Improve Your Writing Practice with These 3 Non-Negotiables
I get it. Everyone and their mother is talking about self-growth, self-development. And how to live your best life. Meanwhile, you’re out here trying not to spill your coffee on your thrifted J-Crew blouse while you rush to the job you aren’t getting paid enough to do (even though you feel called to it). When all you really want to do is feel more connected to yourself, more fulfilled in who you are, and spend meaningful time in the creative writing practice you’re too drained to show up in.
Call in a mental health day and take a seat with me for a slowly-sipped cup of coffee. You, my friend, are going to want to hear this.
Welcoming You to Your New Favorite Corner of the Internet
When I dreamed up this cozy corner of the internet, I had?you?in mind.
You?know?you’re called to something greater than your inherited belief systems allow you to live into. But don’t know how to un-tell these long-told stories. Hate morning routines almost as much as you hate being encouraged to practice your gratitude. And know imposter syndrome keeps you from writing even though you’ve always found joy and meaning in your creative writing practice.
You and I are women who have kept secret journals since we were in our single digits.
(Anyone else remember that purple, plastic, password journal, or is that just me? ????♀?.)
You have something to say. But don’t know how to permit yourself to say it out loud (even if just to yourself).
As the only girl child of my grandmother’s only girl child, I know a thing or to about the inter-generational healing work of giving voice to silenced, inherited stories (but you can read more about my story here ).
First Thing’s First: Bookmark and Share This Page
Here are three things you can do to improve your relationship to yourself and your creative writing practice so you can feel more connected to your story on the page, and more fulfilled in your life off beyond it.
They’re also the values I’ll abide by every time I write in this cozy corner of the internet. My hope is that The Journal becomes a haven for you as you anchor into your self-worth and claim your identity as a writer. If you feel more encouraged for having hung out here, I so hope you’ll add your e-mail to my pen-pal list so you can get new entires in The Journal as I share ’em and get the exclusive monthly podcast I’m only sharing with my pen-pals.
3 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Writing Practice Now
1. Surround yourself with people who believe in your story
We need to surround ourselves with women who believe in our right to tell our story and hold space for us as we learn to find the words.
I grew up having intimate conversations with my grandma over coffee. These conversations lead me to become a psychotherapist. The experience of being?listened?to all those years during our long talks, coffee in hand, sitting in adjacent chairs at the picture window, made me who I am.?
These conversations allowed me to come to know myself.
As a psychotherapist, my primary responsibility is to hold space for others to tell themselves the truth about how they feel, what they fear, and who they desire to become.
And as a writer, I’m holding space for?myself?to do the same.
The page (whether in my journal or in a piece of writing I intend to publish) is a place where I get radically honest about my lived experience and take the first steps to changing how I think about who I am and relate to what I believe is possible.
We need to surround ourselves with women who believe in our right to tell our story and hold space for us as we learn to find the words. And we need to become that kind of woman for ourselves.
I want to both be that person for you. And invite a space where you can create connections with other women so we can be that for each other. The writing process is something we engage in alone, and also requires community to sustain our identity as writers.
2. Value the time you devote to your writing practice
The first time I dreamt up this haven for women writers on the internet, I’d moved home to help care for my grandmother whose undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease progressed into Lewy Body Dementia – a type of dementia that presents as psychosis. I tried to provide comfort and connection for her as she approached the end of her life, while I finished writing a memoir about my experience being raised by her in my childhood.
(Talk about a full circle moment. I know).
After she’d gone to sleep, the time I had to sit up and write was sacred to me. Sometimes these moments at my writing desk felt like a lifeboat, keeping me afloat in an ocean of grief I had to keep at bay while I responded to the more immediate needs of the situation.
I had re-arranged the bedroom my mother lived in while she and my grandmother raised me with a writing desk, and a wicker chair. And every night I did the following routine: Step 1: Take a shower. Step 2: Read the bible. Step 3: Write. It was only after writing that I found peace enough to sleep – a kind of humbling to the circumstances, to my own powerlessness in them, to the enough-ness of bearing witness.
