It’s okay. You can stop.
Stop resisting failure and stop fighting failure and stop fighting your resistance to failure. All this fighting that adds a whole level of energy-sucking, mood-killing and creativity-busting when you’re trying to express something.
Thinking about failure is a distraction.
So is trying to think positive.
Therefore, you can also stop trying to think positive.
Two sides of the same coin.
You can also forget about star-reaching or being-like ________.
It’s hard to let go of these things, I know that from experience.
You—we—can, however, hold a goal very loosely (or forget it completely).
We can write because we love it. Because it connects us to ourselves—first and foremost.
The words we first write are fertile, but they are also like raw data. Some things are obvious and others need interpreting. So with this raw data of sorts, with the words we have, we can read them and feel them in our bodies. And when we do that we begin to know what fits and what’s uncomfortable and needs to stay, and what’s uncomfortable and needs to go.
Editing from there is a different process altogether.
When we edit we need distance from the work, but not distance from ourselves. We need to be very connected to ourselves during the editing process, and every bit as supportive of ourselves as we are when the words first come pouring out. Carve away the excess that hides the real story—the authentic, the truth–can be so frightening. It’s why so many of us get caught up in how to structure, and thinking we have to have the structure to pour the story into.
No, the story will find its structure and, as you edit, you will refine it.
Being objective doesn’t mean cutting yourself off from yourself. It means not being influenced by personal feelings about what you’ve written—or personal attachments to it.
It’s hard work to have those feelings and judgements, to tolerate them and use them rather than to think someone else, a so-called expert, will tell you how to do it. Getting help is fine, but it’s best done when you are dedicated to honoring your true self first and foremost.
Not perfectly.
But honestly.
Authentically.
Hard work, but the kind of hard work that is driven from one’s interior. The interior can feel overwhelming at times, and diving in can be consuming, but the process of writing is not only about writing, but the processing of all of this. Which is what writing is also about.
—Meredith
Photo by Amanda Jones on Unsplash
