4. A lesson from my imaginary friend.
A lot of you have been loving these posts and complimenting me on my writing. Honestly, it’s an incredibly complicated and deeply serious process that is VERY hard to master, but I’ve taken it upon myself to attempt to teach you my ways. If you’re wondering how to write a deeply vulnerable and personal blog post that somehow also resonates directly with the reader, this is your secret:
Just.
Do.
It.
I honestly just set a timer for 20 minutes and make myself write my stream of consciousness without stopping. It’s as simple as that. When that timer goes off, I press “repeat” until the blog post starts to come full circle, and then I make myself hit publish. I don’t even proofread. I proofread after it’s published, to discourage myself from making too many edits and essentially I just keep it down to spelling errors.
When I read about people spending hours and hours on blog posts, or hear that some people are so paralyzed that they go several months without a post, my heart breaks. It’s not challenging unless you make it a challenge. I promise. Just go with it.
See, we’re not even done with my first 20 minute session and I’m already hitting a flow. Once I finish this post, I’ll even tell you how long it took altogether. I bet it won’t be more than an hour. But, since I’m not going to edit this, you’ll be able to fact-check me at the end.
Ok. I know I made it sound incredibly simple and I honestly stand by that. But, I do acknowledge that to get to the place of feeling like I can just put words on a page and keep going until I’ve put enough words on the page, I had to—you guessed it—put lots of words on lots of pages. I wrote a lot as a child. I actually created a fictional character that lived in several of my black and white, 100-page marble notebooks and navigated all of my social anxieties for me so that I didn’t have to. I had her try all of the teenager things, the drinking and the parties and the sex with the boys. I didn’t completely know it at the time, but she was my mirror to my future self. She told me how I felt about everything before I had to live it, and helped me make decisions that felt informed and knowledgeable. This was the first step in learning how to write intuitively.
Fey, as we’ll call her, because she deserves privacy, is a large part of the reason that writing is forever linked to my intuitive work. The ability to lean in and trust that a direct line from my brain to the page will get me where I want to go—she gave me that. She’s the reason I ultimately became able to speak so confidently about what I see in tarot cards, and about what I feel in my body when I work with someone else’s energy. I know that what’s in my brain, organically and unfiltered, has merit, has weight, and has power. This is why people trust me with major life decisions. I first had to trust me with major life decisions. And before I knew what intuition was, I had Fey.
Yes, dear reader, I know that we are (pretending to be) adults here and have no business making up imaginary friends to live our lives for us. We have to live our lives for ourselves. But, I will offer you the possibility that there is still merit in externalizing some of your decisions for the sake of taking the weight off of your own shoulders. If you do that externalization through the process of writing, you’ll get the bonus of feeling really, really confident speaking your truth. I imagine there’s some kind of truth living inside you, and I know that truth is too juicy and full of life to just stay inside you. We need to hear from you.
In times when college students are being evicted from their dorms in some of the wealthiest universities in the world, we need to hear from you. In times when “social distancing” is leading us to a place where our only means of connection might be behind our screens, we really need to hear from you. In times of ever-growing isolation, othering, hysteria, and uncertainty, hell, I don’t even care what we need. I want to hear from you. Please, dear reader, tell your truth and tell it in public.
But first, if you’d like to practice, tell it in private. Tell it to your journal. Tell it to the notes app on your phone. Tell it to a google doc called “Introspection” like I did while I was talking myself out of starting a blog a year ago. Set a timer for five minutes and do a brain dump every day. And if you miss seven days in a row, write yourself a love note on the day eight. I know that “progress over perfection” is really big in the wellness circles, but honestly, don’t even try to make progress. Don’t bother coming up with a “definition of success.” What is “good” writing, anyway? The point of writing is to write. That’s it. That’s how I approach this blog, and if you’re still reading, this approach speaks to you.
Once you get comfortable doing your brain dumps, you might start to ask questions. Because we think we’re too old for imaginary friends, we can ask these questions of our future selves. Imagine there’s a you who is already living on the other side of your big (or small) decision. Ask that person, what does it feel like to have done the damn thing? Who are you celebrating with? How are you coping? What would have made that experience easier? When did you know there was no turning back?
There are many keys to intentional living. One of them is to actually believe that what you think deserves the honor of coming out of your head and into your life. Another is to bother asking yourself what you think in the first place. Dreams come from dreamers, and dreamers are nothing more than people who have given themselves permission to dream. Giving the mic to that voice in my head—that voice, yep, you know the one—giving the mic to that voice is how I’ve begun to give myself permission to dream. Yes, I mean the scary voice. The voice that says the really mean things. I also mean the quiet voice. And the voice that sounds eerily like my mother. And the voice that tells me everything is going to be okay. I give the mic to all the voices, as often as I can, because I believe that they all have valuable information for me and for the world. I no longer want to hold that information back.
If you’re reading this and you’ve made it to the end of this blog post, I want to invite you to go on an adventure with me. No, I’m not asking you to travel in these truly wild times. This adventure stays between you, me, and your inbox. Each week, I’m going to be sending out journal prompts to encourage you to connect to your intuition, trust yourself, and tell your truth. The destination is truly unpredictable, and the journey is one that will change your life. Each prompt is designed to take five minutes, because writing about your dream life is great but living it is infinitely more important. If you’ve got access to a journal, a google doc, the notes app on your phone—honestly, I regularly journal in the body of an email and send it to myself—there’s room for you on this ride. Pack an open mind, and let’s go meet You 2.0.
No, I didn’t forget to tell you how long it took to write this. We’re coming in at 52 minutes and 36 seconds.
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