realize the hard truth: I didn’t have the faintest notion of what I truly wanted. I hadn’t spent enough time listening to know. Let me ask you this: If I were to tell you that you could quit your full-time job today—or, if you were in school, you could drop out—what would you do? What if I told you I had become independently wealthy, and out of the goodness of my heart, I would like to pay you a hefty salary of $250,000 per year for the rest of your life to do whatever you want. The only stipulation is whatever you choose has to be meaningful to you—and it has some positive impact on others (so, it can’t be playing video games all day or laying around eating Pringles and watching reruns of Law & Order). It has to be something purposeful. What would you want to do? My guess is, that’s not an easy question to answer. Even for me this is challenging and I’ve spent the last four solid years of my life exploring my answer. Four years ago I quit my full time job, sold everything I owned and set off on a journey around the country to become a writer. I was certain that’s what I wanted to do forever. These days, that hasn’t changed. I’m still certain I want to write. 29

But how involved would I want to be with other people and their writing? Are copywriting, ghostwriting, editing and coaching just something I do to pays the bills, or do I really enjoy it? The things I do because I want to do them and the things I do because I have to do them seem to play with each other and impact each other and the lines between the two become really fuzzy. Sometimes we convince ourselves we like something so we don’t feel so miserable doing it. Don’t you think? Listening to yourself is the practice of separating all of this. It’s the practice of digging down below the surface to get to what’s true. It’s figuring out the difference between passion and obligation. It’s uncovering your bliss. This must have been what Joseph Campbell was talking about. Because if we can get to our bliss—our real, actual bliss—I do think it will lead us in the right direction. Our instincts are remarkably accurate. Learning to listen to yourself is an essential part of becoming a good writer, but it is also an essential part of becoming a whole person. “Without a listener, the healing process is aborted,” Miriam Greenspan notes in her book called Healing Through the Dark Emotions. What would happen if we began to listen to ourselves? What would happen if we stopped ignoring our instinct, our intuition, our fear and our pain? What would happen if we quit trying to pretend like we were already fixed, already put-together; and just admitted where we actually are? Perhaps we would find relief from our worry, our anxiety. Maybe we would uncover the happiness we long for. Maybe we could give ourselves permission to stop caring so much about how many many people like us, or how many copies we sell, or how viral a post we write. Because we have what we set our for all along—not fame or 30

fortune, but a small and growing semblance of self. Something To Try: Silence & Solitude If you’re anything like me, your entire day is filled with noise. It’s not all bad noise. It’s the sound of your kids giggling or your husband grinding coffee in the morning or the dull whisper of the TV in the background. Where I’m sitting at my favorite coffee shop right now, there are conversations happening all around me. The noise covers me like a warm blanket. If I lived in the country, away from people and the noises of the city, the sounds I heard daily would be different than those I’m listening to now. I would listen to the tall grass whisper up against itself in the wind, the rhythmic hush of waves coming up to shore, crickets singing their nighttime song. Instead the noise I tend to hear in my life feels loud and unnatural—trains, traffic, horns, voices, television, radio. There’s very little silence in my life. Again, it’s not all bad. But sometimes the very thing we need to hear ourselves—and therefore to discover ourselves—is the very thing that scares us most. Silence. In addition to the noise I can hear in my life, there’s also all kinds of noise I see and feel and experience. There are so many different sources of input into my day, it’s hard to even keep track of them all. E-mail. Facebook. Twitter. Text messaging. Instant messaging. G-chat. Skype. We’re so plugged in, so connected—and I’m really grateful for how technology makes this possible—but at some point I have to wonder: if I’m spending all of my time listening to outside noise, how will I ever hear myself? How will I ever know myself? 31

What would it look like to create more space for silence in our lives? Try taking a whole day without background noise. Get away from the city, turn off your cell phone, your TV, your radio. If you typically watch TV during the day, take a sabbatical from it. If you’re like me, and you’re used to falling asleep to Netflix at night, try going a few days without it. Create space for listening. I’ve been experimenting with this exercise lately and it’s incredibly uncomfortable, but the experience is also profound. What if you even just took an hour—took a walk—and stayed present with yourself for long enough to hear what’s beneath the surface, beneath the noise? What if you listened without judgement to what you find there? What if you didn’t push a feeling away—simply because it didn’t fit your current paradigm or because you were afraid of where it might lead? What if you were just honest with yourself? My guess is if you can stand the silence, you’ll find that your intuition is more reliable than you ever realized. You’ll find a hidden wisdom inside of yourself, like I did: you first, others second. This inner wisdom might help you overcome the blockages you’re experiencing, show up to the page and uncover the most unique, most authentic version of yourself.

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3 Learning To Wrestle You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going. You don’t have to have it all figured out. In fact, sometimes the only way to “figure it out” is to just get in and start wrestling. Have you ever noticed how so much content on the Internet these days makes life sound easier than it actually is? I don’t know why this has jumped out to me so much lately, but I’ve gotten to the point where I can’t even stand it anymore. I can’t even read Twitter. It just makes me want to throw things. It makes me want to scream, “One God-forsaken blog post is not going to change your life!” Clearly, I have anger issues around this topic. But you get my point. On the one hand, I get why this is. There is a demand for what’s easy. People don’t want to do the work. If we can reduce the truly awful, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult things in life to a list— if we can promise them that following that list is going to make those awful, unpleasant things simple and even fun—no wonder readers flock to it. I would flock to it, too. 33

The only problem is this stuff doesn’t work. Not in the long run. Not when the rubber meets the road. Not when mom gets Cancer or the debt-collectors call or when your spouse admits there is someone else. In these moments, no list can console. No list can bring healing. No list can restore your marriage. No list can give wisdom. There is only your pain, your story and the tiny bit of hope that keeps you moving. If we are going to write something that matters—for ourselves or anyone else—we have to learn how to write that. If we are ever going to uncover ourselves and move beyond ourselves, we have to be willing to move outside of the “five simple ways” and “10 quick steps” and admit that life doesn’t happen in lists. Lists and how-to’s have their place. I can name a dozen “selfhelp” books that have helped me help myself in my life. Mostly, they’ve helped me put language to the things I was already experiencing—which helped me change the stories I was telling myself. But real life change doesn’t happen in lists. Real life change happens when we’re willing to fight, willing to wrestle. The problem with lists is that they make life sound much easier than the life I actually experience. They make it seem like, if you follow this simple formula, or buy this product, or complete these steps—one, two three—everything will fall into place. But the reality of my life doesn’t live up to this expectation. Nothing that matters in my life—my faith, my marriage, my journey of finding myself, my writing—has occurred because I have followed a list. Nothing. Let’s take marriage for example. I read every marriage book known to man before I got married. I dog-eared the pages and highlighted and processed through all the advice by writing about it in my journal. I was also in my late twenties and had watched most of my friends get married first. I had learned from them, 34

asked them questions, been curious. By all accounts, I was “ready” to get married. But nothing could have prepared me for marriage like being married. Nothing—no list, no book, no advice, no formula— could have readied me for what I would feel when another person pressed in so close to me. No one could have prevented me from feeling so utterly lost in the middle of a conflict. No book could have taken away the pain of rejection—an inevitable part of being close to someone. The books I read gave me tips and strategies and insights and tools that have helped me in my marriage. But none of them have made it easy. It’s a struggle. It should be. It is why we say the important things in life are “worth fighting for.” We wouldn’t put it that way if it weren’t exactly that: a fight. So lists can do what lists can do but they can’t save us from the inevitable fight. And if we want our marriages, our careers, our writing or ourselves to become something beautiful, we have to be willing to wrestle with them. We have to be willing to ask questions, to roll around on the ground a little, to mess stuff up, to really get our elbows into it. When I try everything the lists have to offer and it’s still not working, will I keep fighting? When the advice, the tactics, the tips and techniques make me feel like a failure, will I keep showing up? Am I willing to listen to myself, to find my own way, even when the way other’s have traveled isn’t working? Am I brave enough to create my own roadmap? My answers to these questions will determine my success. Not how many self-help books I’ve read and not how many copies I sell. I don’t have to have all the answers before I get started. I just need to have enough heart, enough passion and enough gumption to stay in it to the end. 35

It’s Okay To Be “In It” There’s a scene from the movie Garden State that I really love. The two main characters—Andrew and Sam (played by Zach Braff and Natalie Portman) go for a swim in a pool late one night and then find themselves sitting in front of a blazing fire, drying off. Sam looks at Andrew and Andrew looks at Sam. They exchange charged glances but no words. Then Sam says, “You’re really in it right now, aren’t you?” Andrew’s mother has just passed away, and he isn’t sure exactly how to grieve the loss. He’s been on anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs for so long, he’s not sure how to feel much of anything anymore. But now that he’s met Sam, you can tell he is considering coming out from his hibernation and feeling something again. Sam explains how this is something her mother used to say when she was really deep in thought about something, when it seemed like she was really trying to wrestle with something or work it out. She would say, “you’re really in it right now, aren’t you?” Ever since I saw that movie, I’ve loved that phrase—and that idea—of being “in it”. I find myself “in it” on many occasions and wonder if this is not a prerequisite for good writing—a willingness to lose ourselves inside of something, a piece of writing or a subject. I wonder if we have to learn how to lean into something, to grow our tolerance for the fear we might feel, the pressure, the pain of leaning against something that doesn’t necessarily feel steady or safe. To me, leaning in means we’re willing to accept that the process of being present with ourselves, listening, wrestling, letting go, speaking up and connecting with a reader doesn’t just happen once. It happens over and over again, every time we choose 36

to show up to the page. I’m learning to grow my tolerance for this process, to expect that it is going to be a little bit uncomfortable, that it might not feel good while I’m “in it” but that I’ll sure be glad I leaned into it when I find the peace and balance I’ve been looking for on the other side. I’ve been working with a writer recently who complained to me that she’s been (as she put it) “obsessing” over her manuscript lately. I asked her to describe to me what this look like and she said, “I lie awake at night thinking about it, I wake up in the morning thinking about it, I sometimes will lose all concentration from work in the middle of the day thinking about it... it occupies my whole life and all the space in my mind.” I told her, “that doesn’t sound like obsession to me. It sound like you’re in it.” Most of us, I would argue, avoid or resist getting “in it”. We’re worried that if we really let ourselves go, really dive down to the bottom of this, really allow our heart to break open and end up on the page, disaster will strike. Tragedy will happen. I’m not sure what we think that will look like. But I think most of us resist allowing ourselves to sink to the bottom, so to speak. So I told her the fact that she was “in it” right now with this project probably wasn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, it was most likely a really good thing. It meant she was really willing to get her hands dirty and get to work. It meant she wasn’t resistant to getting “in it,” she wasn’t scared to really dive down deep. That’s the kind of resilience we need if we’re really going to discover our true voices in writing. Satisfaction-Or-Your-Money-Back Guarantee I’m a writer by passion, by necessity and by training and yet I still have to struggle. I have a bachelors degree in writing and a 37

