Writer Dame

R is for Resistance

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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.

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.

Q is for Quest

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Even though I am not particularly drawn to adventure, I love the idea of a quest. In fact, I often refer to the most ordinary of errands as a quest (it livens things up to say it that way) The Quest for Bread is much more interesting than ‘running to the supermarket.’

(I suppose this is the part where, despite my love of quests, I confess that I haven’t seen Lord of the Rings. I never heard of the book as a child so I never read it, and I don’t feel particularly drawn to that particular type of fantasy. Even though I read about vampires and the like all the time, I am not so much into wizards and elves type of fantasy. Anyway, I know that that is the quest book of all quest books, but I haven’t gotten there yet.)

I guess the storyteller in me is drawn to the nature of the hero’s journey, the familiar storyline, the knowledge that things are going to be difficult but that there will be growth, there will be a sort of okay at the end. Wouldn’t it be great if we could know that in real life, that no matter what happens things will kind of even out?
Actually, in a way, we can actually be sure of that. Things do have a kind of way of evening out over all, just not for individual people. And, as individual people, we, understandably, resent that. We want it to turn out okay for us, not just for humankind overall. Averaging out won’t help us personally.

That, in turn, kind of makes me think about the panic about the planet and its health. While I wholeheartedly agree that we should be doing more to connect ourselves with nature, and that we need to take better care of the planet as a whole, the issue is not really the planet, it is us. We are making the planet uninhabitable for ourselves. The planet will be fine. If we kill ourselves off with the things we do, everything will grow over, the earth will find a new equilibrium and it will carry on. I wonder how much further we would get with the campaigns if we phrased them that way? I guess climate change deniers would be all ‘I can still breathe fine, there’s nothing wrong here!’
Wow, that’s really getting to the heart of the problem hey? The difference between people who hear of someone else’s issue and respond with compassion and the people who hear of someone else’s issue and run to tell them that they are wrong. I really want to be the first type of person.

Becoming more compassionate is kind of my whole quest in life, really. I don’t mean that I want to let people away with bad things or that I want to become weak, I mean that I want to find a way to have ease when I think of other people.

I can often do that now, but I would like to be even better at it.

How about you? What would you say is your quest in life?

Sunday Stories: Dance. Party.

Sunday is a day off from the A-Z Challenge, but I’m posting Sunday stories to keep up my posting momentum. 

Dance. Party.

She could feel the music pulling her towards the spot in the centre of the floor, where the light was.

Her body wanted to be there, her mind disagreed. Her arms longed to be over her head her hips were swaying, her feet weren’t even really touching the floor. She wouldn’t have been surprised to be look down and see that she was actually floating over the ground. The thought itself was disconcerting, her brain didn’t like it. It rebelled against the whole notion of getting into that circle of light. No matter how much her body wanted to be there, her brain was driving this project and it was keeping her firmly in place.

She wondered what it would be like to be one of those people who rushed in, rushed toward that spotlight. That was never her way, she couldn’t even imagine what that would feel like. To have that freedom. To just do without the weighing in beforehand. To leave the questions out of her brain. To silence that chatter in her skull, to just be open. To have her arms spread towards the light, toward the new.

She didn’t work like that. She was in the small steps, the careful ones. She thought that some time she might like to take ballroom dancing, something where the plan was predictable. Where your body would move in the way you expected it to. You’d get the pleasure of the movement without the challenge of the unpredictable, without the uncertainty. Without the feelings that messed everything up, the ideas that popped up, the sweatiness, the wild eyes, muscles throwing your limbs out in all directions. You wouldn’t take up all the space in the spotlight, sure, it wouldn’t be just you. You wouldn’t have to show everything, all your insides spilling out right there for everyone to see, everything you had hidden.

You couldn’t keep any secrets if you were out there with everything on display. People would know how you could move, they might be able to infer things you wouldn’t want them to know. She knew that she didn’t want to pull up other ideas in people’s minds. She didn’t want to take responsibility for that. She didn’t want them walking through her mind, peering in through all the spaces where she kept the details.

She wanted those for herself.

P is for Performance

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When I was a kid, I hated public speaking with a passion. The idea of getting up to do a speech was absolutely terrifying. Then I took an acting class and discovered that I LOVE performing. It took me a few years to realize that I could use that love of acting to make public speaking easier, but I got there. I don’t remember my process but I eventually got to the point where I could convince myself that I was playing the role of someone who knew about topic X and that my character didn’t mind talking about it at all. Now, I do storytelling and acting and public speaking and I am generally unfazed because I can draw on that sense of creating a character.

My performance from yesterday, a suspect in a mystery game. I was Ava, the administrator for an international arts organization. The guy beside me was ZAP, an artist who worked primarily in olfactory paintings.

