Reflecting on One year of writing publicly
With blind bravery and will to be heard and seen, if only by me.
I started this publication thinking I might be healed enough, good enough to share my insights in a newsletter. I started out blind, not knowing what I was truly doing. Initially setting the tone for exploration into my creative brain, the ways in which I unconsciously created my life, exploded it and was at a point of putting the pieces back together. To design it myself.
I didn’t realize it then in full. The awareness of what I was actually going to embark on was an act of creativity in itself. Using this platform to write myself into existence. To claim my story through these posts, shadows and all. I dove head first into the fear in many of the posts and hit publish anyway, unsure but at the same time sure that this is what I was meant to do for myself.
I thought I would share about modalities and wisdom gained. I did but that wasn’t it. I wasn’t sharing tools, I have been sharing me. And in the sharing of me, the puzzle pieces and disjointed parts brought them into the light. The parts I kept hidden from others, from myself, now written into the world, subsequently written together in my embodied felt experience of who I am.
Claiming it all and owning it all, I have nothing to hide and it feels like freedom.
Autonomy In the act of writing
I wrote about pushing through the door of fear. The glass box I contained myself in. The inadequacies and defects I felt made me broken that have turned into my greatest teachers. My anger and rage became a fire signal for change instead of a hidden failure of self. My own controlling and judging way of being, holding me back from that change. The necessity of boundaries and compassion toward my own self.
Writing it helped me to claim it in my daily life. This is my raw material to work with in writing, in art and in changing the trajectory of my life. Illuminating the old and outdated narratives and shining light on alternative paths, giving me back my autonomy of which path to choose and in many cases what kind of path to start paving for myself.
Sometimes in a very clunky, confused way I wrote. Sometimes thinking I was giving advise and tools and that was what this substack was suppose to be about. Trying to curate the information I was learning in real time to something of value for others. Many times feeling that defectiveness again like I shouldn’t even be writing anything because I did not feel “healed” enough, good enough, wise enough. Somewhere within each post, however repetitive or not meeting expectations, mine or others, there was meaning, and growth and new awarenesses coming through. Each time I hit publish I learned something. About writing, about myself, about humanity as a whole and my place in it.
What I know is that the times I wrote for myself as myself, were the times I felt most whole. When the writing was for me first.
The good kind of pushing past yourself.
For whatever reason, divine or self willed, I felt compelled to speak my truth and publish it. Even when I knew it wasn’t “perfect” or at the level I wanted it, even when I was exposing my most vulnerable self, I still would hit publish. As if to say fuck it, but also to say I did my best in this moment in time and here it is. Here is where I am at, honestly.
Before I fell apart, before I decided to take the steering wheel back, I pushed past myself in the name of others. There is a difference in the kind of pushing past myself I have been doing this last year. It has been pushing past my own walls and blocks to learn. Sometimes in shocking ways, I do the hard thing anyway and gain the perspective from the shock wave. The emotions and actions that come after the event that create the insight. First, I needed the catalyst. This publication has been catalyst of trying and learning, feeling of failure and understanding the value in failing. The value in living from each state of being human and nurturing it along the way.
A documentation of growth.
Recording our stories is a way to time travel. To revisit your past to understand your present. I keep journals and morning pages for myself and that is a practice I will not let go of. This publication will also remain as a mutating creative outlet.
Within our words in real time, stamped with a date we have this power we created to go back and review. To remember who we are and where we came. Returning to our stories at different stages we see something different from a new lens. Each spiral around the awareness wheel, each retrospective, each understanding settling into a slightly different more full framed picture.
Writing, whether or private or not, is a real time snap shot of your awareness at the time and to have that physical representation, makes it all real, and the progress between, something we can grasp with greater clarity. But if the writing isn’t there, there is nothing to go back to.
I am so thankful for the ability to express more than my voice can project, through words and imagery on a page. To give me a different way of speaking that works for me. Allowing all my parts to come out in order to put them back together, allowing me to embody an increasingly more self aware and self respected, confident human.
Reflecting on the shift.
When I look back at all my letters shared, I find a point about 6 months in where the language changed, the subjects became more personal and raw. At least for my internal landscape, there was a time where the writing shifted to lean more to the dark corners of my psyche. Moving away from curated to radical honesty. This beginning of this honesty came with the practice of mindfulness meditation. Awareness of my record player thoughts and behavior patterns were brought to the forefront and so that is what I ended up writing about. This shift happened in throughout the winter. From October through the darkest days of winter, my writing creating a parallel to the season.
This is when Creative Human Healing started to really heal the inner me. When I would write my new awareness of old wounds into the world and claim my stories. Even when, after hitting publish, I would want to recoil and hide at the fact that I just shared so vulnerably. I remember writing the pieces with conviction and fire, hitting publish and feeling shame of perceived judgments of others. But I left it. I kept all the posts in place except for one (and removing that was a mistake). In leaving the posts as they were and not deleted or taking it back, I stood in my story and my efforts in understanding. Not questioning myself to the point of making myself invisible again. It is what it is. That was my truth in that time and moment of healing. That is what I actually did, I wrote it and published it and without leaving it as is, the outcome would not contain so much perspective for me now.
By not edited myself, I stood up for myself. In all the repetitive, non linear nature of being a human, learning and growing into her potential.
This past winter was profoundly healing and deeply disorienting. Over time, coming into spring, the tone of the essays have changed. The poking and prodding, the digging and uncovering, have cleared the path for expanding into a different perspective and way of seeing myself in the world.
Instead of heavily sharing wounds and pain, I am beginning to share more of the creativity and openness that comes from the wintering process. The lightened demeanor felt because I am not providing a masked version but the true version. With the old aired out and the new coming from within. There is a more clarity in the ways I see and feel myself as long as I keep writing, speaking and sharing my truth.
Suppression, rejection and numbing are no longer tools that are viable. Instead, writing, painting, and meeting with the true nature of reality in reality in real time through the page, through the canvas and through my breathe. A daily returning to truth as it is, today.
Forward Trajectory
I plan to continue writing every morning as an act of self love. Regrounding myself everyday. I plan to continue to speak my truth here into the world. However feels right and whenever the call comes, whatever the subject and the need shows itself. I do not have much attachment to what I “plan” on creating here as a whole. It is what it is. It is an act of creativity. It is an act of self love. It is an act of radical self expression and honesty. To be honest, you cannot curate or plan real time healing. It just is whatever it is going to be.
Writing myself into the world is a means to fuse my whole story because there is more than just my body and material world needs. There is more that needs to be nurtured by me, through me and brought out to see the light of day.
In my year of writing here and in my day to day reality, it is clear that healing is in the moments of speaking my truth, in real time, where I reclaim myself. Where I pull her back up and out into the light.
Here I am.
In reverence,
Rae
I've been thinking a lot about personal myth-making lately through various beautiful synchronicities. I find writing our own stories and writing about our own stories allows us to reclaim our truest selves. I'm not sure how I feel about the term true self but I think you know what I mean. It is through the writing we are able to process it all which inevitably leads to healing and, a term I learned and fell in love with recently, wholing. There's just something magical doing it all publicly. We find we are not alone. We find connections. We find community of like-hearted individuals. So thankful you chose to share yourself publicly. ❤️❤️❤️