Masters degree in teaching writing. I’ve been writing since I was a child. I just discovered, the other day, that I wrote my first “book” when I was in the fourth grade. I’ve always been admired and praised for my writing and I’ve taught hundreds of students to write as well. But it doesn’t matter how much training I have, or how skilled I am. There is no formula to follow when it comes to good writing. As I sit down to write this eBook, I still have to wrestle. I have skills and tools I’ve learned over the years. I’ve read dozens of writing books. I take what’s helpful from each of those books and come up with a process that is mostly good for me. It works most of the time. But it is not a sure-fire, guaranteed-oryour-money-back kind of thing. It’s a process. And I have to be willing to wrestle. This it the hardest thing for me to teach the people who come to me and want help with writing. Recently, one of the writers who I coach asked me about my refund policy. She was committing to three months of one-on-one coaching and she was dead-set on completing a memoir she’d been working on. I could hear the desperation in her voice. It was like a woman giving birth to a baby, a primal uttering from the deepest part of her soul. The truth is, I felt for her. I’ve been in her position. I’ve heaved the breath of the birthing process and lived through the pain of pushing out. Not literally, but figuratively. I have not given birth to a baby, but I have given birth to a book and I knew how she felt. Not to mention, when writers enter into the coaching process with me, I know they’re taking a huge risk. There’s the financial risk, first of all, but there’s also the emotional and practical risk. What if they invest all this time—three months—and they don’t end up with what they hoped? What if they save and save and save 38

and invest every last penny, and it isn’t what they wanted? What if they get halfway through and get stuck? What if they share their deepest, darkest secrets with me and I betray them? What if they share their idea and I steal it? These are the questions we all ask as writers and people who choose to show up and be ourselves. And at the same time, no one had ever asked me about my refund policy before, so I told her honestly I didn’t have one. I asked her if I could take few days to think about it. As I thought about it, I had a realization that fundamentally changed the way I thought about the coaching process. It went like this: Formulas, lists, money-back guarantees—they make us feel so safe, don’t they? They help to settle our anxieties, to calm those questions that ask, “what happens if this doesn’t work out?” They make us feel like, no matter what happens, everything is going to be okay in the end. But is it even honest to guarantee someone— anyone—that everything will work out? Can I promise you that, if you work with me for three months, you’ll finish a book or your book will be good or it will sell? No. This is part of the beauty and the pain of writing and becoming ourselves. There are no guarantees. Selling a guarantee to success is like promising to give you air. It’s there—success is there, it exists—but how do we really hold onto it? And come to think of it, what if those anxieties we feel when we are asked to show up to the page—when we put our money and our time and our heart-energy where our mouth is—are exactly the fuel we need to find our way out? It hurts like hell. There’s no denying that. And there’s no guarantee it will be anything meaningful or good. There’s no guarantee it will matter to anyone else. But if it’s ever going to matter for you—for me—we have to be 39

willing to wrestle. So I emailed her back and told her I couldn’t offer her a money-back guarantee for coaching. It wasn’t because I was unwilling, or because I was trying to be jerk. It was because I can’t offer anyone that kind of guarantee about writing or about finding themselves. It doesn’t work like that and it would be dishonest of me to promise something I can’t deliver by myself. I told her that if she wanted to finish her book, she was going to have to be as committed to the process as I was (if not more). She was going to have to ask the hard questions, to have a high tolerance for pain, to fully surrender to the birthing process. I told her that if that didn’t seem like something she wanted to do, I totally understood. There was no pressure on my end of things. I would give her full refund now, before we started. I didn’t hear from her for a few days, and I honestly figured that was her answer. I assumed she was going to opt out. But 48 hours later I got the e-mail: “Okay, I’m in,” she said, “But I have a list of questions.” Good. I thought to myself. Questions are an excellent place to start. New Life Comes A friend of mine recently had a baby—an actual baby, not a book baby—and last time we got together we spent some time talking about the birthing process. Her labor was really long, so although her intention was to give birth naturally, without the use of drugs, eventually (after 22 hours) the doctors began to worry that if she didn’t have an epidural, she would not have the energy to push when it came time. At that point, she explained, she was way too tired to fight 40

them. She’d been laboring for nearly a day, so all idealistic pictures of how the birthing process was “supposed” to go in that moment flew out the window. She signed the papers and before she knew it, the anesthesiologist was standing next to her and she was feeling like she had just died and gone to heaven. The pain had stopped and nearly an hour later, she gave birth to her little girl. We sat in awe together for a moment at the marvels of modern medicine. We couldn’t help but think about how often women used to die in childbirth, or lose their babies, before all of these other measures were possible. I’m still not sure if this experience fits perfectly into the analogy of what it means to labor over the writing process, or the process of becoming. But it makes me think this: The process is not safe. It’s not pretty. It’s not all neat and wrapped up with a bow. Thank God for modern medicine—for the equivalent comforts and therapy and access to people and things that soothe our wounds. Without these things, we may not survive. Our bodies might, but our souls might die. But the birthing process—the process of bringing human life into existence—has never been a safe, easy, clean process. It has always been a messy one. And no amount of medicine or numbing or therapy or writing coaching could ever change that. Anyone who sells you a guarantee is lying. So then, what is my role as a writing coach? I’ve struggled with this a little bit. If I can’t guarantee you an outcome, what is my role? A marketing coach would say I’m supposed to tell you about the tangible benefit I will bring and about the problems I’m going to solve if you choose to hire me. And I’m sure there’s a place for that, but if I’m really speaking my own truth, none of that feels like the whole picture to me. To me, that feels a little like a guy taking a girl out to coffee 41

for the first time and promising he won’t break her heart. He can’t keep that promise. It doesn’t work like that. Relationships and writing are both delicate balances. We have to learn to lean against each other and depend on each other, and when one person shifts his or her weight, of course it will have an impact on the other. You can’t promise it won’t. So as a writing coach—and even as I type this book—I feel little bit like a pastor trying to explain the way to spiritual healing, or the way to heaven. The words reach toward something that is real and good, but the words aren’t enough. Words are insufficient to describe spiritual realities. Faith is not a linear, step-by-step process. Neither is writing. Neither is finding yourself. People who have faith—like people who have written something of consequence, who know the sound of their own voice— have done so because they’ve wrestled. They’ve asked the questions. They’ve felt the feelings. They’ve shown up and they’ve listened to themselves. And at the end of the day they’re willing to admit they don’t have it all figured out—but that they’re going to continue to do all of those things. Continue to show up. Continue to listen. Continue to wrestle. As for me, as a writer and a coach, I can’t make any promises. All I can do is what I know to do, which is keep showing up, keep listening to myself. I can’t worry about how all of this ends, I can only remember how it always begins—a willingness to endure the pain of struggle until new life comes. Something To Try: Write Now, Edit Later Is there something you’ve been wanting to write, meaning to write, dying to write—but you’re putting it off because you don’t have the answers? What if you just tried this. Write now. Edit lat42

er. This has been one of the hardest tasks for me to learn as a writer but it has also been one of the most important. My tendency is to write now and edit now. In other words, I sit down to the computer and edit myself as I go. I type out a sentence and think to myself, “I shouldn’t have used that word,” or “the reader doesn’t need to know that,” or “what a dumb thing to say.” Then, after awhile, when this inevitably doesn’t work, I sit down to the computer and think to myself, “who cares about the reader? I don’t give a rip about the reader. I’m doing this for me.” Either way, I never make much progress with my writing. The creative process is never as satisfying as I want it to be. The editing process doesn’t produce the product I hoped it would. I wish writing wasn’t such a process, don’t you agree? I wish I could just sit down to my computer, type out a few words, and have suddenly created a masterpiece. I don’t like the patience writing takes. I don’t want to get on the plane to my vacation. I just want to snap my fingers and be there. I wish I could just arrive in one sitting. I don’t think I’m alone in this. I remember talking to an author once who mentioned how frustrated she was that her book was taking so long to complete. I asked her how long she had been working on it, and she told me six months. I nearly spit out my drink. “Oh my,” I wanted to say. “If you can write a book in six months, you’re doing great!” Part of becoming a writer, in my experience, is learning how to sit with myself in this process, learning how it feels to let an idea percolate until it’s ready, to allow myself to show up to the page all disheveled and grammar-less; to go back and clean things up later. So I often edit myself as I write, which leads to stilted, controlled writing—or I free-write and then never edit, which leads to messy, convoluted writing. Either way, I am not living up to my potential as a writer or as a person. 43

There is a parallel here for how we live our lives, if we’re willing to see it. We can’t edit our lives while we’re living them. We have to live now, with abandon—speaking up when we feel passionate about something, moving forward with conviction and without fear—and then edit later. Later, we have to sit down and reflect, asking ourselves honestly what worked and what didn’t work, being truthful with ourselves about our real intentions—the ones hidden behind the one we want everyone to think we had. The editing stage is where we adjust for next time. It’s where we say, “I shouldn’t have said that or done that. I was acting selfish. I’m so sorry.” It’s where we confront ourselves so we can change. Editing is when we clean things up, clear things out, have a good, long, hard talk with ourselves or those around us. It’s where we ask for support, get critical, develop the willingness to go back over things again, and again and again until we get them right. This must be a regular practice in our lives if we’re ever going to grow or make any progress, but we can’t always be editing. We have to live first—to write first—and then edit later. If you’re anything like me, you recognize that the writer in you and the editor in you are two different people. Or, at the very least, they’re two different sides of the same person. The writer in me says, “go! Write! Get the words on the page! Or, “go! Jump! Start that project! Take that leap! Meanwhile the editor in me says, “wait, have you thought this all the way through? You could start the story in the wrong place or forget a comma or misrepresent the characters. Are you sure you want to risk that? Do you have an outline? Are you really ready? The editor in me says, “You could make a fool out of yourself!” Or, “This could be dangerous! You could lose your savings or break a leg or ruin this friendship. Don’t do that or say that unless you’re totally sure it’s the right thing to do.” 44

Even now, as I write these few paragraphs of this particular chapter, I have to stop myself from editing as I go. My tendency is to go back, to re-read, to comb and obsess and wonder about grammar. But the tendency to stop and obsess is holding me back from the words I need to get on paper, it is holding me back from discovering the kind of writer I could be. If I think of myself as a sculptor. I need raw materials first, before I need a chisel. Write first—get your raw material. Edit later—don’t get to precious about anything you’ve written. Bring your chisel. We think writing and editing at the same time is going to make our manuscripts cleaner and our lives more exciting. But in fact it does just the opposite. To write, and to find ourselves in our writing, we have to let ourselves go. When I’m writing morning pages, I let myself go. I don’t feel pressure to make it readable or likable or marketable. The only pressure I feel is to show up at the page. I choose to be present, to listen to myself, and to engage in the process by wrestling through my thoughts and feelings. When I start to feel overwhelmed, I remind myself not to worry about how this will all turn out. I’ve done this before. I’ve wrestled before. It’s always uncomfortable. But there’s a huge payoff for it. There is nothing like it. I want to do it again. And so because there is no pressure with morning pages, I can just be—just exist—on the page. I can lean into it fully. I intuitively and instinctively put it all out there, my whole self, in that private place. I’m the one who gets to decide later (when its time to edit) what should be shared and what should be held back, but for now, there is no question. Everything goes. Everything comes. Everything is on the page. The more I do this, the more I learn this is the only way for me 45

to really find myself. Most of us, I would argue, are writing now, editing now. We’re not leaning into our lives, or our writing. We’re holding back. We’re scared what would happen if we really let ourselves go. We’re scared what would come out, terrified of what we might find. But what if you practiced writing in a journal, or on a typewriter, instead of a computer? Or, what if you put a piece of tape over your delete key? What if you promised yourself you were going to write a certain number of pages, without looking back? What if you just wrote, everyday, without giving your inner critic any room to speak up? What if you wrote without stopping for long enough to edit yourself? What if you just learned to trust yourself? My guess is it would be really uncomfortable. My guess is you would have to wrestle. But my guess is you also might find yourself there, on the page. You might discover a story you didn’t know was there. You might become the writer, and the person you were meant to be all along.

