Transcript: Episode 3

Hey, writer friends, and thanks for being here for this episode of the Inspirited Word. I hope you’re doing well, wherever and whenever you’re listening. To get things started this month, I want to do a bit of a call back to where we left off in the previous episode.

Last month, I talked about writing in right relationship, and how the idea of unlearning mastery can form a sort of conceptual tentpole for a more connected and relational way of writing and creating. Toward the close of the episode, I touched on what I think is the first step of unlearning the ideal of mastery in creative work: cultivating a more generative, less restrictive relationship with our creative selves.

This month, I want to spend a bit more time with the idea of right relationship with our writer selves by looking at one possible answer to the question I posed at the end of last month’s pod: What do you want to unlearn when it comes to your relationship with your storytelling self? And how can you start unlearning that?

One of the core symptoms of that mastery-based view of creativity that I’ve come up against repeatedly in my writing life is the dreaded inner critic. And I know this is a very common experience for other writers as well. I’m not talking about just a garden-variety or healthy inner critic, the kind of critical voice that is just part of having a functioning human psyche.

I’m talking about an inner critic who completely and utterly highjacks my creative process to the point that when I write, I’m not really writing from my storytelling self. I’m trying to write in direct and exclusive partnership with that inner critic or naysayer – that voice whose psychological and evolutionary job is to slow me down, to keep me focused on spotting and avoiding problems or dangers.

That’s really what the thing we often call “the inner critic” is actually doing – it’s a manifestation of the same voice that tells us some important basic truths like, “Hey, you do know that if you go around doing a bunch of really stupid shit, you might literally die, right??” It’s the same voice that probably kept a bunch of your ancestors from being eaten by proverbial grizzly bears before they had time to become your ancestors.

That voice has its place for sure. But it is a uniquely terrible storyteller. You can’t play and explore and discover with somebody who behaves like you’re going to literally die if your first draft has too many adverbs in it.

Instead of writing in partnership with the inner critic, I’m trying to learn to write in partnership with my curiosity – with a version of my inner self who is always willing and eager to see what’s going to come next (even when the process is hard and the story is difficult to tell, when the inner critic thinks there’s a grizzly out in the forest).

I want to unlearn my creative criticism and start cultivating what I’m currently thinking of as “creative compassion” – the kind of generous and curious inner voice that encourages exploration instead of constantly scanning for danger.

I’m going to frame this shift through a couple different lenses, both of which were reflected in two books I read recently that I’m going to reference later: Anam Cara by John O’Donohue, and The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand. Before I get fully into the episode, I should say that I honestly have mixed feelings about both texts – more so about O’Donohue’s Anam Cara. But I did also find parts of both books to be really evocative and thought-provoking (and they both also have some really beautiful writing, which is of course always a plus).

I’m not going to derail the episode by going into my critiques, but my newsletter subscribers will be getting a brief rundown of my enthusiastic pros and my reserved cons for both books in the monthly episode resources. So if you’re curious about either of these texts by the end of the episode, hit the link in the show notes to join the newsletter list.

The first lens I want to offer you as a way of cultivating creative compassion is to reexamine your conceptions of what it actually means to show compassion (to yourself or to others, although I’ll mostly be talking about self-compassion).

I think the concept of compassion tends to get a bit watered down in our culture, in ways that are maybe most noticeable when we look at the trend of “self-care” over the past decade or so.

[This is Audio Editing Mary hopping in on a different day with different recording conditions to make a small addendum… The concept of self-care has roots going back to the civil rights movement and to feminist and queer activism, so it’s not accurate to reduce that entire history to merely a trend. But in the context of this conversation, I’m talking specifically about the more recent commercialized, meme-ified, and often whitewashed version of “self-care” that we see in mainstream culture.]

This phrase has become so ubiquitous that it’s both a constant refrain and a punchline, a convenient but also cringe-inducing codeword for a host of practices that are supposed to alleviate the effects of stress and oppression and alienation in our lives. It’s a tongue-in-cheek hashtag on a social media post of somebody soaking in the tub while eating pizza – and it’s also the topic of the entirely earnest Powerpoint the HR department at work is forcing you to watch as part of your job training.

There is a lot of good critique out there on the phenomenon of self-care, and I’ll share a couple links in the newsletter. But to sum up my own understanding of the core problem here: the kinds of practices and activities promoted by “self-care” conflate true, deep care and self-compassion with self-soothing. And these are very much not the same thing.

