How I Stopped Fretting and Started Honoring My Soul

Photo by Fathromi Ramdlon on Pixabay

We have a troubled relationship, writing, and I.

When writing regularly, I see the world in new ways. I draw connections. I notice beauty. I attune to bits of poetry that float through my mind.

Time stalls as I play with word combinations and sentence structures. Discovering new insights sends energy surging through me. My heart glows fiery red, like E.T.’s when his companions return in their spaceship to fetch him.

I am honoring the voice that, since I was a child, has quietly and stubbornly whispered to me: You write to know yourself. You share your writing to be known.

Then, at some point, I drop my writing practice. I abandon my creativity, and I suffer. I begin to feel small, like a snake trying to wriggle out of the skin that no longer fits.

How I block my creativity

For the first dozen years of my career, I was a professional journalist. I was paid to write and edit stories for the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times — stories read by hundreds of thousands of people.

In 2009, I moved into the business world. I worked at Google and Apple for a decade, in corporate communications and environmental sustainability. There, the kind of writing that brings me alive became something I had to make space for outside work hours. Instead of providing my living, it competed with my family, household, and personal obligations.

It usually lost. Writing, the way I come to know myself and make myself known to others, no longer felt justified in the absence of an attached monetary value.

I’d always have simple excuses for stopping. I took writing classes, then let them go. I got caught up in other hobbies. I decided I was too busy.

But when I looked deeper, I found more insidious reasons: I told myself no one would be interested in my ideas. I didn’t feel strong enough to be judged. Or I echoed what someone I loved once told me: Writing is a selfish act that interferes with your responsibilities.

Those voices often outweighed those of the people who supported me — the people who told me I had talent when I was young, who published my stories in newspapers, who welcomed me into writing workshops and encouraged me to keep going.

Once I stopped writing, it was so easy to keep not writing.

I made lists of ideas, then tackled only the easiest, least vulnerable ones. They might have gotten some likes on social media, but they didn’t reveal my heart.

I blocked time on my calendar to write, then gave away that time to clients, friends, or meaningless tasks.

I offered other people feedback on their writing, but didn’t work on my own. It felt less frightening to help other people shine than to let myself be known.

I made excuses. I told myself writing is hard for everyone. I read quotes like this century-old one from Sinclair Lewis:

“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

I blamed the pandemic. I sent friends that New Yorker cartoon about how now is the time to finish your novel … while you row in a storm with sharks and sinking boats all around.

I berated myself. I said, You are a writer, and writers write. So write!

I gave up. I decided I was too lazy, too undisciplined. C’est la vie, fella. Get over it already.

I told myself I needed to read just a little more. Learn just a little more. Live just a little more. Then I’d be ready to create something worthy.

Writing always pulls me back

But then, always, I remember that I don’t need to be ready to create, and I don’t need to decide what’s worthy. I just write, and I see what happens. The act of creating makes me ready to create. The act of creating makes my creation worthy.

To nudge myself into action, I might pluck one of the dozens of books about creativity off my shelf, sign up for a creative writing class, or reintroduce journaling into my morning practice. Sometimes, a walk in nature flares my inspiration.

Inevitably, I start to wriggle out of that too-small snakeskin.

I always find my way back to writing. Or maybe it’s that I open myself up enough to allow writing to find me again.

That’s what’s happening now. I’m sitting in the shade of my front porch, bare feet on the wooden slats, warm MacBook on my thighs, remembering all over again how much I love writing — by doing it.

I’m learning, once more, how to surrender to my heart’s calling.

What cracked me open this time was a call with a business coach in April. He recalled a Steven Pressfield quote:

“The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”

I’d read that quote myself a few years earlier, in “The War of Art,” Pressfield’s lovely little book on pursuing a creative life. I’d written it down in my commonplace journal. But hearing it this time unlocked something new in me.

I realized writing isn’t so hard for me because I’m not suited to it, but precisely because I am. Sitting down to write is the fullest expression I know of my soul’s voice. When I’m writing, I’m honoring that inner voice that tells me — begs me — to write.

That means that when I don’t write, I’m bottling up my soul. When I tell myself I’m not meant to write, I’m letting the least powerful part of me win.

So, I wrote this essay to free my soul.

I hope that by reading it, you will feel the courage to honor that thing your inner voice is begging you to do. I hope you will let your heart glow.

What matters isn’t that you never stop doing what you love. It’s that you keep listening to your calling, and you always come back to it.