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4 Be Okay With Imperfect The best writers and the best stories in the world aren’t focused on perfect. There is no such thing as perfect. The best writers are willing to give up the story they wish could be in order to tell the story that is. I’m not much of a fiction writer. I only took one fiction writing course in college and I was by far the worst fiction writer in that class. But the most memorable thing I learned from my professor that semester was this: the primary thing that makes a fictional character believable is that they are imperfect. They are a mixture of right and wrong, good and bad. I found that so fascinating, and to this day, I think of it often. The thing that makes a fictional character seem most like a real character is that they don’t live up to your expectations of them. So, in other words, a cheerleader who is the most popular girl in school, speaks like a valley girl, and can’t wait to find out if she made cheerleading squad is not the most believable character. What would make her more believable, more relatable? If we saw her behind the scenes reading Steinbeck. Perhaps she is intelligent in a way she feels afraid to admit to anyone around her. 47

Think of your favorite character for a minute. It can be someone from a TV show, a book or a movie. Do you have it? Ask yourself how that character surprises you. One of my favorites is Rory Gilmore from The Gilmore Girls. Rory is a sweet, studious, bookish young girl who’s closest confidant is her mother. In the first few seasons of the show, you get to know her pretty well. She is an avid reader, goes to a private school and is an obsessive rule-follower. At one point, Rory’s mother Lorelai admits Rory has never done anything wrong in her entire life. She hasn’t gotten a bad grade, hasn’t been caught smoking, hasn’t shoplifted. “Not a candy bar, not a lipstick.” Lorelai exclaims. “She forgot to return a library book once. And she was so guilty about it that she grounded herself. I mean, can you imagine? She’s just sitting there in her bedroom yelling at me, ‘Now no-one else got to read the Iliad this week because of me!’.” There are a few quirks that make her an authentic, believable character. She and her mother watch too much TV. She keeps her distance from the posh, uptight “cotillion” world of her classmates. She lives in a small town filled with quirky, out-of-the-ordinary people who would no doubt be rejected by the students and families of her fancy private school. Even her grandparents, who live in the uppity town just 20 minutes away stand in stark contrast to where she spends her evenings—in Stars Hollow, the unimpressive, strange, down-to-earth place where she has grown up. But the most interesting dichotomy comes about five seasons into the show—when Rory loses her virginity. Up until this point, she’s put off sex with two boyfriends, both of whom she loved. The writers of the show have established Rory as the cautious, careful, logical, analytical, pro-con-list kind of girl. But caught in the heat of the moment with her ex-boyfriend, she finds herself in bed 48

with a man for the first time. And I suppose this wouldn’t be so hard to believe—after all, even a conservative, studious girl can find herself falling for a handsome young man. It wouldn’t be so hard to believe—if he weren’t already married to someone else. The unexpectedness of this action, the out-of-the-blueness of it, the seeming contrast to her usual conviction and personality is, strangely, what makes it so believable. The reason we don’t have a hard time wrapping our brains around why Rory would make this decision, and the reason why we can identify with her so closely, is that we are all a mix of good and bad. We are all oxymorons. I’ve been thinking about this recently because one of the primary ways I make a living is by helping others speak their stories and unlock their creative power—and yet, for weeks, I’ve been stuck myself, feeling like the biggest fraud because I haven’t been able to bring myself to do morning pages, can’t take my own advice, can’t get myself out of bed in the morning period—let alone to show up to the page. Every time I sat down to write, I would think to myself, “okay, write something awesome...” the very mantra I warn other writers will sabotage their process before they even start. I’ve been numbing myself with noise, music, TV, activities, busy-ness—to the point I can’t hear my own voice. Meanwhile, I’m supposed to be the teacher here. How am I supposed to help other writers when I can’t even help myself? Or how about the fact that I’m an all-natural, organic, granola kind of girl, but in private, when no one is looking you might very well find me sipping a Diet Coke? If you asked any of my friends, they would tell you I’m really pretty careful about what I eat. I’m gluten free. I tend to cook from scratch, with as many real foods 49

as possible. I try to avoid sugar and its substitutes. But I’d be lying if I said, at the end of a hard day, I don’t still kind of want to crack open a cold Coke Zero and drink up. It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t fit with what you to know about me—or at least with what I project to the world about myself. But at the same time, it does. It’s unexpected. We are unexpected beings. We are a mixture of good and bad. Nice People Make Bad Writers You might be wondering: what on earth does this have to do with writing, and why do I care? Let me give you an example. When I wrote my first draft of Packing Light, I did my best to honor the stories of everyone involved. I knew I was going to have to write about several people who wouldn’t get a choice about how they were painted in my story and it was important to me to honor this privilege. One person in particular was a guy I had dated while I was traveling. The relationship had ended badly for me, and since since I didn’t want my pain to color the story too much, I did my best to paint him in a positive light. To be honest, this was a struggle for me. Although I had since married and moved on myself, I never really got the closure I wanted with that relationship. So as soon as I started writing about it, I found myself wrestling through a lot of negative feelings again. I was terrified to be present with those negative feelings, to listen to what they were telling me. After all, I was married now. I had no business being angry at an ex-boyfriend. Not to mention I was a really nice person! I didn’t have anything negative to say about anyone. Did I? So I tried to push those negative feelings down and keep the 50

details about this relationship to a bare minimum. By the time I turned the manuscript into my publisher, I thought to myself: “Whew, thank God that is over and I never have to think about it again.” That is, until my editor got her hands on it. “This character and storyline is falling a little flat to me,” was the way she put it, I think. “I just feel like you’re holding back.” She was right, but in order to not hold back I was going to have to let all my negative feelings about this person and this circumstance boil up to the surface. I was going to have to be present with those feelings, to listen to them, to wrestle with them and to admit that both of us—myself and this other person—were a mix of good and evil. This meant admitting I was not as nice and neat as I wanted people to believe. There was a lot of unexpressed fear and anger inside of me. It also meant letting him come down off the pedestal I’d put him on so long ago. My heart had been broken. I was more affected by his rejection of me than I wanted to admit. And, if I was really being honest, we’d both made some pretty significant mistakes. He was not perfect and neither was I. This was not the, “I’ve moved on, you-can’t-hurt-me” story I wanted to tell. It wasn’t the, “you’re-such-a-swell-guy, just-notthe-guy-for-me” story I wished it had been. But it was the true story, the one where two people, who were both a mix of good and bad, got tangled up with each other. When I was able to write that story, the true story and not just the pretty one, it came off the page in a new way. When my editor read the final copy, she said, “The whole thing makes so much more sense now.” It wasn’t cut-and-dry. We—myself and this other guy—didn’t stay in our categories. But I told the messy, confusing, convoluted truth and because I did that, it was believable. Since then, as I’ve grown as a writer and as a person. I see even 51

more ways I could have shown up to the page. I’ve discovered new ways I wasn’t really listening to myself. I’ve noticed areas where I was holding back, where I wasn’t willing to wrestle. And if I had it to write over again now, I think I would be able to admit even more of the nuance I couldn’t see or couldn’t admit then. But I am surrendering to the process of becoming an authentic writer and an authentic person. I’m allowing myself to see people, and to see my circumstances, as a mixture of good and not-sogood. Sitting With Yourself In The Dark One of the scary things that happens as you begin to be present with yourself, to listen without judgment and to wrestle with what you find there is you’ll likely begin to have strong feelings about people, places and things you didn’t notice before. As you work through your morning pages, for example, you might find yourself writing about negative feelings toward your dad, or your job or even your spouse. Perhaps these feelings were not apparent to you before or perhaps they were, but my guess is you didn’t realize how much they were affecting your day-to-day life. It’s important to honor these feelings and give them space to exist. I used to think the opposite was true. I used to be so afraid of feeling anger, fear or jealousy, I would push those feelings away until I couldn’t see them anymore. But “negative” feelings we have pushed away are like a beach ball we’ve pushed underneath the water. They’re still there—they’re just waiting for a space and opportunity to pop out again. The only way to move through these feelings is to admit them, honor them, and allow yourself to feel them fully. We have tended, in the past, to see these feelings as totally 52

negative. It makes sense. I understand how we get there. I read an article a few years ago about a man who burned down his house— with his wife and two daughters inside—because he found out his wife was cheating on him with his best friend. Feelings like grief, fear and jealousy can be dangerous emotions in the sense that they lead us to make dangerous decisions. But, as Barabara Brown Taylor suggests in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, “perhaps we don’t need to dismiss difficult emotions nearly as much as we need new strategies for dealing with them.” If we don’t find ways for staying with ourselves, even when we feel these difficult emotions, we run the risk of losing missing ourselves altogether, of losing our voices. We’re all a mix of good and bad. We’re a complicated, confusing, mix of anger and gentleness, good intentions and selfish ones, wisdom and insolence, hard-headedness and tender compassion. If we don’t allow ourselves to see, or to admit, the less attractive qualities about ourselves, how will we ever be able to see the more attractive ones? How will we become believable to our reader? How will we appreciate ourselves and learn to love ourselves for who we are? How will we ever be able to truly love anyone else? Something To Try: Reenacting A Conversation For a moment, think with me about the last time you were really hurt by someone. Perhaps it was a boyfriend or girlfriend and things didn’t end the way you hoped they would. Maybe it was a parent—something they said or didn’t say, something they did or didn’t do. Maybe it was your spouse. Perhaps there was an argument or other confrontation that wasn’t handled how you wished 53

it would have been. Do you have something in mind? Now, I want you to do something with it. I want you to write the dialogue. Exactly as it happened. Don’t improvise or exaggerate. Try to represent it as closely as you possibly can. Consider what I’ve already discussed about life being nuanced, about everyone being a mix of good and evil. Don’t forget to include yourself in that space. Don’t go back and read the dialogue until you are completely done (write now, edit later). In fact, when you’re finished, you might want to wait a few hours or days before you revisit it. But when you do revisit it, make a list of a few things that surprise you. Make sure you include a few things about yourself, as well as a few things about the other person. What I’m guessing you’ll find is the circumstance looks different from a distance than it does from close up. And when you can look at it from that angle, you just might be able to see yourself a little more clearly. If you can stay with that image, if you can listen to it, if you can wrestle with it, if you can give yourself permission to be imperfect—to be a mix of both good and evil—I think you might uncover wisdom and grace you never before believed possible. You might find your own way out of the woods, out of the struggle. You might be able to lead someone else out as well.