There’s nothing inherently or universally wrong with self-soothing (much like there’s nothing inherently wrong with having an inner critic). Soothing self-care can help alleviate the symptoms of whatever is ailing our minds or our bodies (or our mind-bodies). And sometimes you absolutely need soothing practices in order to manage those symptoms.

Like most of us, I’ve gone through periods of having to explicitly prioritize and ritualize basic care tasks like bathing and eating, due to some sort of crisis of mental health, physical health, or both. Sometimes using the meme-ified framework of self-care to get yourself to run the literal or metaphorical bath water is exactly what’s needed.

But no matter how necessary self-care or self-soothing can be, it only goes so far. Soothing isn’t a curative process – it doesn’t actually create any sort of lasting change in the conditions of your life.

Having a soak with a scented bath bomb and/or a piece of pizza doesn’t keep your daily work from tying your muscles up in knots. A Powerpoint about managing high levels of stress doesn’t actually reduce your exposure to sources of stress. And at times, the soothing practices we come up with to alleviate our symptoms can even become counterproductive for creating the deeper change we actually need. We get so focused on the trappings of soothing our distress that we don’t dig deeper to access the actual source of that distress.

So, here’s how self-care can apply as an analogy to how we often behave in our writing lives. When we’re struggling with our creative practices, when the creative life is causing us more anxiety than reward, often the easiest way to self-soothe is to back away from the kind of creative work we really want to be doing, rather than finding ways to engage deeper.

We’ll spend our time on tasks that feel productive or restorative, but that don’t get us any closer to our actual creative vision. If you’re spending hours polishing your opening pages into lyrical perfection when you haven’t even figured out the storyline of your first draft – you might be engaging in a self-soothing practice. It feels better to sit down and get sucked into furiously, “productively” copyediting stuff you already wrote than it does to sit down and stare at the existential crisis that is your next blank page.

Or maybe you engage in the flip side of that self-soothing coin – maybe you crank out reams of stream-of-conscious first draft pages and then never return to them, never doing that vulnerable work of retracing and evaluating your steps to discover the story underneath the word dump.

Maybe you write something easy and by-the-book (if you’ll excuse the pun) – something you’ve done before and think you’ve mastered, rather than risk coming face-to-face with a story you don’t know how to tell.

Or, maybe you engage in the ultimate maladaptive form of writerly self-care: You don’t write. It’s too scary, and you suck too much. You’ll write tomorrow, or next week, or next year after you’ve figured all your issues out and respawned into a less broken and incompetent version of yourself, somebody who can sit down and focus at will without entering a doom spiral.

Like I said earlier, sometimes when your creative life isn’t going well, you absolutely need to self-soothe. Sometimes you need to work on a creative task that’s the equivalent of the sugar-scented bath bomb, something that just keeps your creative practice alive while you rest up for some heavier lifting. Sometimes you genuinely do need a long break, if you’re consistently experiencing a symptom of distress that needs to be soothed before anything else can be addressed.

But no matter what your creative self-soothing looks like, it’s important not to conflate those coping habits with the transformative work of establishing a creative practice that’s genuinely grounded in curiosity and compassion (instead of getting stuck using compassion to alleviate the results of a creative practice that consistently just tears you the hell up).

No amount of word count sprints or hours spent editing and polishing will really elevate your writing if you’re not able or willing to unearth the most authentic, powerful version of the story. No amount of time away from the page will spontaneously shift your anxieties into opportunities for discovery.

If we want to actually make change in our creative lives, to engage fully with the fundamentally powerful act of storytelling – we have to figure out what real compassion for our creative selves looks like. That’s much more likely to shift our experience of writing on a fundamental level.

So what is compassion if it’s not the act of soothing our distress? I have a personal definition I’ve been playing with: Compassion is the act of encountering and engaging the world with a keen but accepting eye. (And so, self-compassion is the act of turning that keen but accepting eye on yourself and your creative work.)

To me, this feels like the true counter to the myopic and masochistic eye of the inner critic, which is so often a symptom of creative disenchantment. That critical eye is never simply observing and accepting. Its gaze is always inherently a judgment. It’s incapable of noticing anything without forming an instant and often demoralizing opinion, which it will then defend over and over to itself at an increasingly shrill volume while you’re just sitting there trying to think of a synonym for the verb “walked.”

(“You just used ‘walked’ in the previous paragraph. How can this possibly be so difficult? If you can’t think of another good word for something so basic as ‘walked,’ then what are we even doing here? ‘Gamboled?’ Are you shitting me?”)

This is pretty obviously not a state conducive to deep creativity. This is the threshold of the doom spiral. When you find yourself here, you can self-soothe by turning around and heading in the other direction, away from your deeper creative vision (whatever that avoidance looks like for you). Or, you can do the more complicated and curative work of creative compassion.