At that time I wrote with a kind of pressure. Like I had more words inside of me – more feelings to express – than I could get onto the Google Document. But in the years since – after the sale of my childhood home and my grandmother’s passing – my writing has changed.
领英推荐
Sometimes, in the thick of my grief I could only write sentence fragments. Other times, short-hand renderings of scenes I wanted to recall but couldn’t meaningfully describe.
It wasn’t the ‘quality’ of my writing – we an have a discussion about what exactly that means in another Journal entry – but the value in the writing process that committed me to the page. Sometimes, being committed to my writing practice meant laying down in a living room with all of my inherited furniture watching the sunset through my apartment’s living room window. Sometimes, it looked like just being with the feeling of missing home, even when I didn’t have the words.
Tip number two: value the time you dedicate to writing – to engaging in conversation with yourself – and validate whatever this looks like for you.
These entires in The Journal will be a place where we openly talk about the creative process in all of its complexity. Not just the getting-words-down part. But also (and especially) the parts about avoiding writing, thinking your writing isn’t good enough, overcoming imposter syndrome, feeling the uncomfortable feelings, not having the words and finding them in the way you live your life off the page.
3. Recognize the connection between your writing practice and self care
I took an extra semester to complete my course sequence in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College to allow me to both be present with my grandmother, and complete my creative writing with integrity.
This taught me that writing and life need to intersect. I mean – it taught me that writing and life inherently do intersect. And we can either acknowledge this, and work with it. Or deny it and work against it.
Allowing our creative writing process to be a part of our self-care practices is necessary not only so that our writing life can be sustainable. But because doing so honors that the spirit and intent of the writing process – like any creative endeavor – facilitates the creative process of becoming.
And by becoming I mean: coming to terms with our life circumstances; coming to understand our inner life; coming to understand our calling; coming into our own.?
This is where the self-development, mindset stuff comes in.
Because we won’t show up to the page to write – we won’t show up as fully and honestly ourselves – if we don’t believe we are worthy.
And this is not a belief we establish once and for all. But over, and again. Through our daily habits. In the conversations we choose to have. The company we choose to keep. How we let others mirror who we are. And how we recognize who we are called to become.
I’m only sharing these exclusive workshop style podcasts with my pen-pals, so be sure to tell me where you’re accepting e-mail these days so you can get your private podcast delivered to your inbox monthly .
Introducing The Journal
This ,?my friend, is the first of many, many entries in The Journal where I’ll give voice to all of the things we don’t want to admit out loud as women.
Like how we don’t feel enough. Or how uncomfortable we are talking ourselves up. Or the banal ways we are made to feel smaller daily.
And how all of this effects how, and when, and if at all, we show up to write. (And what we give ourselves permission to say when we do).
In The Journal, I’ll share personal development practices that come out of my expertise as a psychotherapist. Sustainable self-care routines. (I know because I’ve co-created with my clients?and?I practice them myself). And creative writing prompts to pair with my e-mail-only workshop-style podcast episodes you can expect monthly when you sign up for my monthly letter.
So you can develop a creative writing practice that is sustainable, and sustaining to your sense of self-worth.
Let’s Keep the Convo Going, Friend!
I’ll be in your inbox each and every month with real-life stories from my work in mental healthcare as a psychotherapist, my process writing my way into my own enough-ness, and establishing the the creative writing practices self-care habits that actually feel good to me.
I co-create this stuff with my clients, practice it myself, and share it with you here.
I mean, you literally can’t get me to shut up about this stuff.
(To all my friends who got ‘talks too much in class’ on their report cards,’ this is your encouragement to keep on talking.)
Ok friend. It’s about that time to re-heat my coffee and get to recording the next e-mail only podcast I told you about.
Remember: you are abundantly worthy. (And if you need a daily reminder, let me be your hype woman. I send audio-msgs to my friends daily. Just tell me where to send ’em! )