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5 Learning To Let Go Of Control My best writing doesn’t tend to happen when I obsess over it, plan it, map it out and try to articulate it perfectly on the first try. My best stories occur when I open my hands and heart and simply let the words come. It was about 2pm when I got the call you never want to get. My husband and I had been fighting that day—all day—the kind of fight you reserve for special occasions in a marriage. You know, Christmas Eve, just before you leave for church. The first day of a brand new job. A time in life when both of you are severely sleep deprived. Or, you know, any random day during your first year of marriage. We were acting like children, but we didn’t care. We had yelled, slammed things, broke at least one of the things we slammed, and then I dropped him off at work without a word. I was livid. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I was looking forward to having some time without him at the house. That’s when the phone rang. The first missed call was from my sister, who I didn’t much feel like talking to at the moment. This was weird because I always 55

feel like talking to my sister. She is one of my closet friends. But somehow (without thinking through it very much) I knew that if I answered the phone, she would hear in my voice something was wrong and make me talk about it. She would probably also figure out this wasn’t all my husband’s fault, as I so desperately needed to believe in that moment, so I ignored the call. The next missed call was from my mom. At the time, my thought was, “geesh, did he call my family and tell them what happened? Did he post something on Facebook? Is there some kind of familial intuition I didn’t know about?” I ignored that call, too. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I wanted to stew. It wasn’t until about thirty seconds after the missed calls registered on my iPhone that I considered how strange it was that two family members would be calling me in the middle of the day on a Monday afternoon. It was 2:00 my time (EST) and just around 11am for them. Shouldn’t they both be at work? My mom is a teacher and, for the most part, impossible to get ahold of during a work day unless there is an emergency. She works in an elementary school and since, of course, there is a strict no-cell-phone policy for the kids, the adults tend to keep their phones put away as well. Not to mention, when you’re in charge of the well-being of a classroom full of tiny people, the last thing you need is an extra distraction. My sister’s work isn’t so strict about cell phones but she has a work ethic unparalleled to just about anyone I know, so more often than not, she keeps calling and texting under wraps during the work day. If I wanted to get ahold of her, I would have to call her work phone. And yet, here they were. Two missed calls on my cell phone. To add to the confusion, there had just been a major transition in my life. Two months prior I had gotten married to my now-hus56

band and we had moved, together, from my home in Portland, Oregon (where all of my family lived) to our new home in West Palm Beach, Florida. As transitions tend to go, this one had been a little bit rocky. I had gone from being an organic-eating, dressed-down, Birkenstock-wearing, granola-ish Oregonian to a part of the country where boob jobs, high heels, luxury vehicles and string bikinis were the thing. I had gone from being single to married. I was trying to be fully invested in my “new” life without completely abandoning my old one. It was a ton of pressure, and no matter what I did, I felt like a total failure. Things felt out-of-sync. I knew they would be back in sync soon (right?) but what if something happened before then? I suddenly felt very afraid of everything and my life felt out-ofthis-world fragile. A few weeks earlier, as I was driving to dinner with my husband, I told him, “If something happened right now—if one my parents got sick or had a heart attack or died... I would never forgive myself.” Now, here I was, staring at these two missed calls on my cell phone. I called my mom back first. She didn’t answer. I called my sister back second. By now my heart was racing—almost like it could anticipate what was about to happen. I heard my sister’s voice on the other end of the line. “Don’t freak out,” she said. “But dad’s in the hospital.” After that, I only heard about ever fifth word “... heart attack... doctor... come soon...” That was when the wailing started. I’m not sure if you’ve ever cried like this—or if you’ve ever seen anyone cry like this—but it reminds me of the last scene from Baz Lurman’s Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet (Claire Danes) wakes 57

up and discovers what Romeo has done. When she discovers the mistake he’s made and the impact it now has on her, she let’s out a sob that could wake a grown man from a drunken slumber. It’s from her gut. It’s loud. The camera pans out to show the entire tomb (which, in this movie is covered with lit candles) and her sob echoes throughout—so you can hear it a dozen times over. That sob, in my opinion, is one of the most gut-wrenching sounds in the entire world. That’s how I sobbed that day. I grabbed my purse, left my house without shoes, went back to get shoes because I remembered, strangely, that in Oregon, you can be arrested for driving with no shoes... or was it get a ticket? I couldn’t remember, but I went back to get my shoes and drove straight to where my husband was working. I finished the conversation with my sister—which was barely a conversation because we were both crying so loudly—and then called my husband. “My... my dad... heart... attack... doctor... died three times...” My attempts at explaining what had happened and what I was doing were interrupted several times with, “wait, what happened? Who?” and, “Babe, you have to calm down. I can’t understand you.” Eventually I made it to his office and he met me outside. I collapsed into his arms. All the things I had been angry about earlier that day, all the things that had made me think I never wanted to see him or talk to him again, all the things I had been trying to fix and control because they made me absolutely crazy... none of that was important any more. In fact, it was hardly relevant. I couldn’t even remember why I had been so mad. All my illusions of control had been exposed. I didn’t control anything. I didn’t control my husband. I couldn’t control him... why should I try? I didn’t control my own emotions—at least not 58

nearly as well as I thought I did. I couldn’t control life and death. I wanted to get on a plane. I wanted to drive to the airport right that minute and get on a freaking plane (yes, a freaking plane, which is different than just a normal plane—I had to explain this to my husband as well) and fly to Portland. Maybe if I could just be there, it would help. Maybe it would mean I could hold the family together. Maybe it would mean I could hold myself together. Maybe it would mean I wouldn’t lose my dad. But even as I went over the options in my mind, it occurred to me that even if I got on a plane right now, my dad could be gone before I got there. There was really nothing I could do. This was out of my hands. There’s nothing fun about realizing or admitting that life is out of our hands, but one of beautiful things about letting things get out of control, or just admitting we were never in our control in the first place, is we see ourselves for who we really are—just a small part, a supporting role really, in a much larger story. We are not the center of the Universe. The world does not revolve around us. We don’t have control. All we can do is what I’ve spent the past five chapters describing. We can show up. We can listen. We can wrestle. We can be a mix of good and bad. And we can let go and allow the story to unfold as it will. What does this have to do with writing? Everything. In the moment I was urged to let go of control, something really profound happened. I let my guard down. I was truly myself. The sobbing, the calling my husband even though I was angry—that was me, unpolished and unprotected. Even forgetting my shoes seems significant, a powerful image of how the simplest social “rules” are forgotten when the chaos gets to be too much. Suddenly, without warning, we become the raw, vulnerable, real versions of ourselves. 59

We may not have felt permission to be this way—or to show ourselves this way—before, but we feel permission now. We feel permission to let ourselves be truly seen, by ourselves and by someone else. That’s exactly what happened to me that day, the day I realized I didn’t have control. All the things I had been angry about before faded into the distance. I couldn’t even remember what any of them they were. All the posturing and protecting I was doing, all the defenses I had thrown up to distance myself, all the anger... all of that was gone. All I had now was me, no shoes and sobbing. When we can let go of control, or when life forces us to realize how little control we actually have, we tend to see ourselves for who we really are. And if you ask me, this is when the good writing comes. Good writing comes when we’re willing to let go of who we think we are, who we wish we were, the way we hoped things would be and talk about they way they really are. Good writing happens when we’re willing to let go of control. This is not just messy. It’s terrifying. Sometimes it happens to us, like in this circumstance, with my dad, and other times we choose it for ourselves in a sort of rare moment of clarity. But no matter how the chaos comes, letting go is about living fully present in spite of everything, listening, wrestling, and allowing things to be messy in the most unsettling way. This is the only way I’ve ever been able to write a story, or live a story, that matters beyond itself. This is the only way I’ve ever been able to uncover my voice. As it turns out, my dad survived. It was a miracle, really. And eventually, I made it to Oregon to see him again. But every time I think about the day we almost lost him I am reminded how one day I will lose him. I don’t have control. And maybe that’s okay. 60

Because the girl I discovered the day I almost lost my dad is the girl I want to be—the one who is willing to let go of control of her tiny, unimpressive and self-centered little life, to sacrifice her carefully planned out words, to show up, to listen and to just be herself— mess and all. Be Willing To Get Messy When I want to pretend like I have control over my life, I clean my house. We live in a modest two-bedroom loft in Nashville and we host people all the time. We love having overnight guests and adore hosting dinner parties and often have people over for latenight game nights or movie viewings. We make popcorn. We drink wine and lemonade and beer. And all of that makes a mess. It makes a mess of dishes and schedules and routines and furniture. It disturbs the quiet of the house and leaves footprints on the carpet and a pile of shoes by the door. I wish it were different, and when I want to pretend like it is different, like no matter what happens I have my crap all together, I clean. I put the shoes back exactly where they belong. I line them up all perfectly and separate them by color. I vacuum. I run the vacuum back and forth in a perfect patterns so it leaves lines in the carpet. Then I try to avoid walking on the carpet so they pattern can stay as long as possible. I shot a short video course for writers in our little loft apartment; and I made our apartment look perfect for the cameras. I cleaned. I arranged all the trinkets on the coffee table. I bought fresh flowers. I wiped all the fingerprints off the refrigerator and cabinets with Windex. I hid the little scrub brush in the kitchen underneath the sink. 61

Behind the camera, what you would have seen was a total disaster—empty donut boxes, old Chipotle containers, camera equipment, sweatshirts, various loose papers, all the bags and purses of everyone involved in the production. But in the camera frame what you saw made you think my house looks perfect. Here’s what I’ve learned about making anything look perfect: if it looks perfect, it isn’t real. As long as I try to control my life and “clean it up” and make it perfectly presentable, I won’t be free to actually live inside of it. I’ll have to stay off the carpet and and never open the fridge and never put on my shoes to leave the house. As long as I try to control my writing and “clean it up” I won’t be free to speak from my heart, to speak my truth. I don’t want to control my life or my writing. I want to live it. I want to write it. But learning to quit controlling your life or your writing doesn’t just happen overnight. There have to be catalysts for this kind of change—moments where you almost lose someone you love, or a split second when you forget what is “smart” and do what your heart tells you to do or nights when you choose to go to bed with the dishes undone and the shoes in a heap and confront the anxiety that comes. You don’t just wake up one day and decide to stop trying to keep things under your control. You have to notice you’re doing it, admit your fear, and let go again and again and again. When it comes to writing, the answer is no different. Recently I submitted a piece to an editor friend of mine and asked him if he could help me make it better. Something about it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. He agreed, and after he read it, he said, “you’re being too careful. It’s so clean.” When I heard the words, all I could think about was the row of shoes lined up by my door, the pattern in my carpet. A clean 62

home is not necessarily a home full of life. Clean writing is not necessarily good writing. Our writing is stunted by our need to control. When we try to keep our writing clean, to keep everything grammatically correct and to write in perfect sentences and to never have a run-on, our voices will get stuck inside of us. I’m not saying every sentence has to be imperfect, or that you publish something really messy, but I am saying we will miss the best writer inside of us if we never let the mess come. Something To Try: Get Out Of Your Head One of the things I think we need to do as writers is learn to get out of our heads and into our bodies. Our heads will try to control things. They’ll take the information available and try to turn it into something coherent and believable. Our heads are always trying to sort, organize and make sense out of things. Our bodies don’t do that. Our bodies don’t try to tell us what should be. They just tell us what is. They tell us the truth. I’ve been reading a book lately by Miriam Greenspan called Healing Through the Dark Emotions and this book is quickly becoming one of my favorites of all time. Greenspan explains how so many of us resist what we consider “dark” emotions, like fear, grief and despair because we don’t like the way they make us feel and we’re afraid of where they might take us. But we can’t avoid the impact of these emotions. Even if we choose not to think about them, our bodies will feel the weight of them. We don’t experience the dark emotions cognitively as much as we do physically. As an added bonus, Greenspan explains that emotions such as grief, fear and despair don’t have to be as “dark” as we assume them to be. They can actually offer us a great deal of wisdom if 63

