Part 1: Rebuilding Self-Trust as a Writer

An editor invites you to consider Writing Seasons as a way of rebuilding and writing authentically

For years I have felt caught in a complex writing web. In this web, my longing to write, my desire to be heard, and what I’m told by experts is “the way” to be a writer are consistently at odds. 

How about you?

Today’s post is rooted in a hunch I’ve had that even if you weren’t raised in a high-control, authoritarian family structure like I was, that many, many of us are rewarded when we self abandon, both off and on the page. I’ve also had this hunch that writing is where the traumatized, scared and bullied turn in order to find some safe way to relate with their inner thoughts. As an adult, my own wrestling act has revolved around assuming my writing is something that someone else possesses extraordinary knowledge for. (This is a symptom of C-PTSD, in case you were wondering.)

I have sat in a closed, scared posture as far as I can look back. This means living in a near-constant state of hypervigilance, ending new relationships after three weeks, shredding confessional pages in my journal while barely breathing through an anxiety attack. I could sit at my writer’s desk and hear three, four, sometimes five, voices rising up like angry preachers in my mind—all describing the ways I might be abandoned, homeless, shamed and outcast if I dare write down what I was thinking. 

I don’t judge myself for retreating into a closed posture because, as you can imagine, it was rooted in a basic instinct to survive what I sensed was coming to harm me. Another way I tucked into a scared posture was to convince myself that I needed to be more logical and to keep studying, researching and learning (a common wayfinding technique for autistic people—we often assume our knowledge library is missing one elusive ingredient). I surmised that I just hadn’t stumbled onto the real, underlying knowledge—or a person with that knowledge.

This assumption was especially corrosive because the work I did for others in a marketing agency never worked for my own writing. Every time I tried something new and it backfired, I took that as proof that I wasn’t equipped for the job and that someone else, someone “out there,” knew better than me about my writing. To make matters more complicated, editing was (and still is) my day job—I was helping writers all around me get unstuck or say the thing only they can say, but still I could not unstick myself, I could not yet say what only I could.

I didn’t start untangling all of this until I’d spent 10 to 15 years listening and gobbling up the knowledge of other marketing and writing experts. It was exhausting, heartbreaking work just … trying … to tackle … my work onto the page—let alone get people to listen to my writing or pay attention. Often, I resorted to my autistic superpower of masking and imitating others to belong. Nevertheless, my efforts to succeed fell apart over and over again because doing work that separates you from your instincts and who you are at a cellular level is a recipe for psychological collapse. We can only “fake it ‘til we make it” for so long until our physical bodies flatten from the strain.

I spent a lot of time and money treating my writing as a problem to be magically solved by someone else. But the more I listened—and was sent in circles and dead ends—the more I realized that marketing experts are usually no more reliable than meteorologists. They’re useful when you’re staring down a tornado or a PR emergency, but not really equipped at predicting or guaranteeing how anything will land with the people you’re trying to reach.

Exchanging autopilot for mindfulness

In the time that I have been wrestling with my writing and editing work, a parallel sphere of life has existed, which is my meditation practice. After ten years of practice, things look quite different here. When I’m sitting in meditation, I’m invited to relate with my mind exactly as it is—to notice when I have drifted off into thought and gently guide my attention back to my breath. There is no prodding to bliss out, to transcend or be less of me: the work is to be as fully human, just as we are, in any given moment. It’s a practice of opening again and again off the cushion when I want to chase narratives or solidify anxiety or imbue meaning to my thoughts, good or bad. 

When I hold my writing life in one hand and my meditation practice in another, I recognize a troublesome habit: I have some neurological predilection to blindly follow experts—marketing, writing, religious, medical and so on—before turning inward to touch base with myself. This shouldn’t have been too surprising since my entire cultural DNA had primed me for self-doubt at a cellular level. (See D.L. Mayfield’s latest piece on C-PTSD and its pervasiveness not just in controlling religious environments, but any government with authoritarian aims.) On any given day, within any various writing endeavor, my autopilot instincts as a woman and a writer were (1) to close down, (2) to cling to outside sources or (3) to fall into self-doubt patterns. As many of you know, this is really pesky stuff to shake. 

A More Fruitful Path Forward: Writing Seasons

When I began to practice opening to my writing instincts as inherently reliable, I went in circles a lot. It felt like learning to ride a bike for four or five years. There was a lot of unlearning to do, a lot of audio recordings in my head to slowly let go of over time like, “Well, that editor went to Harvard, so they know better than me” or “That person has been formally published by a real publishing house, so I better not speak up.” 

Where I landed is this: Rather than writing being a problem solved by someone smarter than me, writing functions best when it’s rooted in my direct experience that naturally shifts through ever-evolving seasons. Writing absolutely can benefit from some outside perspective and insight—hello, hi, editor, here!—but never as a means to squelch your instincts, vision or conviction. It’s from the ground of Writing Seasons that I think we can give ourselves and our writing what we’re really longing for. Relating with Writing Seasons helped fundamentally shift how I say what I want to say and how I ask for help (or not). Let’s take a little closer look…

There are four Writing Seasons:

1. Season of Musing

2. Season of Tending 

3. Season of Craft

4. Season of Rest

These Seasons are grounded in your lived experience, right now, today. Not what you’d like to see in six months or 10 years. They are not obsessed with or driven solely by goals, ROIs or outcomes. (These things aren’t antithetical to Writing Seasons, but they are lower on the priority list and held with a more open hand.) 

Writing Seasons are looking to see the felt qualities that float to the surface in your days—what you have energy for, when your muscles instinctually twitch or your stomach turns sour. Writing Seasons are directed by the writer’s experience of their own writing practice and trying to recognize where we have gotten stuck or when we need rest. They’re an invitation to drop the narrative around what is good, bad, acceptable or dangerous, and instead experiment with sinking into and trusting our instincts. They circle back to an enduring truth about life: that everything is always in the midst of transformation. 

Basic goodness

When I look at Writing Seasons, I see them grounded in basic goodness—a Buddhist notion that proposes our starting place as humans is not tainted. That we aren’t permanently flawed and trapped by human frailty, and only the “strongest” can overcome their humanness.

Basic goodness posits that the stuff we writers are made of is inherently trustworthy and reliable. And that when we trip over our own two feet or lose our tempers, this isn’t the end of all goodness and potential for growth. In writing terms, basic goodness means we can return to a limitless supply of compassion inside ourselves—and I think that means the very act of caring for and expressing ourselves in an authentic way is, in and of itself, creatively regenerative. 

The Writing Seasons—the Seasons of Musing, Tending, Craft and Rest—are an ever-evolving framework that I’ll explore in more detail in this post here. I’ll define the seasons, and we’ll look at how relating to your writing in this way can help identify which types of writing, marketing, branding and editing work that would help the most, without abandoning your own sense of where your work is heading. And most of all, I hope Writing Seasons will help establish a place for all writers to return to or cultivate a new, compassionate abiding for where our writing is right now, just as we are.

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