Instead of capitulating to what the inner critic sees, you can offer yourself a countering vision – one that accurately sees the current reality of your work, and accepts it as part of an ongoing process that doesn’t require either perfection or comfort.

This keen and accepting eye of compassion is what transforms the doom spiral into a labyrinth path. You’re not traveling a linear trajectory that’s somehow veered off course and is now circling the drain – you’re traveling in and down and around on an organic path that through its very twists and turns will take you inevitably to your work’s core, if you can just exercise some trust and some wonder.

Here’s the part where I finally reference one of those books I mentioned earlier. The late philosopher, ex-Catholic priest, and poet John O’Donohue describes this kind of creative compassion as “hospitality in meeting the negative” and the unknown. The title of his book Anam Cara is an Anglicized version of an Irish term that roughly translates to “soul friend.”

In the early Irish church, the soul friend was a spiritual advisor, someone you confessed to and whose role was to nurture your development within a close and loving relationship. O’Donohue’s work applies this concept in a modern and (somewhat) nondenominational context.

He proposes that a philosophy of radical friendship with ourselves, our work, and the world is the key to discovering and carrying out our real desires and purpose. When the anamchara encounters something seemingly negative or blocked within their soul friend (whether that friend is themselves or another being), they don’t paper over it or ignore it. And they don’t condemn it. They meet that perceived negative with both acceptance and a loving expectation of change.

Despite having some critiques of Anam Cara, I wanted to reference O’Donohue’s overall philosophy because I think it’s a powerful formulation of what it means to really exercise compassion. If you consider compassion through the lens of the soul friend, it quickly becomes really clear what’s missing from the self-care style approach to practicing self-compassion.

The self-care brand of compassion, while useful in its own way, has no inner engine of nurturing development and change. It’s a practice, but it’s not a process. So unless it’s paired with a different kind of compassion – something like the loving mentorship offered by the soul friend – self-care is ultimately a repetitive dead end.

Which brings me to the second book I mentioned: Sophie Strand’s The Flowering Wand. This book is a collection of essays on the cultural construct of masculinity and how Western narratives about gender can be “rewilded” into healthier models for this late-stage capitalist era. So this book is not, on the surface, a book of writing advice (which I’m realizing is emerging as an unintentional theme of these first episodes of the pod…). But many of Strand’s reflections touch on creativity and on living within a framework of relationship and interconnectedness, so I found that parts of the book really echoed the themes we’re exploring here.

Several of Strand’s essays mention the overuse of the Hero’s Journey in the Western storytelling tradition, and how this familiar plot framework tries to hammer all stories into a very linear, progress-oriented narrative of healing and growth by essentially levelling-up, video game style – by overcoming a very standardized progression of obstacles that make the protagonist into a hero.

This narrative spawns out of the same problematic pea pod as the concept of mastery mentioned in last month’s episode. The Hero’s Journey is the ultimate Western narrative of mastery – and thanks in large part to persuasive but not always entirely accurate scholars like Joseph Campbell, the Hero’s Journey has become so ubiquitous that it’s almost impossible to untangle it from mainstream writing advice. It shapes the way Western writers think about all forms of narrative, whether we’re talking fictional narratives, poetic ones, or even non-fictional ones.

Strand points out that the Hero’s Journey is fundamentally unsuited to processing trauma, or to telling stories about trauma and healing. It’s too linear, whereas healing and growth is much more often a spiraling journey. In her essay “Tristan and Transformation,” Strand also mentions the psychological concept of repetition compulsion or reenactment compulsion – the habit of recreating painful or traumatic scenarios from our past.

I’m very much not a trained counselor or therapist, so be forewarned that my description here is going to be very much a layman’s translation. But as I understand it, repetition compulsion describes the act of either intentionally or unintentionally recreating a situation, event, or relationship we’re familiar with (even if that familiar thing is objectively awful or even traumatizing). It can also be a way of attempting to “master” a past event by repeating it.

(And I want to explicitly note that I took the word “master” from multiple scholarly or professional definitions of repetition compulsion – I’m not just sticking it here to serve my own sly rhetorical schemes. This concept really is basically everywhere… because our entire culture trains us to think this way about basically everything.)

Seeing Strand mention the Hero’s Journey and repetition compulsion in the same essay got me thinking about the way writers often use our creative expression as a way of processing and responding to pain or trauma. And in a culture that doesn’t nurture or support creativity except in very limited and competitive and commercialized ways, we also often carry pain and even trauma around creativity itself.

