(For your amusement: I wrote this the other day right after I wrote my Q post. I was excited to be ahead of the game for a couple of days. I actually posted this for a couple of hours before I thought ‘Wait a second! I missed R, S & T!’ Apparently, I was not fully awake for the first couple of days of this week. :))

Sometimes I wish I were one of those people who awake peaceful and pleasant early in the morning. Instead, left to my own devices, I’m one of those people who wakes up kind of cranky at the latest possible moment I can let myself away with. I am working on this, tweaking my systems to figure out how I can make mornings more pleasant for myself, but I can’t help wishing it just came naturally to bound out of bed with a smiley enthusiasm

One of the reasons that I wish I were a naturally early riser is that I love being awake by myself in the morning. I am often up late by myself, but that is not the same. It’s being up, in the light, with the day ahead of me, that gives me the feeling I’m seeking. Part of it is that it feels like secret, stolen time and I have always loved unexpected pockets of time*, and another part is that I like knowing that all my people are settled and comfy but I’m not needed by them at the moment.

This is the mug (well, cup) in question, delightful, no?

I was up by myself this past Sunday morning and I sank fully into the experience. I made a giant cup of tea, wrote my morning pages  and did a little pre-work for the week (I had decided that I wanted to do a lot of planning this week so I did some extra work on the weekend to take care of the day-to-day so I could focus on the long-term. This was not the success I had hoped it would be.) and I just enjoyed feeling productive and peaceful and letting the words flow out of my brain.
It’s not that I can’t get that feeling at other times but I too often get caught up in what is coming next, in the anticipation of being interrupted by having to pick someone up or make lunch or whatever, and I can’t get right into what I’m doing in the same way.

But it is really terrific when I can be up early, sitting at my table with the light just so and I can feel at peace with my work and with the world and with myself as I just move at my own pace from thing to thing.**
Of course, the key thing I see from creating this post is that I need to figure out how to find that same feeling at other times of the day. Funny how that need to transfer an idea or a skill set keeps coming up, huh? It’s like I said in one of my earlier posts for this series (quoting Fabeku, of course), how you do one thing is how you do everything. That concept has upsides and downsides, but mostly it gives useful information.
*I used to love to get to my university classes a bit early and read or make some notes before everyone else got there. It didn’t happen often but I liked it when it did. And if someone is late for a meeting with me, I love it because everyone else THINKS I’m in a meeting and they won’t interrupt, but I have a few minutes to do WHATEVER I WANT until the other person gets there. It’s exciting.

**That was one of my biggest struggles when my kids were small, I had to do things in the order that made sense for working around them instead of in the order that made the most sense to me. I felt all jittery and interrupted in my work and that is hard on the brain!

I find myself in a bit of a conflict when I consider resistance. I’m not talking about writer’s block* where you feel drawn to write but you just can’t. I’m talking about that sort of situation where you do almost anything to avoid writing and you keep putting it so far down your to do list that you never get to it (or you do a bunch of other things ‘to get them out of the way’ and then (surprise!) you never get to the writing.

My boys drew this for me a few years ago when I was reading Pressfield’s ‘Do the Work’ and asked them for a drawing of me slaying a resistance dragon. I’m pretty sure that cloud is          helping me by sending a lightning bolt. Clearly the universe is on my side. 🙂

One of the first things I ever read about resistance was Steven Pressfield’s War of Art –  about how to get beyond resistance and just do your writing (He has several other books on the same topic). I found it very helpful in letting go of that idea that being a writer was so precious and special that you needed specific conditions in which to write. I felt energized by his words and his approach but the feeling in that book is that you need to fight resistance, you have a battle on your hands, you have to ignore those feelings and forge ahead.

Another perspective, from a lot of life coaches and personal development books,  is that the resistance you are feeling is telling you something, that there is valuable information for you in that feeling. This school of thought is more about identifying what is really going on for you and being kind to yourself about the problem while you work around it/work past it/sometimes give in to it.

Pressfield’s approach has a kind of a violent undertone to it – the language is about toughening up and fighting – which has the motivational impact of a battlecry but doesn’t match my usual experience with creativity. The other has a touchy-feely kind of undertone which I like for its softness and kindness but it puts me at risk of wallowing around in the feelings instead of trying more practical approaches. And while there is a certain amount of ‘different things work for different people’ that needs to be considered here, there is also the fact that I need both of these approaches because I can’t fully buy into either.

Sometimes, I need to just get my butt in the chair and start typing and see what comes out. Other times, I need to explore what’s behind the feeling that I’m having. The challenge is in figuring out which one I need at the moment.

This is where I drag information from another area of my life to apply to this one. As usual, when the problem is figuring out a brain habit, I need to look at the duration and the frequency of the issue. If I’m just annoyed with my writing today, then maybe I need to sit down and see if typing any old crap will help. If I keep having a problem, then maybe I need to have a look at whatever keeps coming up for me.

But, whichever solution I choose, I try not to be mean to myself about it. I try to avoid ‘stories’ about what it means that I’m struggling at the moment, I try to just accept that I am struggling and do what I can to get past it. I have varying success with this of course.**

How do you deal with resistance? Do you power through or do you get all touchy-feely?