we’re willing to listen carefully to what they’re telling us—if we’re willing to let our bodies speak for themselves. One of the exercises she gives toward the end of her book has been tremendously helpful in teaching me to let go of the control that comes with rationalizing my writing, searching my brain for “smart-sounding” words and trying to organize and perfect during the brainstorming stage. As long as I’m in my brain, I can’t stop doing this. This is the the purpose of my brain. It is it’s job. But this assignment by Greenspan teaches us to leave our brains and listen to our bodies, who won’t rationalize and organize nearly as much as they will just speak the truth. Take a minute and just sit quietly wherever you’re sitting—in a chair, on a couch, laying in bed, at a desk. For a minute, just try to clear your mind. Then, after a minute, simply notice your body. What sensations do you have? Is there a pain in your right wrist? Do you have a constant throb in your knee? Is your back sore? Do you have a headache? How do your legs or arms feel touching the fabric? Where is there pressure from gravity? Are your shudders tense? Don’t try to analyze or rationalize. Just notice. Don’t judge. Just be. Now, pick a part of your body that seems particularly needy right now. If you have a chronic injury in one part of your body, that might be a good part to pick. If you’re stomach is growling because you need food (or because, like me, your stomach is where you hold all of your stress) that would be a good part to pick, too. Pick a part of your body that seems to be saying something—and write for fifteen minutes from the perspective of that body part. Don’t overthink this. In fact, try not to think too much about it at all. Just write what the body part is saying about how it is feeling. Be willing to let go of control. Show up, just as you are. Listen. Learn to wrestle. Be okay with imperfect. And let go. If you can 64

learn to do these five things, I think you might just be ready to give up what you should say in exchange for what you need to say. You may just be ready to speak up.

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6 Learning To Speak Up I used to think I didn’t deserve to speak up until I had something smart or insightful to say. Now I know that, if I can speak up in humility, even when my thoughts are incomplete, my words help shape who we are together becoming. There has been a pattern in my life of keeping silent. I thought silence was saving all of us, but of course it wasn’t. Silence didn’t save anything. My husband has been trying to lose weight lately. It’s not a really aggressive approach. He’s not dieting, per se. It’s more lifestyle changes. He’s trying to eat smaller quantities and avoid ordering pizza late at night and, you know, stop before he eats the entire box of cookies. Pretty typical first world, stressed-out, slowing metabolism-because-I’m-30-now type problems. The cool thing is he’s seeing results. He bought a scale and put it in our bathroom and he weighs himself several times a week. His clothes are fitting better. He has more energy. It’s an all-around good thing. The problem is, for me, scales and diets and counting calo66

ries are not a good thing. Not even close. I’m 5’10” and 128 pounds (I know because I just weighed myself) and I don’t need to lose weight. But for some strange reason, when people around me are dieting, I can’t help but join in. I’m not sure if its the competitive nature in me, or if it’s all the magazines and media that have fried my brain into thinking “the thinner, the better!” or if it’s some other kind of quirk or sickness altogether, but every time I hear him celebrate that he’s lost a pound or four pounds or that he only ate a certain number of calories for dinner... I can’t help but feel badly about the number of calories I ate for dinner, or rush to the scale to weigh myself to compare. For the first several weeks he was doing this, I didn’t tell him. I worried that, if I told him, I would squelch his energy and enthusiasm toward eating better and working out and I really didn’t want to do that. I was happy about the changes he was making. I didn’t want him to stop. So why would I tell him something that was going to make him feel badly about it? Here’s why. Because when we choose not to speak up about things, our words become toxic inside of us. According to Miriam Greenspan, when we “suppress, dispel, avoid, deny analyze or distract” ourselves from what we think or feel—rather than being mindful of it—the energy of those thoughts and feelings either gets trapped inside of us as toxic energy, or it finds a means to escape some other way. She goes on to say: “Distract yourself from deep sorrow and it will come back to haunt you. While distraction can stave off feeling overwhelmed by intense emotional energy, it can also suppress a necessary flow of emotion... distracting ourselves from our emotional pain... doesn’t help us get to the root of what ails us.” Speaking up, on the other hand, will get us to the root of what 67

ails us. Speaking up about what we want, feel or need is terrifying because it exposes our weakness and gives others the opportunity to really hurt us. But it is the only way out I’ve found out of the dark woods of silence. Say What You Need To Say I guess the first thing that drew me to writing and blogging was the thought that people would actually listen to me. I always felt invisible in my real life—like I had a hundred things to say but that nobody really wanted me to say them. Or, more accurately, that I just didn’t have the courage to speak up. So I was shocked when I discovered there was a way I could lock myself in my bedroom, where I felt safe, say the things I wanted to say, and then just allow people to come read as they so desired. I was even more shocked to discover people would actually come. And comment. And share with their friends. So the start of my career as a writer was really 100% selfish, if I’m being honest. It was all about me. I didn’t care about a reader, wasn’t even thinking about an audience. All I was concerned about was saying the things I wanted and needed to say. This isn’t all a bad thing. In fact, I think this is all part of the process. I don’t know if there is a way to get to selflessness without first being selfish. Think of babies. They come out screaming and crying for what they need, the center of their own little universe. Eventually, they grow into people who hopefully learn to empathize with others, to reach out, to see the impact they’re having on the world as a whole. But that’s not the way they start. That’s where they’re headed. And the screaming-crying, all-about-me stage is all part of the process. But at the same time, the more attuned we can be to our own 68

process, the more intentional we can be about it, the more likely we are to reach a level of maturity as people and as writers. This process, in my experience, goes in order. It had a cyclical nature to it. It repeats itself over and over and over again. We learn to be present with ourselves, to listen to what our bodies are saying (not necessarily our minds), we are willing to wrestle with it, to see it as imperfect, to let go of control, and then we are ready to put it out into the world. So often we get this backwards. We speak up before we’ve done the work that comes beforehand—not the work of perfecting, but the work of surrendering. Showing up. Listening. Fighting through it all. Those who have walked this journey know: this is where our message comes from. This is how we know what we need to say. If we want to experience the intrinsic benefits of writing I’m talking about, if we want our words to really make a difference in our own lives or the lives of those around us, we can’t ignore the steps that come before speaking up—being present, listening to ourselves, wrestling through a problem, learning to see it as nuanced, and letting go of control. This process readies us for what comes when we speak our minds. It readies us to receive criticism with wisdom and grace. It readies us to admit our own part in all of this—our anger, our grief, our fear. It readies us to get into the ring, to be a part of our own messy story. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process. But the process is worth it. I’ve seen this to be true over and over again. Owning Our Stories After a week or so of stopping myself and feeling scared by what my husband might say, I finally decided to speak up. I had 69

spent a lot of time, privately, working through my fear, so when I finally talked to him it wouldn’t seem like I was asking him to hold it. I was present with myself, and listened, and felt humbled by my own part in this—the lack of control I felt over this area of my life. But I also let go of control and gave myself permission to be imperfect. After all of that, I finally felt ready to speak up. I prefaced the conversation by saying I wasn’t asking him to change what he was doing, but that I wanted him to know what was going on with me. I told him I still wasn’t sure where these feelings were coming from, but that every time he shared his weight loss victories with me, I felt an ache inside. I told him how I had been weighing myself at night and in the morning, right along with him, and counting calories like he had. I admitted how crazy this was—I really don’t have weight to lose—but that it was easy to make it an obsession. And the moment I finished telling him the story, I felt something shift. I don’t want to oversimplify and say, “all I had to do was say it out loud and everything changed!” But the truth is when I spoke up about what I was feeling, there was a tangible shift in my personal energy. I gained a little bit more confidence in that moment, a little accountability, a little dignity from telling my story. I became a little bit more myself. The best part of all of it is my husband didn’t react like I feared he would. Part of this is how I presented the information to him: my tone wasn’t blaming or angry. I reminded him several times that I wasn’t asking him to change. I shared vulnerably about my hurt and my fear. And his response was really positive. It wasn’t defensiveness. It wasn’t a desperate need to “fix” the problem—by giving up the weight loss process himself. Instead, it was a tender understanding of who I was and what I felt. 70

It wasn’t because he saw me that I became myself in that moment. It was because I became myself that he could see me. And being seen felt really good. We think we can protect people if we don’t speak up. Or at least this is what so often keeps me silent. I think I can protect myself from the pain of ridicule when I have an idea that doesn’t work, or that I can protect others from the pain of discovering the impact of their words or actions. I buy into the lie that ignorance is bliss and would rather live in that ignorance than invite any of us out into the light. But ignorance is never as blissful as it seems, and keeping quiet might protect us from blame or ridicule, but it also keeps us trapped in our own miserable prison of silence. And yet speaking up is not always glamorous. When we decide to speak up, we are choosing to join the ring, to get into the mess of things. When we choose to speak up, we’re choosing to throw our weight around a little, to stick our elbows out and make room for ourselves. This means we have skin in the game. We can’t speak up without having any skin in the game. Speaking up means we might be wrong. It means we might be right, but we might have said it in the wrong way. It means admitting we only know part of the story. When we speak up, we are inviting criticism. We can’t speak up without expecting people are going to respond—and they get to choose how they do that. We have to ask ourselves: Are we ready? Are we strong enough? What if my husband had responded to me with anger or criticism or frustration or fear of his own? That would be his choice. Could I have held onto myself anyway? Could I have held my story and let him hold his? When we throw our voices into the silence, we have 71

to know our voices won’t be the only ones there. The world is filled with voices. Is there room enough for all of us? Can we hold onto our own story, in spite of everyone else? I think we can. I believe we can. But not without being ready. Not until we’ve learned to show up, to listen to ourselves, to wrestle through problems, to be willing to be imperfect. Not until we learn to let go of control. Something profound is happening to me as I’m learning to own my own story without asking others to own it for me. I’m discovering I’m stronger and more unique than I ever imagined. I’m discovering there is room for me. I’m beginning to see how my thoughts and ideas and opinions aren’t nearly as important to the world as my voice is—the words and images and stories that make up who I am. Something To Try: Tell The Story Of Your Opinion I was editing a short eBook by one of my clients and there was one particular part I found to be really off-putting. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but as I read the words I just felt disconnected from the author, like there was a thickness between him and me. It could have been the subject matter, I told myself, since I happened to disagree with what he was saying, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. I often read articles I disagree with but can still admit they are well-written. It was something else. So I asked the author if he could meet with me over the phone or Skype and I told him what I was sensing. I tried to be sensitive to the fact that I disagreed with what he was saying and reiterated several times that I wasn’t trying to get him to change his mind. I just wanted him to “show up” for the reader. 72

