Walking my Talk

on the power of having your own words taught back to you

Sometimes, especially when I am feeling insecure and a tiny bit bitter (which is usually when I am feeling full of shame) I will engage in elaborate critiques inside my mind of writers and other creators whose lives and actions don’t seem to perfectly conform to their lofty, beautifully-crafted ideas and advice.

This is petty of me, as I know all-too-well how very difficult—probably impossible— it is to have our actions line up all the time with our beliefs and values.

But I think it is also perfectly human—both falling short of our beliefs and values in the midst of the day-to-day messiness of life, and also feeling vindicated in that “gotcha” moment when we see someone we admire do the same.

I also tend to bristle when someone gives me advice, especially when they offer my own words and values back to me. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to be on the receiving end of that “gotcha” with regard to your own work. Even if the other person is being earnest and loving, it can still feel like getting called out.

But it’s possible to sit with and work through that discomfort. Empathy (even if it’s an intellectual sort of empathy) and humility (even if we have to pull it on like an ill-fitting garment) can help us get back to dancing more in tune to our own values.

Recently I was going through a pretty hard time, feeling incredibly insecure about myself and my work. I was gripped by a panic that I would die without anything important or meaningful to show for my life, and in that mire of anxiety, I was not able to use any of the metaphors and tools I have developed for disrupting shame and making art in spiral time. I was just stuck, feeling worthless, and worst of all, feeling like I couldn’t write. This has happened to me before, and it took years to find my way back to words, my first creative love.

It’s not easy for me to ask for help. For most of my life, I have rarely let anyone inside my own shame and insecurities, as doing that feels fraught with existential danger. But I’m learning that it’s possible to pass through the soft underbelly of spiral time and come up a bit wiser and more humble each go round. I guess that’s what led me to enroll in one of KR Moorehead’s “crash courses” called Writing While Neurodivergent.

KR is a a freelance writer, teacher, and mentor living in the UK (though they are a Philly native, yo!). I had recently become friends with KR when they attended the first of my workshops for the Glasgow Zine Library and took pity on my fumbling tech issues and generously offered to handle all the technical parts of the subsequent workshops. I can’t tell you how helpful this has been.

I knew of KR before this, but I probably passed right by their online course offerings with the grandiose thought that “I could teach that course, why would I take it?” But this time, I looked more closely at what they had on offer. As it turns out, KR uses some of my work in their course! But sometimes you just need to take a class in the things you think you could teach yourself. Sometimes your walk stumbles and loses rhythm with your talk and you just need help to remember what it is you know and value in the first place.

Having my own work taught back to me was incredibly powerful. Through freewriting exercises I often use in my own workshops but never actually do for myself (Read it? I haven’t even taught it yet!), I uncovered some of the sources of my stuckness that genuinely surprised me. I also learned, and more importantly practiced, some new tools—both for my writing process and for thinking about craft and genre—that I never would have come to on my own. In a subsequent conversation with KR (they also offer one-on-one mentoring sessions), I cleared a whole host of hurdles that had been keeping me from the writing-project-which-shall-not-be-named.

The next intake of Writing While Neurodivergent starts at the beginning of July and goes for four weeks. It’s incredibly reasonably priced. I highly recommend it, especially if you are feeling stuck or insecure in your writing and your writing practice.

I’m also thrilled that KR has asked me to join them in co-teaching, along with Meg Max of Writers in Bloom, an extended 12 week course in the fall on neuroqueering your creative practice. We’re in the early stages of developing the course, which will start at the beginning of October, but in the next few weeks we will have a link where you can register your interest and get access to reduced, early-bird rates.

Stay tuned!

Thanks to all you lab rats who subscribe and provide me such a generous, insightful audience on which to experiment with my words and ideas. I could never have had them taught back to me when I needed them if you had not first helped me put them into the world in the first place. I love hearing from you in the comments and reply emails!

Thanks especially to those of you who are able and willing to pay me to do this work! What a dream. A quick note to paid subscribers: I have just discovered, to my horror, that there is some place on the back end of the Substack platform where I am meant to see and respond to the incredibly generous messages many of you have written when you upgraded your subscriptions—I literally missed every one of them because I am such a noob when it comes to the back-end of anything technical. I will be responding in the near future, with gratitude for your patience.