My performance from yesterday, a suspect in a mystery game.
I was Ava, the administrator for an international arts organization. The guy beside me was ZAP, an artist who worked primarily in olfactory paintings.

I originally thought that was all there was to it, just drawing on an imagined personality to get me past any worry about how I was coming across* but then I got into doing personality tests and discovered that I was an introvert**. I had always thought of myself as an extrovert because I am pretty outgoing and not at all shy, but when I started to dig into what being an introvert means, I realized that I do get easily burnt out in social situations and need time alone (or almost alone) to recharge. And I am super aware of the emotional temperature of every room that I’m in – that’s a whole separate blog post though!
Anyway, as an introvert, I really like for all the roles in any given situation to be very, very clear***and I especially like to know what roles I am playing. Soooo, when I perform, either as a speaker, storyteller or actor, it is very clear. And, if I am the person in charge of the room (as the performer) then that’s even clearer and I have no problem stepping into that role.
I’ve been trying to use this knowledge of my comfort with being a performer to ease my nervousness in other situations, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it is definitely one of my ‘go-to’ solutions for creating ease for myself whenever possible.
*The really funny thing for me is that if I think too much about my stories or my monologues or anything beforehand I start to freak out a little because I don’t remember the details. HOWEVER, my ‘character’ apparently does because I get up in front of the crowd and slip into that role and the stories and details come pouring out. It doesn’t happen immediately upon hearing a story or writing a monologue – I have to do a certain amount of practice and then something kind of clicks and I’ve got it. I’ve had to learn to trust that click and know that the stories will be there when I need them.
** An INFJ actually. I’m not all cute about being an introvert, I don’t request special care and feeding. I use the information from personality tests to figure out how to operate more effectively in my own life – I don’t expect other people to adapt to me. I will set up some pretty strong boundaries to protect my down time or to ensure that personality differences are respected, though. There is more than one ‘right’ way of being in this world and I won’t let anyone say any different.
*** I seriously think that this is one of the reasons I love so many urban fantasy books about werewolves – everyone automatically knows how to interact with each other and where everyone stands. I wouldn’t want to be a werewolf, of course, but I like the idea of having clear systems for that kind of thing.

O is for Ordinary

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I really, really, like an ordinary day. The sort of day where you get the kids to school, do your work, have supper, hang out with your family or read or do household stuff, and then just head on to bed. You don’t want every day to be exactly the same, of course, and it’s not good to get in a rut, but it is pretty damn good to have a routine, and it is perfectly okay to enjoy it.

That sort of life seems to be dismissed by a lot of people. There is a sense that it is dull, or that it lacks challenge, and that might be the case if you did the exact same thing every day and shied away from anything that deviated from it. However, I think the real danger is in being unconscious about what you truly want and what makes you happy, so if you are acting that way, then there is just as much of a problem in ‘going big’ or always seeking variety for variety’s sake.

I see this a lot in the coaching world. There is so much emphasis on going BIG, on being extraordinary, on things being epic, that it makes me ornery (bonus O word). What about if you don’t want or need an epic life? What if you just want to have something ordinary that makes you happy?

I get that some people feel drawn to this huge projects and huge ideas and they love the excitement and the adrenaline rush involved with that lifestyle. However, I don’t think everyone feels called to live big and that is just fine. I want to be sure people live to the edges of the life that they want, that they take up all the space that they need to thrive, but I don’t give a damn if they go big or go home, or if they try to be a superhero.
I get where these coaches are coming from, and I respect the energy they bring to their work, but it makes me feel a little alienated sometimes. I am not encouraging people to clip their own wings or hide their skills, but I think that all the focus on the epic makes people feel that they couldn’t possibly measure up. Or it makes them feel that the things they want are not important enough. And I don’t want ANYONE to have that feeling.
I think that there is a lot of joy and passion to be found in the ordinary, in living the life you want to live, and living it very well. I think the real joy is in being tuned in to what is going around you.
That’s part of the reason that I don’t spend a lot of time rushing around to expose my kids to all sorts of new things all the time. It’s a conscious decision on my part to curate the things we spend energy on. It’s hard enough to make choices about what to do these days – there are so many options all the time and our brains were NOT designed for this variety – without adding additional complication.

Now, I’m not suggesting that people operate from a sense of fear, or that they try to confine themselves to minutae, that is not a life well lived at all. What I’m saying is that they can find a way to celebrate the things that happen for them all the time, that they can see the beauty in the every day instead of always seeking to go bigger all the time. Constant expansion does not guarantee happiness and it seems to keep the focus out there, in the space between here and there, instead of in having you look around and just be where you are.

I can imagine that a lot of people are turned off by the GO BIG GO BIG people, so I’m here to tell you that it’s okay to be soft, it’s okay to have a tight focus, it’s okay to choose your experiences, it’s okay to be ordinary. I love ordinary things.