Then I had an idea. I asked him to tell me the story of this opinion. He looked at my blankly. “This seems like something really personal to you,” I said. “You feel really passionately about it, I can tell. Where did that start? How does this issue impact you personally?” When I asked that, he squirmed a little and looked away from the camera. “You don’t have to tell me what just happened right there,” I said. “But whatever it was, write that.” I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable by forcing him to process with me right then and there, but I asked him if he felt like he could stay present with that feeling, as uncomfortable as it was. I asked him if he could listen to what the feeling was telling him, if he could wrestle with it a little, if he could give himself permission to be a mix of both good and bad, and if he could let go of control for long enough to get it on paper. “I’ll try,” he said. “That’s all you can do,” I told him. When he sent the revisions to me, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was like a different writer had written the same section. Suddenly, the parts which had seemed so off-putting to me before were the exact parts that invited me into his story. The part that had made me feel he was putting himself above me—“I have it figured out and someday you can have it figured out too”—was the part that now made me feel like we were connected in some inexplicable way. It was the part that made me feel a little less lonely, a little more confident. It was the part that made me want to keep showing up for myself, listening, learning to wrestle, admitting my own shortcomings and letting go of control so I could speak my own story as well. His voice came through so clearly in that section now. It was 73

really beautiful because he is a beautiful person and it made me feel beautiful right along with him. It’s so tempting as writers to posture ourselves in a way that makes it seem like we have all the answers. We write top ten lists. We give advice. We package things in a way that promises to solve a whole bunch of problems. We speak up before we really know what we want to say. And I can see why the temptation is so great. You can sell a million copies of your book without ever doing any of the hard work of writing. You can hire a writer. You can buy your way onto the New York Times Bestseller list. But if we do all of this at the expense of the process—without showing up, without listening, without learning to wrestle, etc, etc—I think we miss the most valuable aspect of writing, the part of us that changes when we commit ourselves to the process. Worse than that, I think the world misses out on us. Authentic voices are not the loudest voices in the room, necessarily. They aren’t always the ones to garner the most attention. But authentic voices, in my opinion, are grown over time, by people who are willing to do the hard work of showing up to the page, listening to themselves, wrestling with what they hear, seeing themselves as nuanced and letting go of control for long enough to speak what’s in their heart. If you’re not sure this is you, don’t panic. Authentic voices are not born. They’re developed. They are not predestined. We grow into them, the same way we grow into ourselves. If this is something you want to practice, try doing what I recommended the author do that day: First, consider a topic really close to your heart. Maybe it’s adoption, maybe it’s women in leadership, maybe it’s marriage or relationships, maybe it’s sexuality. I don’t know. Whatever it is, consider what you might say if you were given a platform to say whatever you wanted. Give yourself permission 74

to write for a few minutes—to show up to the page, to listen to what your body is telling you, to wrestle, to be both right and wrong, to let go of control and to speak up. After you’ve written for a little while, go back and read what you wrote. What do you think? What emotions do you find expressed there? Is there anger? Fear? Grief? Now, ask yourself this question: what is the story of these emotions? Where did the fear come from? What about the anger? What is the anger about? Now, for another 30 minutes or so, write the story of those emotions. You can allow your body to speak for you if that’s helpful (see the exercise from chapter 5), or you can just tell the story of their origin. What is their starting point? If you’re anything like me, you’ll feel tremendous resistance at this point. This is the same resistance the author from the story above felt when I asked him to think about the story of his emotions on our Skype call. But I’ll ask you to try the same thing I asked him to try that day. Stay present with the feeling. Don’t push it away. Listen to what it is telling you. Wrestle with it for awhile, without trying to come to a “right” answer. Let go of what you think you should write and just write what’s in your heart. If you can do that, I think you’ll find yourself becoming a writer. I think you might just begin to uncover your authentic self. I think you might learn how to connect, in a powerful way, with your reader. We might even become something beautiful, together.

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7 Learning To Connect With An Audience Writing is not about you and it’s not about your audience. Writing is about the connection that happens when we find a way to reach out for another without losing ourselves. My dad is a psychologist. People always want to know what it was like to grow up with a psychologist for a dad—“did he psychoanalyze you?” “Did you ever have him interpret your dreams?”— and I always say it was pretty much like growing up with any other kind of dad. He just happens to be a really great listener, and give really good advice. One of the pieces of advice he has reiterated to me my whole life is that, when it comes to just about any problem we face in life, there are Three Big Ideas which help to point us in the right direction. These Three Big Ideas, according to my dad, are prerequisites to healthy relationships, healthy living and a healthy sense of self. They are also prerequisites, I would argue, to great writing. The Three Big Ideas go like this: 1. Differentiation—the ability to know oneself and be one76

self, different from those around me 2. Attachment—the ability to be attached to those around me, to flex to fit with them, even though I’m different 3. Transcendence—the state of being that occurs on each rare occasion when the first two ideas are in perfect balance. Let me see if I can give an example of this. I am a morning person and my husband is not. If it were up to me, we would go to bed at 9:00 every night, wake up at 5:00 every morning and enjoy watching the day come alive together. If it were up to my husband, we would burn the midnight oil, tap into the late-night creative energy, work until midnight or 1:00 in the morning and wake up late morning sometime, whenever our bodies felt like we were done sleeping. We’ve bounced around between these schedules, trying to figure out something that works for the two of us. Sometimes he comes to bed early with me or I stay up late with him (attachment), sometimes I go to bed early and he comes to bed whenever he is ready (differentiation). But as we’ve fluctuated back and forth between differentiation and attachment, we’ve also missed each other. We just haven’t been able to find a rhythm and balance that works well for both of us (transcendence). The other night, at around 2:00am, he came into our room where I was already sleeping. He leaned down on my side of the bed and whispered, “Hey, there’s a lightning storm happening outside right now. Do you want to come watch it with me?” Silently and sleepily, I rose from bed and came into the living room where every few seconds, the room would explode with light. I sat at the table for a few minutes and then went to the freezer where I knew there was a pint of our favorite ice cream. I grabbed it, along with two spoons and returned to my spot at the table. There were very few words spoken that night. We just sat at 77

the kitchen table, at a time that felt too early for me and probably too late for him, but we spooned the ice cream in a sort of silent agreement. He asked. I responded. We both moved to the middle and for the smallest moment, we found transcendence. I’ve held onto that memory all week—as our lives take us separate directions and we can’t seem to agree on an appropriate bedtime and we feel disconnected. That small moment of transcendence—something as simple as a lightning storm—has kept me waiting, kept me hoping, kept me holding onto myself and reaching out for him. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it because that moment of transcendence is so powerful, because I hope we can make another moment like that happen again. Transcendence can’t happen all the time. But it is what we work for, it’s what we strive for—by holding onto ourselves while reaching out for the other. You might be wondering: what on earth does this have to do with writing? Great question. When it comes to writing and finding ourselves, I think we have to strive for the kind of balance I’m talking about here. We have to hold onto ourselves. In other words, there have to be spaces and places that are, creatively speaking, just for us. We have to get private and allow our minds to wander. We have to give ourselves permission to feel what we feel and to follow the trail of those feelings to hear what they have to say. Then, one day, after all of that has happened, and as soon as we feel ready, we zoom out from ourselves and take a look at the whole picture. We ask ourselves: where is a reader going to connect with this? How can I support the reader? How can I bring them along with me on my journey? This is the attachment. How can I reach out to my reader and make sure they feel connected and attached? 78

The balance is tricky. It’s like a teeter-totter. If the weight is heavier on one side than it is on the other, the balance is going to be thrown off. If we are more differentiated than attached—more concerned about ourselves than we are about others—our writing will read as self-centered and detached. If we were more attached than differentiated—if we’re thinking about the reader without first doing the work ourselves, the writing will sound hollow and impersonal. And any time one person shifts their weight—anytime there’s a change in circumstance or environment—the weight changes and we have to seek that balance all over again. This is a lifelong task—working to achieve just a moment of balance, of transcendence. This is the work of our life, whether in our relationships or our writing. This is what it takes to know ourselves. We show up, just as we are. We listen. We wrestle. We let go of control. We speak up. But even after we’ve done all that, what does it matter without transcendence? What does it matter if we don’t connect with someone else? Finding The Balance When it comes to writing, people always say, “the best authors don’t write for themselves. They write for an audience,” but I don’t know, I’m still wrestling with this advice. I mean, I understand the gist of it. Any book that has moved a group of people has had a strong appeal to an audience. This is why Harry Potter became a world-wide sensation, it’s why selfhelp books (even really bad ones) sell faster than Tickle-Me-Elmo on Black Friday; and it’s why memoirs (even really good ones) are called a “tough sell” in publishing. It’s because at the end of the day, no one really cares about your story. 79

It sounds harsh to say it that way but it’s true. Every marketing person worth his or her weight will tell you: people, for the most part, don’t buy books because they want to read your story. They buy books because they want to be entertained, get skinny, improve their marriage, etc, etc. You get the drill. And yet, part of my problem with this advice is that the best authors I know aren’t necessarily writing for a huge audience. Take The Shack, for example, by William Paul Young. He didn’t write this book for a wide audience. In fact, he wrote the book for his children. He had fairly narrow intentions: “I’m going to teach my kids about the Holy Spirit”. And yet the book had wide appeal. The same is true for Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller. The book is an incredibly personal faith journey—the struggle of it, the questions, the wrestling—and yet millions of people saw themselves in that story. It gave a whole generation of people permission to change the way they think and talk about their faith. I could go on. Wild by Cheryl Strayed. Eat. Pray. Love. by Elizabeth Gilbert. A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Anything written by Anne Lamott. These are some of my favorite authors and stories. They’ve sold, collectively and even individually, millions of copies. And yet I can’t imagine any of these authors sitting down to the page and asking themselves, “What does my audience really need to hear? What’s their felt need?” My guess is most writers—not all of them, necessarily, but many of them—sit down to the page focused mostly on themselves. Eventually, an author does have to think about their audience, partly because their publisher makes them and partly because they really do care about their book moving beyond themselves. But thinking about your audience too soon, if you ask me, can derail you. If you’re too attached to what your audience needs, what they think, what they might say—you’ll lose yourself. 80

The Stage Fright Effect A friend of mine has a daughter who is about five. Five years old is such a beautiful age, if you ask me. Five-year-olds are in this perfect balance—still entrenched in the oblivion of childhood and yet teetering on the brink of adulthood. Not “adulthood” in the sense that they’re about to be asked to prom, but in the sense that they’re just about to realize what it means to be seen—that they are not alone in the world, that their actions have an impact on others. Anyway, my friend’s daughter is in this phase and I love watching her. Sometimes she’ll be sitting at her little Fisher Price table, brushing the hair of her dolls or coloring a picture. She’ll be talking to herself, or sometimes singing, and then suddenly she’ll stop. She’ll look over her shoulder, realize her mom and I are admiring her, and then she’ll be silent. This is a five-year-old’s first realization she is supposed to hide herself. One night I was over at their house for dinner and, after we finished eating, this precious little five-year-old made her way to the living room and turned on the TV. I’m not sure what she was watching, but whatever it was, there was music playing in the background. Before I knew it, she started dancing. I don’t mean be-bopping her head to the music, like you or I would tend to do (you know, keeping it cool). I mean full-out, hip-swinging, body-moving, arm-flailing, dancing. I saw this out of the corner of my eye, and of course, grabbed my cell phone, intent on taking a video. I tried to be sneaky about it, so she wouldn’t see. But the minute she saw movement out of the corner of her eye, she stopped. She saw the camera and ran back to the couch, where she hid under her blanket and giggled. She realized she was being watched and she no longer felt the 81

freedom to dance. I realize not every child would react like this. I’ve also met children (future MTV stars, I’m sure) who looove being in front of a camera. A camera comes out and they come alive—hamming it up and telling jokes and doing weird stuff to get attention. I suppose you could argue these children are hiding in their own way. They’re hiding behind humor and showboating and their ability to make people laugh. We all have our tactics. My point is this: each of us, in our way, changes when we realize we’re being watched. Maybe when you realize you’re being watched, you respond like my friend’s little girl does—you run hide under your blanket on the couch. Maybe, instead, you’re like the kid who sticks his tongue out in front of the camera and tries to make fart noises with his armpit. Whatever “kid” you are, if you ask me, you will find yourself—your most authentic voice—in private. You are your most authentic you when no one is around to listen, no one is around to take pictures. This is where you really meet yourself. This, I suppose, is why becoming a better writer, and discovering my unique voice, has been such a process. First, I have to get private. I have to choose not to care about what anyone else would say. I have to follow my bliss. I have to brain dump, write my feelings, get the words on paper. Then, I have to forget about myself for a second and reach out to connect to my audience. If I do this enough times—over and over again—I find transcendence. It isn’t about me, or about them. It is about us both. Eventually, I did get my friend’s little girl to dance for the camera. I explained to her how cute I thought her dancing was, and at one point, I even agreed to dance with her. She learned a little bit more about herself in that moment and so did I. We both let loose. 82