*This is not exactly the same as writer’s block. I’m not sure if I have mentioned this before but I don’t really believe in writer’s block, or more so, I don’t exactly believe in calling the problem in question writer’s block. Giving it a big, writerly name gives it a greater weight and it makes it into a THING all its own. I think that takes us further from a solution instead of closer to one.
To be clear, I’m not denying the pain or the challenge that people face when they can’t write at that moment but I hate labeling it writer’s block because of all the connotations. If you say to yourself ‘I have writer’s block’ then it feels like an almost insurmountable problem. If you say ‘I am worried about how people will take this thing I want to write and it is keeping me from starting’ or ‘I am not sure I have done enough research to get this right’ or ‘This is so important to me that I am having trouble getting the words out’ – then those are things that can be worked on, they aren’t a mysterious force that is between you and your creativity.
**‘Just accepting’ doesn’t come natural to me, at all but when I can do it, it’s really helpful.

One of the biggest challenges I have as a re-story-fier* (life coach, to the uninitiated) is to guide people to be kinder to themselves.

And isn’t that the hardest lesson to learn?

It’s often difficult to be kind to other people – especially when they are getting on our nerves, but it is mind-bendingly difficult to be kind to ourselves. It’s like we’re afraid that if we are gentle with ourselves, we’ll somehow slip off into madness and get totally out of control.

Isn’t this quote lovely? I had a poster of the prose poem Desiderata hanging in my room for years.
I think I should get another copy.

We aren’t taught how to be kind to ourselves, either. Instead, we get positive reinforcement – in school, at home, in commercials,and in society in general** for being tough on ourselves, for being unforgiving. We are always being told how to be hard on ourselves, and the messages we get mix up discipline (training ourselves to work in effective ways) with punishment (being hard on ourselves for falling short of our plans).

I know I’m hard on myself that way sometimes, wondering if I am just not trying hard enough, wondering what I’ve done wrong, wondering why I just can’t get it together. The good thing is, though, that because I have spent so much time reminding other people to be kind to themselves, I usually catch myself pretty early.

Because I know how hard this is for all of my clients, I have been working hard to make sure that my kids learn to be kind to themselves. It’s tough to be a kid, there’s a lot of pressure to excel at everything and not so much consideration for kids who want to try things just for fun. It would be easy to get caught up in the swirl and let them pile pressure on themselves for not being enough. I try to stay conscious of it, though, and I remind them of times they can make choices to support themselves, I tell them they are enough just as they are, and I try to give them tools to help them see themselves in a softer light.

Are you kind to yourself? How did you pick up kindness habits?

If you aren’t kind to yourself, do you think you could try it out for a while?

*I call myself a re-story-fier because I like to help people change the stories that they automatically tell themselves about their experiences, so they can cast themselves in a more positive – KINDER- light.

**Don’t even get me started on the fitness inspiration posters that are supposed to be cheering you on, but seem to be really telling you that anything other than Olympic effort is a waste of time.

If you are looking for fabulous stories featuring women, this is a great place to start – Jane Yolen’s Not One Damsel In Distress.

As a storyteller, I like to share myths, folktales, family stories and stories that I made up ‘in my own mad head’ (as my friend Darryl once put it). One common theme in my stories, though, is that the women in my stories are their own people. They aren’t just plot devices, they have their own plans, their own motivations and their own ideas.
When I first started in storytelling, I was a little annoyed by how hard it was to find stories with real women in them instead of placeholders whose only purpose was to motivate the hero or give them information for their quest. Even stories of goddesses seemed to be mostly about the gods they were opposing. It was frustrating, to say the least.
Gradually though, as I learned more about how stories worked, I learned how to find the stories of women AND I learned that if you find one version of a tale that doesn’t quite show the story that you want to tell, you can keep looking because there may be other versions of the same one. I am so determined to portray women as heroines – as people who have their own stories- that I never just accept the first version I hear.*
For example, a few years ago, I was the sacrificial lamb for a story slam** and the theme was ‘Skeletons in the Closet.’ I opted to tell the story of Bluebeard since he had literal skeletons in a literal closet. The story bugged me though because there were two female characters in the crucial moment when Bluebeard discovers that his latest wife has disobeyed his orders not to look in the closet and instead of ganging up on him together, one of the women runs upstairs to look out the window and wish for her brothers to arrive to save her and her sister (the hapless wife).
It didn’t ring true for me. I have two sisters. Trust me, if you cross one of us you are bringing the righteous anger of all three of us down on yourself. I had to use the hapless women version for the slam because it was short notice but when I came home, I immediately looked for other versions of the same story. I found one quickly (Count Silvernose) and that’s the one I tell – and most of the time, I preface it with the story of WHY I chose that version.
There are lots of great stories of heroes, the world is full of those, but I am most interested in telling the stories of heroines (and of female villains, too). The stories of goddesses, witches, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters and female friends are just as important and often have different ideas and wisdom to share than the ones we are most used to hearing. It’s not that I NEVER tell stories with men in them, I tell those too, especially when I am telling family stories, it’s just that stories of women and their adventures are my specialty.
I think it’s really important for everyone to hear those stories, to be reminded that women and girls are agents in their own lives and that they are forces to be reckoned with in the lives of others. Women aren’t prizes for bravery. We aren’t plot devices. We are people with our own stories.
It does the world good to be reminded of that.

*It’s funny, you know,I just realized where that tendency to search for the women actually originated. I studied gender archaeology in university and I was always annoyed by the fact that women were rarely mentioned in the ‘story’ of human social evolution. Men were always the agents of change while women seemly just carried the babies around. I was having none of it – just from a logical point of view, it doesn’t make sense to waste half a work force based on the fact that for part of their lives they have babies – and I began studying the work of feminist scholars. The women were there all along, of course, and feminist scholars had developed the tools to look for them. My MA thesis ended up being about gendered household space amongst the Thule in Labrador.
**Translation: I was the first teller in a five minute storytelling contest and my role was to warm up the judges by getting them to practice their judging skills on me. My totals didn’t count for the contest.