So when we find ourselves struggling with a disenchanted creative process – when we come to the page to write and instead just find ourselves frozen, or panicked, or locked in never-ending debate with the nastiest incarnation of our inner critic – we’re participating in what could be called a form of repetition compulsion.

“This writing session (or, This project) will be different,” we say, as we settle in with all the same maladaptive baggage and beliefs we’ve always had, about the way stories should function and what discipline and dedication should look like and how heroes are made. Not only are we perhaps trying to write about pain through a narrative structure that doesn’t actually allow space for that pain in the story. We’re also reenacting our creative wounds in the belief that this repetition is how we’ll master them.

Y’all already know how I feel about mastery, so I’m sure you will not be surprised when I say that I don’t think suffering in the name of mastery is a viable form of compassion or growth. I don’t think it’s possible to exercise self-compassion in our creative lives by repeatedly throwing ourselves at the fallacious linear trajectory of progress that is the writerly Hero’s Journey.

I mentioned earlier that the limitation with self-care is that it’s a soothing practice but not a curative process – that instead of relying solely on repeated actions that don’t actually encourage change, we need a container that enables actual, organic, non-linear growth, that spiraling path down and in to deeper discovery.

To me, this is the difference between a level-up, Hero’s Journey approach and the type of creative compassion represented by the soul friend or anamchara. The former is a restrictive or even punishing form of repetition. You attempt to master your way onto the next rung of the journey, and if you fail, guess what? You crash painfully back to a lower rung before you just rinse and repeat.

But the labyrinth path of creative compassion is a different kind of repetitive journey, where each moment of the process (whether positive or negative) is another opportunity to engage fully without judgement, to look at ourselves and our stories with friendship.

The question then becomes: How do we engage our writing with friendship??

Here’s how O’Donohue describes soul friendship in the prologue to Anam Cara:

“Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe. That the human journey is a continuous act of transfiguration. If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative, and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. As an artist, the human person is permanently active in this revelation, because the imagination is the great friend of the unknown. Endlessly, it invokes and releases the power of possibility. Friendship, then, is not to be reduced to an exclusive or sentimental relationship; it is a far more extensive and intensive force.”

Anam Cara is a book of general life advice and philosophy, not a book on writing – so I honestly don’t love that this quote includes the idea of approaching things that are threatening with friendship. There are plenty of contexts where we should listen to ourselves when we feel something is a threat. Sometimes a grizzly bear is a grizzly bear.

But, in the particular context of creative work, many of us are predisposed to see nothing but grizzly bears. We’re trained to think of our creativity as an indulgence that has to be earned or justified. It has to be validated by how well we can meet an external and impersonal standard of excellence, genius, or talent. And that can feel like a life or death proposition – you’re trying to justify the creative acts that bring meaning into your life. When the stakes have been set so high and so rigidly, any non-linear creative path feels like a sequence of failures rather than a process of discovery.

I see two key aspects of O’Donohue’s philosophy that might help us overcome that chronically critical view and that could form the basis of a re-enchanted, inspirited writing practice. The first aspect is approaching in friendship, or what he also calls offering hospitality. The second is the active expectation and invocation of possibility and change.

Approaching writing with friendship and hospitality is not going to look the same for every writer when it comes to the specifics. But I think whatever our practical process is, it needs to incorporate that core spirit of hospitality to whatever emerges each time we come to the page. That’s the “accepting” part of my own definition of self-compassion, the “keen but accepting eye.”

I think the “keen” part of that compassionate eye aligns with O’Donohue’s idea of endlessly invoking possibility. I can’t discover and invoke the possibilities of my storytelling if I don’t both accept lovingly and perceive keenly – perceive both what’s currently emerging, and what’s possible if I keep going.

What I encounter on the page as I create may sometimes not look or feel the way I want it to. In fact, it may often not look or feel the way I want it to. Instead of responding with judgement or even fear of that unknown – instead of being the myopic and inhospitable critic – I’m trying to learn to say instead: “I see you. I welcome you. What possibilities can we release next?”

If you want to spend some time this month cultivating creative compassion in your own writing life, head to the link in the show notes and join the Inspirited Word newsletter circle. This month’s episode resources will include some ideas to help you experiment with more concrete ways to bring hospitality and friendship into your creative practices.

And speaking of friendship – if you’ve been enjoying these first episodes of the Inspirited Word, share the pod with a creative friend. It’ll help this virtual space grow, and the more support we writers can give each other to get out of the doom spiral and into the labyrinth, the better.

Until next time – keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.