It’s hard to have capacity for all the changes on your plate if you’re beating yourself up all the time.
It’s hard to make room for someone else’s pain if your own mind is busy stabbing you in a tender place.
Some of this mental stabbing comes from brain chemistry, which usually needs to be treated with expert care.
Some of this mental stabbing comes from experienced trauma, which—at this point in our history—we now all share. The degrees differ, and every person’s exact experience is unique. But I haven’t yet met a person who emerged unscathed from the past few years.
But some of this wounding, perpetuated by our own brains, comes from habits made normal by the culture we have inherited.
That’s what I want to speak about.
For example, we writers may speak casually about our “inner editor,” a voice in our heads that tells us what we’re making is terrible or worthless. At best, we may trade techniques on how to shut this voice up long enough to keep on writing in spite of the noise in our heads.
We don’t often speak about how often this cruel voice shows up in other areas of our lives. We rarely mention that many of the writers we grew up reading—including those assigned in our writing classes for their artistic brilliance—struggled with mental health. Quite a few committed suicide. Who has emerged from high school without studying Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or Sylvia Plath?
It is immensely human to want to end pain. I can’t fault anyone for that impulse.
It is however cultural to accept that creativity must be paired with stabbing yourself with your own thoughts—and perhaps other more physically dangerous forms of self-harm.
I challenge that belief. Instead, I encourage an alternative:
Make your mind a nicer place to live.
Commit to retraining your brain’s habits until it’s a safer space for you to inhabit.
Experiment. Use as many modalities as are effective. Allow your creativity to support your emotional wholeness.
Investigate the stories, whether internal or inherited, that are giving your mind a knife to cut you with, and rewrite them until you dull that blade—until it loses its power to cut you.
This quote came from the very first piece I posted on the JourneyPen Project website, way back in March 2020. With everything happening back then, I wouldn’t be surprised if you missed it. I titled the piece “How to Navigate Chaos,” and I’ll link to it here in case you would like to read the rest of it.
Over the past few years, I created the collection that this idea—and the whole piece—belongs inside: “Renewing Capacity” is the theme.
Making your mind a nicer place to live IS one way to renew capacity. You can reinvest the energy you’re losing in self-criticism for something more useful. More here.
As I’ve shared before, I’m speaking to this from my personal experience. I too was immensely hard on myself, and one year, I made it my 2018 New Year’s intention to accept myself. From there, it took a little longer to work up to self-compassion. I talk about that process in this video.
But I recognized the need for self-acceptance in Fall 2017, while I was taking an online writing course. I described that moment in People Are Stories-in-Progress here.
At the time I had that realization, my life was in chaos due to family crisis. In that moment, I didn’t have the time, energy, or capacity to make any actual changes. It wasn’t until a few months later, when the family crisis had settled, that I circled back to it. I got sick, and forced to slow down, I tended my frayed edges and committed to changes. That’s why I make time to integrate experiences—it helps me to respond to a troubling situation by making changes that improve my entire life, not just a part of it. More on integrating here.
“Put down the knife you are holding to your own throat.”
- Elizabeth Gilbert, author of BIG MAGIC and host of Magic Lessons Podcast
