The Terror
If it’s scary, it’s usually worth it.
For the last year, I have been filling my journals, making notes in my Google Calendar, and pinning up index cards. Bullet points and pages, thoughts metaphors, and parallels to be sectioned into courses and modules in my new and improved courses on Narcissists and Empaths.
You can listen to this podcast episode below-
I’ve stated on numerous calls after someone brought up a topic I’d just written on,
“I have got to get these courses out!”
I set deadlines for myself, created pdfs, flow charts, and recordings, and all this after announcing the course's planned release in the Spring.
Ya know, the one that came and went already?
About a month ago, when I realized I was pushing and pushing and the dam wasn’t breaking, I had an epiphany.
I’m not writing courses. I’m writing more books from my own life. Why am I dead set on these instructional courses exactly?
But that was a short-lived moment of elation and relief because I immediately began to bargain.
Ok then, as soon as I get these courses done, I will get on with the books I wanna write for me! Once these courses are done…
But the closer I got to finishing those courses, the less I felt like I was on track and in the flow. It was all written! Too much was written. All I needed to do was put the passages where they fit but for the life of me it felt like I was trying to slide cooked spaghetti through a window screen. I’d shut my laptop again and stand up from my desk thinking, “Why the fuck can’t I just crank this out!?”
I meditated.
I made play dates.
I took it slow.
Then I went faster.
I took naps.
I exercised.
I drank smoothies.
I drank Guinness.
I posted myself in my office.
I went out to lunch.
I beat myself up then let myself off the hook.
But I still couldn’t get myself to finish those damn courses!
I finally started cracking around the end of June. Not into full surrender yet, but moments of relief started coming in and disrupting all my well-laid plans.
You know how that goes. The quick revelations that make you wince a little at first? Like cracking the lid on that sour cream container that’s been hiding in the back of the fridge?
When the lies we’ve told ourselves at some point to keep us safe, have now been crowding our shelves long past their expiration date. Those suckers start stinkin’ up everything.
As these little cracks started forming, I kept remembering what I’d said when people had asked me about writer’s block a couple of years ago. At that time I was still riding such a wave of freedom and elation that I hadn’t really experienced it firsthand. I’d gotten my personal story out and then had enough fuel left in my tank to crank out an entire course including multiple short stories and meditations and how-to’s galore!
But even then, I did have an idea where writer’s block came from.
I feel like it’s when we’re trying to write from an outdated version of ourselves. We’re constantly growing and changing, so if we’re trying to anticipate what others need from us or what we think we should be saying or how we should be saying it and not creating for ourselves and from ourselves first? It just doesn’t work.
Fuuuuck. Fuckfackfack fuck.
I mean I love being right… But sometimes I also really…don’t love it.
I’d spent the last year doing my best to anticipate every possible thing someone would want in these new and improved courses. As if I could free myself of this endless task once I’ve answered every possible question that could ever arise, and I’d spun myself right into a bona fide burnout.
And as I realized I was trying to fit 35 years of experience and insight into a couple of online courses, I realized just how unattainable a feat I was setting before I’d grant myself permission to just keep writing and sharing and showing up!
I mean, emotionally? Spiritually? Psychologically? I have been raw doggin’ for about five years straight. So I don’t think it was completely with ill intent that I was throwing a wrench in my own spokes and giving myself a lil break from repeatedly stripping myself down to the bone.
I didn’t expect my wonky but willful self-published memoir to reach that many people.
I had a feeling there was more to come and that things were every bit as twisted as I’d known them to be and then some. It’s just, I didn’t think I’d get this kind of confirmation until I was spending my days eating tapioca pudding and watching hummingbirds from under a wool blanket.
So some days it’s felt like I’ve gone through lifetimes of processing in a matter of days and months.
With all of this new vision and understanding of myself and the people I love, I’ve kept plugging along without realizing I was also sneakily devoting more and more of my energy to others and putting my real dreams on the back burner until I realized I was scooting myself right back into hiding.
And lemme tell ya what, service to others? Is hands down my all-time favorite hiding place and my most cherished argument for self-abandonment with righteous intent.
If codependency were a street drug? I would solely use needles from the church exchange program and unbleached cotton balls from Whole Foods so I could hang a halo on my addiction and call it things like Conscious Living and Shopping Locally.
Specifically, for anyone raised in the LDS church who also doesn’t generally stand to pee? This was a taught and practiced cornerstone of our goodness and worth since we were born.
If you were born a woman in the Mormon church? Babe you’ve been bench-pressing self-sacrifice since you started eating solids, and by the time you’re an adult? You make it look easy.
That’s why it’s so fucking hard to detect sometimes.