We made a beautiful connection. But that connection couldn’t have happened if she hadn’t shown herself to me—her true self, if we hadn’t both let go of control and allowed ourselves to be imperfect, if we both hadn’t reached out for each other while holding onto ourselves. The truth is, you have to think about your audience at some point. If you don’t, your writing will fall flat. It will feel dull and meaningless, or dramatic and detached. It probably won’t ever make it past your journal. But if you ask me, great writing happens when you think about yourself, first and others, second. If you try to think about your audience first, you’ll be like my friend’s little girl, who wants to dance and flail her arms around to the music, but can’t quite get over the camera. Great writing is not about your audience. It’s not about you. It’s about reaching out for one while holding onto the other. Eventually, if we do this long enough, we will find the magic of transcendence. Something To Try: Getting Private Like I’ve mentioned, I work with authors on a daily basis and one of the most difficult parts of the coaching process is helping them understand how to connect authentically with their audience. Inevitably, no matter how much I talk about balance, and the fact that this is a lifelong process, it always ends up sounding like I’m contradicting myself. “So, you’re saying it’s not about me, but it is about me?” they wonder. Or, “You just said it’s not about my audience, but now you’re asking me to think about my audience. I’m confused.” I understand the confusion. We start the whole coaching process by talking about where they’ve come from and what they’ve 83

experienced. I explain how this is where messages are born. I tell them to write like no one is watching, to be careful of their inner critic, and to focus on what they know and what they want. Then, the very next week, we touch on audience. When we talk about audience, I stress how important it is to know our audience—that knowing our audience helps us to know ourselves. I explain how balancing what we know about ourselves with what we know about our audience brings our message to life in a really exciting way. I tell them not to get too attached to anything we come up with in those conversations, to give permission for this to evolve over time. I try to speak encouragement and confidence into them, the way I did that night with my friend’s little girl. “It’s really cute!” becomes, “Who you are matters. We want to see you. You’re so fun and smart and wonderful when you’re acting like yourself.” But no matter how careful I am about these conversations, it’s always messy. This is normal. This is part of the process. These conversations cause insecurities to flare and writers begin to wonder, “do I even have an audience—and even if I do, why should I care?” Something I encourage them to try when I can tell they are losing their equilibrium, is to just get private with their writing again. I tell them to get rid of the proverbial cameras, to turn off the noise, to ignore the voices and to just lean in. I tell them to explore the intention I was given in chapter 2—yourself first, others second. Write for yourself now and others later, I tell them. We can have conversations about audience until we’re blue in the face, but at some point, we have to get private with our writing again. For me, this is mostly a brain trick. I like to get up and write early in the morning because that is a time of day when everyone 84

else is sleeping. I know some writers who like to stay up late at night for the same reason. Sometimes, this means escaping to a place—a part of town, or another city—where I can feel anonymous. Sometimes it means writing in a journal, instead of on my computer. Sometimes it means putting in headphones and listening to music that can transport me to another place. Whatever it is, I have to find a way to get private with my writing (differentiation) so I can eventually take it to public (attachment) and hopefully connect in an authentic way to my reader (transcendence). And above all, I remind writers to be gentle with themselves in the process. After all, they’re showing up—just them. They’re here. They’re listening. They’re wrestling. They’re not trying to be perfect. They’re just letting go of control and speaking their heart and trying to connect with their audience. None of this is easy. None of it is clearly defined. None of it is perfectly safe or guaranteed to have a positive outcome. But somewhere in the midst of the struggle and the mess, they’re uncovering themselves and why they matter. Slowly but surely, moments of transcendence are coming. What could possibly be better than that?

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8 Learning To Rest & Play Most of us think work comes first, rest come second. Rest is the reward for a job well done. But what if rest and play are the starting place, rather than the ending place? What if play is the place where we become. When I finished writing Packing Light, I thought the hard part was over. I’d labored over the manuscript for more than a year—drafting, writing, editing, revising, more drafting. So when it finally went to print, I breathed a big sigh of relief. I could finally have my life back. The hard part was done. Now I could just coast and watch the sales ranking go up on Amazon; lean back and wait for all of the praise and affirmation to rush in. Here’s the funny thing I learned in the next few weeks: launching a book doesn’t work like this. In fact, if I wanted to sell any copies of my book, I was going to have to keep writing articles, keep creating ad copy, keep publishing blog posts, keeping taking speaking engagements. This wasn’t the easy part of the process. It was the hard part. This was crunch time. This was a time that could determine the rest of my career as a writer. The only advantage I had over some86

one who was already established as an author, I figured, was that I was willing to work harder and faster and longer hours than they would. In the month after my book released, I wrote nearly 150,000 words—more than double the total of my entire book. I had no boundaries around my “work” time in my life, and I would take literally any opportunity that came my way. My days, weeks, mornings, nights and weekends were consumed with work. I ordered my entire day around radio interviews, spent hours developing blog content, stayed up late responding to comments, and would drive across the country for speaking engagements—even if they couldn’t pay me any money. It’s no surprise to me, reading this now, that about seven months after the book released, I’d completely burnt out. My life was all output and no input. I hated writing. Despised it. Even the thought of getting up in the morning to write made me feel like I was going to rip all of my hair out. I started to feel angry and resentful of the work which at one point had been my dream job. I felt depressed and anxious. Something had to change. Finally, I took a whole month off from blogging. This was the first time I had taken time off from blogging in almost five years and my hope was that, by taking some time away from the writing space, I could remind myself why I loved it in the first place. My hope was that I could come back at the beginning of the following month and feel re-energized and ready to start again. And while my month off was reenergizing, it wasn’t enough. When I came back, I still couldn’t do it. I was too burned out. Too far gone. The only way I have made it through this season is what Julia Cameron calls Artist Dates. She talks about our creative selves as a 87

“well” and explains how anytime we draw from the well, we have to replenish it. If we don’t, the well will run dry and no matter how many times we reach our buckets down there to get some water, we’ll come up with nothing. That’s how I have felt the past few months—like I’m reaching down into a well and coming up with nothing. The preventative measure, or in my case, cure, Cameron gives for this is basically the equivalent of taking yourself—the artist part of you—on a date. If you think about the “artist” in you (the delicate, vulnerable, creative part of you) as separate from your everyday self—and if you think about what you would do to really honor and care for that part of yourself—if you were going to take him or her on a “date” what would you do? It took me a long time to get to the place where I could give myself permission to take the time for an Artist Date. Every time I would consider doing it, my mind would race with all the things still left undone and all the people who were ahead of me and fears how I would never “make it” if I didn’t work harder and faster and longer than them. At some point, I had to come the realization that the opposite was really true. I’d never make it if I didn’t take care of myself in this way. When all is said and done—when we’ve show up for ourselves and others, we’ve listened, we’ve fought the battle, we’ve let go of control, we’ve allowed ourselves to be imperfect, we’ve spoken up and connected with our audience, we discover what we should have seen all along: None of this would have been possible without what we learned to do long before we learned what it took to be great writers—to sleep, to eat, to explore, to notice, to touch, to taste, to feel, to rest and to play. 88

Something To Try: Artist Dates For a minute, just think about the concept of a date. A date is a special time that is set aside to do something unique, something thoughtful, something that creates a connection between you and another person. Have you lost connection with your creative self? How can you reconnect with him/her? If you were to plan a special date for this creative part of you, what would that look like? What would be special for your artist self? How could you incorporate an element of surprise or awe? Remember this part of you—the creative part—is the curious part. This is the part that loves to explore new places, to go on adventures, to experience pleasure, to linger and to use all her senses. This part of you doesn’t just want a cup of coffee. She wants the best cup of coffee in town. She wants the vanilla latte you never allow yourself to get. She wants to smell it, to taste it, to sip it and not gulp it. She wants to linger for a long time. Artist Dates don’t have to be a lot of money. They can be simple. When my husband and I were first married, we would go on dates to Costco. We would try all the samples, wander down the aisles to see all the new products, we would check out the TVs and stereo systems we couldn’t afford. Then we would get hot dogs and soda for $1.50. It wasn’t expensive or elaborate. But it was adventurous and fun and gave us a chance to connect with each other. Think of your artist dates like this. Not expensive or elaborate. But adventurous and thoughtful. Just a chance to re-connect with your inner artist. One thing I love to do for artist dates is go to Whole Foods. I don’t shop at Whole Foods on a weekly basis but I love eating lunch or dinner in their prepared foods section and I love looking at all the soaps and shampoos and natural cosmetic products. So 89

every once in a while I’ll take myself to Whole Foods and just give myself permission to smell, taste, touch, see and even listen. It’s not elaborate or expensive. Most of the time I don’t even buy anything. But it’s exactly what I need to wake up my senses, to be gentle with myself, to give myself permission to feel something again. If we’re ever going to become ourselves, as people and as writers—if we’re ever going to discover our voices—we must give up the idea that rest and play, wonder and exploration, entertainment and adventure come after we work, that they are a reward for a job well done. Instead, we must see them as a prerequisite, a foundation, the fuel we need to sustain ourselves and the raw material we use to create what we are building.

