A few friends asked me if I do New Year’s Resolutions.
I normally don’t—I feel like there are always moments throughout the year to reflect and be more intentional.
But the changing of the calendar is one of those moments, and I’ve had a lot to reflect on from this past year.
I worked through a lot of stuff: facing traumas from my past, de-sludging toxic patriarchal masculinity from my system, understanding how my brain has always worked and building new routines to complement and support it, setting boundaries and building new relationships, facing the possibility of rejection yet coming out anyway.
I made hard decisions.
I took risks.
I failed a couple times.
I had impossible days.
I had joyous days.
I got to know myself.
I learned to love myself.
It also was the year that I allowed myself to accept and embrace the label “writer.” I figured out what I need to unlock my vision and let it coalesce onto the page. And I’ve reached a point where I feel like the faucet is fully open and flowing—I’ve never felt so much creative momentum and power before in my life. [Stay tuned later this year for some big news on creative projects I’m working on.]
I know I wouldn’t be at this point right now without everything that came before it, all the work I did along my personal growth journey.
Steven Pressfield said, “It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.”
In order to be able to sit down with a clear mind and the focus and determination needed to do the hard work of writing—I disagree with Pressfield there; don’t let anyone tell you that writing isn’t hard—I had to work through all of that stuff which didn’t directly relate to writing but got in the way of me sitting down.
The one intention (I shy away from using “resolution” because, to me, it smacks of one-month gym memberships and pyramid-scheme diet offers) I’m setting for the new year is building a creative community.
I’m very comfortable in solitude. Part of that is my personality, part of that is my autism, and part of that is that I find my creativity and motivation and momentum most available in solitude.
Sure, part of creating is forcibly removing yourself an arm’s length from the world—deciding to create, putting on something comfortable, muting notifications on your phone, putting on ambient noise in your headphones, and staring at a keyboard for a long time.
But, for all its upsides, you run into a ceiling when you work entirely in isolation. You don’t get the feedback from others reading and commenting on your work. You don’t get the validation and motivation to keep going like you do when someone else cheers you on. You feel that sense of derangement, of being different, like a mutant or an alien, for being in your head so much.
I want to be surrounded by people in my life who accept me, support me, validate me, challenge me, and push me.
Finding other creatives who are also looking for the same thing is a challenge, though. But it’s a challenge worth tackling to feel that sense of community and to feed and feed off the creative energies and ideas of others.
So, take this as my invitation for you to reach out and connect if you’re also looking to build your creative community in 2022. From beta reading to coaching/mentoring, to just having someone else in the trenches to push each other along, let’s be creative together.
Someday we’ll find it/
The Rainbow Connection/
The lovers, the dreamers, and me/