We’re shoppin’ locally! We’re livin’ consciously! We’re doing the right thing! So what the fuck!? Where’d all the dreams go!? The passion!? The purpose!?
We probably donated it.
So imagine my horror and the onset of tantrums when I realized I needed to let all that work go and admit I was pushing myself in the wrong direction.
It was the most enraging and relieving realization. I’d already been down this road with my memoir.
I’d told myself I needed to perfect and rewrite my embarrassingly unedited, unformatted, rambler of a self-written story. Then, I needed to shine up, improve and extend that course and make it into two!
Then, THEN, I can get on with writing my stories.
I realized that what was fueling all this reawakened self-abandonment and perfectionism, was the fact that I was filled with the same paralyzing fear I hear from other HSPs, Empaths, and abuse survivors every week.
“Is my belief in myself, my drive to speak, my passion to share my own creativity and intelligence really just… hidden narcissism? Am I just like the people who hurt me?”
As someone who’s dreamt of being Josephine March, standing up to the lions of injustice, and sharing her own stories since she was in Elementary School? Who specifically wants to write and talk about her own personal experiences? And who has also been told for decades that I hurt people when I address my feelings and experiences?
I get it.
Debunking and testing the validity of that fear can feel downright torturous.
Because the entire reason my empathy had no boundaries for most my life (and as it works for most of us) was because I wanted so badly to make sure everyone around me felt heard and seen and loved and accepted, that I denied myself those things to make sure everyone else got it first.
So if you’re reading this or listening to this, I’m gonna assume that you like me also have that “Get off the stage!” Oscar music that plays in your head once you’re speaking for longer than 20 seconds.
For me, whether it’s personal journaling or sharing publicly, writing helps turn the volume down on that music. Because I get to talk and know the person reading or listening can pause, exit, shut the book, go pee, and/or return me to the store at any time. No pressure. No questions asked. No stealing of anyone else’s space time or energy.
I need writing. Bad. And I’m stubborn. It’s taken me years to realize just how transformative and necessary writing is for me.
I really wanted to share this, not only because I’m ready to get back in the pool and spill the beans, but I hear this same internal struggle so often, and even though I don’t have the cure exactly, I am learning to live with it a little easier every day. And maybe that’s about the best we can do with any fear or addiction in general.
Learn to accept it for what it is and work with it the best we can.
Before I wrote my own story back in 2018, I had a list of books I wanted to write. How-Tos and Self-Help-ish books. But all I kept hearing from my Spirit Family was, “You have to write this one for you first.”
And they were right.
So while bargaining with my Spirit Family a couple of weeks ago, trying to make peace with the fact that their answer to my endeavors will most likely always be “You have to do this one for you FIRST.” an image came to mind that helped me reframe this fear of self-obsession significantly.
I saw a tribe of people sitting in the snow, circled around a large roaring fire as the sun sank below the horizon. I saw one member developing frostbite on their little toe. They weren’t taught to trust in their community’s ability to love them despite their flaws, and instead feared their judgment and disgust. So, they tucked the cold toe under their body, ashamed, where it got colder, and the frostbite began to climb up their foot and soon their entire leg. The blackened skin continued to climb, and the more of their body it covered, the more they turned those frostbitten areas away from the fire and out of the light, horrified their friends and family would see what they’d been hiding, now even more gruesome than it had begun. Soon no amount of heat was enough to warm them. They couldn’t stop themselves from pushing loved ones out of the way, just trying to get enough heat to the small percentage of themselves they’d still allow to be seen. Now more dead than alive, their very survival depended on pushing others out of the way so they could keep that tiny part of themselves close enough to the fire to keep their heart beating.
“You see,” they explained to me, “There could be nothing better for the whole, than to share your whole self, because what you hide becomes your sickness, which soon becomes a detriment to those around you. When you bring your darkness into the light, you invite the ones who’ve stayed hidden to rescue those parts of themselves as well. To hold their own shame up to the fire and trust that they too can still be loved and accepted.”
I mean… when ya put it like that…. Maybe it’s not that selfish.
So here’s where I am. Scared still yes, probably always. But more so, excited. And that course is just gonna have to wait, maybe forever. Cause I have a lot waiting to be held up to the fire and I’m not gonna keep it waiting any longer.
Next month we’re gonna discuss Athena the Goddess of War and Wisdom, and how being sensitive doesn’t mean we’re necessarily built to be gentle and soft-spoken. Which means sometimes we don’t make sense to others or fit the mold because we’re deeply empathic and compassionate, buuuut we’re also known to bring the fuckin’ ruckus.
Thank you for reading.
I love you I love you I love you.
I’ll talk with you next month. Bye!
-Becca