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9 Learning To Hope I used to be waiting for my “big break,” for that moment I would feel like I had finally made it. Now I know there is no such thing as a “big break”. The journey is the reward. If you would have asked me five years ago, I would have told you the chances of me being able to write a book of my own someday—let alone to publish it, let alone to share it with people beyond just my family and friends—was pretty much slim to none. If it were going to happen, I figured, it would have to happen like this: I would just be minding my own business, writing on my tiny blog like I always did. One day, one of my friends would read what I had written and something about it would interest them. They would share it on their Facebook page. Then, one of their friends would read it and would happen to work for a publisher and they would say to themselves, quietly, “wow, this woman is totally brilliant!” Immediately, they would take my brilliant blog post to their publisher and say, “we can’t wait any longer. We have to contact this girl and give her a book deal.” I’m fairly sure I imagined the CEO himself showing up on my 91

doorstep with a giant check like Publisher’s Clearinghouse and that would be the moment I would know this is what I was meant to do all along. I guess I don’t have to mention that’s not how my writing life has unfolded. Not even close. Instead, my first step toward being a writer was actually doing it. It started because I couldn’t not. Because I had to. Because it was the only way I could cope with the sadness and grief I felt, the only way I could express my anger. I had no intentions of ever sharing it with anyone. I started writing for myself, in a journal, in my private place. That’s where the healing began. I practiced all the time in those early days. I worked in restaurants through college and graduate school and I can remember coming home from work at 2am and grabbing my computer because I just had to get something down. I remember writing long e-mails, or handwritten letters, to my friends because something about writing just felt right. I would go back over them, again and again, almost obsessively, to get them just right. Sometimes while I was working, an idea would come to me and I would print blank receipt paper from the register or scribble something down in my little server notebook. All those ideas back then were just that: ideas. Most of them I can’t remember. But they laid the groundwork for the writer I’ve become. They are like the cement foundation you lay underneath a house. You hardly see it. But what would you do without it? They are what have brought me here. In those days I had no idea who I was as a writer or as a person. I was just feeling my way around in the dark. Then, one day, when I realized there was a desire for my writing to go beyond me, I had to take a step. I had to decide to start a 92

blog, first of all, then I had to decide to put stuff on it—really, really bad stuff. Thank God a publisher didn’t stumble upon it, and if they did, no wonder they ignored it. I needed more time to mature as a person and as a writer. Then, at some point, I took an even bigger step—let’s call it a leap. I didn’t have any idea if I would ever be able to really “make it” as a writer. I hadn’t met any publishers. I hadn’t had anyone tell me—beyond my parents and my friends—that I was good at writing. But at some point, I had to decide writing a book wasn’t really about impressing anyone else. It was about getting my story down on paper. I had to decide the intrinsic rewards were more important than the external ones. I had to decide that, even if it didn’t make me any money, if it never paid my bills, if I would never become famous or be wellknown, I still wanted to do it. I had to decide writing was worth everything. So, I quit my full time job. You can write a book without quitting your full-time job, but for me quitting was symbolic. It was my way of letting go of what was safe and comfortable to prove writing this book—discovering myself and my unique voice—was my first priority. I put my money, my time, my heart-energy and my effort where my mouth was. It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns after that. Not even close. I struggled financially for years. I accepted food stamps. I took public transportation. I sold most of what I owned and could still barely pay my bills. My roommate and best friend at the time was constantly and silently giving me money or clothes or groceries. None of this happened like I thought it would; and on several occasions I wondered to myself if I was doing it wrong. But one of the greatest skills I learned in those days was how to hope. I could never be where I am as a writer or as a person without hope. 93

People think of hope like this bright and shiny word, like a word you use when you want to describe a time when all of the pieces of the puzzle just sort of clicked together. But in my experience, hope is found mostly in dark, dingy times—not bright and shiny ones. The times when we need hope most are the times when nothing makes sense, when the electricity is almost shut off and when it seems like there is no possible way this will ever work. The times we need hope most are the times when hope seems the most ludicrous. Hope is this quiet assurance that no matter how bad things get, we’re going to be okay. Anne Lamott says, “When God is going to do something wonderful, He or She always starts with a hardship; when God is going to do something amazing, He or She always starts with an impossibility.” Hope, to me, is holding onto that. It’s really hard to keep hoping. Some days I feel ready to do it, to keep showing up even when things don’t turn out how I plan, to stay faithful to my writing, even when I don’t see the fruit of my labor. Other days I’m tired, or selfish, or I allow myself to collapse into the fear that my hard work isn’t ever going to pay off. There is nothing shiny or wonderful about this. Hope is horrible, heart-wrenching, back-breaking work. But we’re going to have to learn how to do it if we’re ever going to truly discover ourselves, if we’re ever going to grow into our unique voices as writers. If you feel lost in the woods, as a writer or as a person, hope is the only way to the other side. If you feel like you’re feeling around in the dark, but you don’t really know where you’re going or who you are, hope is like the tiny crack of light that leads you out. You might squint when you see it. It might seem fairly unwelcome. After all, your eyes have adjusted to the dark. But it’s your only chance of survival. Several years ago I somehow found myself running a mara94

thon. It’s one of the stupider things I’ve done in my life and to this day I’m not quite sure how it happened. It was one of those things where you agree to one little thing at a time, just a series of small tasks that don’t seem like a big deal. Then, all of a sudden you find yourself in over your head asking, “Who agreed to this? How did this happen?” That’s how it happened with my marathon. I started running to get in shape after graduate school. I had spent too many nights sitting on my couch writing papers and eating cookies—I don’t need to remind you about the Thin Mints. Plus, I was twenty-five, which I’m convinced is the magic age when your metabolism suddenly decides it wants to slow down, so I had put on a good 40 pounds in just a little over a year. I wasn’t exactly feeling my best. To make matters worse, I had booked a big “hooray-for-finishing-graduate-school” trip for myself to hike Machu Picchu in Peru. A few friends of my guy friends had agreed to go with me— three of them—and they were each in incredible shape. They were the kind of guys who go hiking and rock climbing every weekend; meanwhile I would get winded when I walked up the half-flight of stairs to my apartment. I was going to have to get into shape if I didn’t want to get left behind in the middle of the Amazon. So I decided to run a marathon to get in shape. I have no idea how this idea calculated as a logical choice in my mind, but for some reason it did. I looked up “couch to marathon” online and found a training program and started following it. I lived in Northwest Portland at the time which is about 20 blocks up from the waterfront. So when I first started, I would run downhill to the river, which was about a mile, and then walk back to my apartment. I’d be huffing and puffing when I got home and would reward myself with chocolate milk. Slowly over time I built up my mileage. I kept doing this for 95

several months until I could finally run 10 miles without stopping. I felt like I was on top of the world. There was no way I was getting left behind. I was a freaking Amazon woman. Finally, the day of the marathon came and I was a nervous wreck. I was running with my little sister, who is by far a better runner than me. She was hopeful we would finish in four hours. I was hopeful we would finish without dying. For the first six miles of the race, I was having fun. In fact, I was the eternal optimist, feeling like nothing could possibly stop us now, talking and catching up with my sister and explaining the strategies we should employ when we were tired later on. We ran and ran and ran. Twelve miles into the race I still felt pretty good. My family showed up on the sidelines, we waved, and they cheered. We can totally do this, I thought to myself. See, now, you would think this was hope—that little bit of happy self-talk you give to yourself along the way when things are going pretty well—but I’m not so sure. At this point in the race, you hardly need hope. You’re still thinking clearly and feeling pretty good and relying on your own strength for everything. Eighteen miles into the run, we ran up a huge hill, which looked daunting from the bottom, but we coached each other up, reminding ourselves to take one step at a time. At the top, we celebrated our accomplishment, but also, my legs were starting to cramp. I was tired and out of breath. This is the first moment in the race when I wondered if I was going to be able finish. This was the first part of the race when hope had to kick in. When my sense of certainty ran out, when I couldn’t fathom how my body was going to hold up, when I no longer had an explanation for how this was going to happen—these are the moments when hope grows. 96

At mile twenty, a dear friend met us and jumped in the race with us for about few minutes. She was all fresh-faced and happy and telling us how amazing we were and that we were doing great. I think I managed to grunt at her, but I can’t remember. We kept running, and running, and running. At twenty-one miles, things got worse. My legs were cramping so badly now, it was hard to keep moving. People had told me about this part of the race. They’d called it “hitting a wall” but never in a million years did I consider that metaphor would feel so literally true. Actually, I think hitting an actual wall might have felt better than that. Hope, at this point in the race, was ludicrous. But at the same time, it couldn’t have been more necessary. How could I possibly finish this race? I could hardly walk, let alone run. A woman ran by in a bright pink hat and stopped briefly because she noticed my struggle. She was at least twice my age and she was moving along at a totally remarkable pace. Compared to me, she looked like she had just stepped out of a beauty pageant. She handed me a small packet of salt and said, “take this—it will help.” Then, she sped off. After she left, I turned to my sister. “What do you think she means by, ‘take this’?” I asked. “I think she means you’re supposed to eat it.” This made no sense to me at all, but at that point all logic had gone out the window and I was desperate. So I ate it and pretended I was eating french fries and kept running. My sister encouraged me to take slow, steady breaths. We ran, and ran, and ran. Finally, at about mile twenty-five, the salt kicked in and I could practically see the finish line. People lined the streets holding signs and—even though only a few of them were for us—that’s 97

not how it felt. It felt like all these thousands of people were throwing me a giant party—me personally. They weren’t, of course, but that didn’t matter. Because suddenly I realized this was going to happen. I was going to finish. If you had asked me a few miles prior to this, I would have told you this was impossible. And to be honest, I’m still not exactly sure how it happened. But I just kept coaching myself through the last .2 miles the way I had been through the first 26. Take deep breaths... You’ve got this... One step at a time... When I finally crossed the finish line, I started crying. These are the moments when hope is grown, when you have no idea how what just happened, happened. When you’re certain something beyond you just carried you. When you have hundreds of steps left to take, but you’re only sure you can take one. Sometimes just one step is enough. This is the kind of hope we need to cultivate if we’re ever going to “make it” as people and as writers. Because if we think all we have to do is take a risk, all we have to do is work harder than everyone else, all we have to do is follow a list of instructions and the reward will be handed us, we’re in for some disappointment. Your big break is not coming. There is no such thing as a big break. The journey is the reward. There are no guarantees you’ll write a bestselling book or that you’ll be famous or that a million people will care about what you have written. But that doesn’t matter. The reward is who you are becoming. The hardest part about me helping you become a better writer is that I can’t do the hoping for you. You’ll have to learn to do that yourself. I know that probably isn’t what you want to hear. You’d rather me say, “just follow these 10 easy steps—that’s right, only 10 STEPS—and you’ll become the writer you never dreamed you 98

could be. (Three months or your money back).” But I don’t have any ultimatums or guarantees like that. What I can do for you is what my sister did for me. I can remind you to breathe and to take it one step at a time. I can tell you you have what it takes. I can even hand you a salt packet. I can’t do the work for you. I can’t make you keep running, keep committing words to paper. I can’t give you guarantees. I can just tell you it’s worth it. I can tell you there is no feeling in world like crossing the finish line. There is nothing that compares to becoming yourself. Something To Try: Just Keep At It Becoming yourself is not a one-time event. It’s not something we “achieve” or accomplish in our lives, or a place where we arrive. The more we can see this, acknowledge it, admit it, embrace it—the more likely we’ll be to keep hoping, to put one foot in front of the other when we can’t see the finish line, to do what it takes to make it to the end. This book is not a step-by-step process to finding your voice as a writer. But my hope is, after you read these words, you will be more aware of the journey you are on. My hope is you will have more confidence in your ability to navigate this journey safely and with intention. There are days I want to quit. There are days I wonder if any of this is worth it. There are days I worry I’ll work and work and work my whole life and it will be worth nothing. But I’m also learning to trust the process, to keep showing up, to keep listening, to keep wrestling and being imperfect and letting go and reaching out for moments of transcendence. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. Not because of how many books I’ve sold. But because it is changing me. 99

I’m a little more confident these days, a little less lonely. And because at the end of it all, I might not have a bestselling book or a viral post to show for my hard work, but I’ll have hope. And maybe hope is what matters most.

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