How I Stopped Fretting and Started Honoring My Soul
A writer’s battle with himself
We have a troubled relationship, writing, and I.
When writing regularly, I see the world in new ways. I draw connections. I notice beauty. I attune to bits of poetry that float through my mind.
Time stalls as I play with word combinations and sentence structures. Discovering new insights sends energy surging through me. My heart glows fiery red, like E.T.’s when his companions return in their spaceship to fetch him.
I am honoring the voice that, since I was a child, has quietly and stubbornly whispered to me: You write to know yourself. You share your writing to be known.
Then, at some point, I drop my writing practice. I abandon my creativity, and I suffer. I begin to feel small, like a snake trying to wriggle out of the skin that no longer fits.
How I block my creativity
For the first dozen years of my career, I was a professional journalist. I was paid to write and edit stories for the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the New York Times — stories read by hundreds of thousands of people.
In 2009, I moved into the business world. I worked at Google and Apple for a decade, in corporate communications and…
