When I journal, I’m reminded that many gods of magic are also gods of writing. There’s a strange alchemy that occurs when psyche encounters pen and page.
Today, for the New Moon in Libra (my birthday season 🥳), I want to share how a recent journaling session led from a blah Friday afternoon to creative renewal + ancestral pattern breaking.
The Friday in question happened at the end of my first week of editing my romance novel—the latest round of editing, I should say, because there have been dozens. This will be the final round, though, before I start the nitpicky proofreading phase.
The week had gone really well. Monday through Thursday, the editing was humming right along, and I was thrilled to be thisclose to the finish line.
But then came Friday. I had a number of orders from my other business that needed filling, so I ended up editing only half the day, and it was flowing like frozen molasses. I finished less than half my usual word count and flicked off my computer feeling like a deflated balloon.
In recent years, I’ve learned something about myself:
If I let feelings like this fester, that’s a recipe for future procrastination 🥣 so I decided to journal it all out before unplugging for the weekend. My only intention was to write out my sense of frustration, so I was surprised when one thing led to another led to another…
(I considered taking a pic of my journal page to show the transition point, but I have a special handwriting that emerges only in my journal, and which can best be described as ‘utterly atrocious.’)
I start out describing the sense of defeat, but how the last chapter I’d worked on was undoubtedly better post-editing, so that also felt good. But then I notice what I describe as a ‘teetering energy’ and the awareness that this teetering feels awfully familiar.
Before I dig into this, I want to pause, because I spotted something mid-journaling that reminded me of a magic circle.
If I were just thinking about this stuff, my mind would be constantly trying to hold the thread of what came before. It’s this subtle weight that eventually logjams the flow. I feel this especially when I’m coming up with story ideas. If I don’t write them down, this fear that I’ll forget the first five as I’m careening onto the tenth idea begins to constrict the channel of inspiration.
But with journaling, the page is holding the energy, very much like the containment of a magic circle, which holds the energy raised for your spell or ritual.
If you had to focus on holding all the energy and raising it and charging it, while also making sure unwanted energies don’t get muddled into it—not that it can’t be done, but there’s a subtle drain. When you cast a circle, you can focus on the current task, whether that’s raising the energy, charging it, etc.
So…back to my awareness of the strange ‘teetering energy.’
Initially it was a faint psychic impression of a thing barely hanging in the balance. I closed my eyes and brought it to the fore, feeling into the dynamic. Once it felt palpable, I opened my eyes and continued to journal.
Here’s what came through…
The teetering seesaw has, on one side, the excitement of seeing how much my chapters have improved, post-edit—yay! And on the other side is a very specific fear, one that, the instant I captured it in my journal, I knew had been with me for a very long time.
The fear goes like this:
Now that I’ve improved the chapter, this ‘means’ that whatever was there before was cringy-bad, and just think: I could have shown that to someone. 😱 This is swiftly followed by the overwhelm of how much MORE improvement is needed, because if I was able to improve it by, let’s say 20%, then there’s no excuse not to shoot for 100%.
Another way of describing the fear:
I don’t want to look too closely at this thing I’ve created (or something I’ve said or thought or…), because if I see any room for improvement, this ‘means’ it isn’t perfect and I ‘have to’ endlessly tweak it, and I’ll never get to release it into the world, and it will all feel so overwhelming that I’ll give up, and the entire project will end in defeat. 😵💫 Better to not look at all.
As soon as I journaled this, I had memories of watching family members drive themselves into the dirt trying to perfect a thing, be it a garden plot or a pie crust, sweating and muttering curses, everything closing in on this impossible task until the entire house was pulsing with this seething, combustible energy.
It makes sense that I have an inner part who’s trying very, very hard to keep me from returning to that suffocating scene, but in order to do so, it often has to keep me from doing creative work full stop, because to do anything is to risk being confronted by our fallibility.
Without tools to be with this inevitable imperfection, lots of things feel overwhelming or even downright impossible, because we can never quite ‘get it right.’
Those of you who have been around for a while might remember that the whole reason I started writing this book was because my guides said it would change my life. I knew zilch about writing fiction or romance, but I trust my guides, and I trusted that feeling of curiosity and spontaneous joy I got when I took their suggestion seriously. (Huh…what if I really did write a romance??)
Pretty much from day one, this project has confronted me with all these little patterns lurking in my psyche, organized around keeping me ‘safe’ and creatively small.
Let’s go back to my journal entry.
As I described this fear, letting myself flesh out its parameters and recognizing how it cropped up in my day-to-day, I realized I was essentially mirroring passages from that 14-page letter from hell I received from a parent this summer. (If you’re like, Melissa, what on earth are you talking about, I wrote about the letter here.)
This part had taken those criticisms, which were a constant refrain growing up around this parent, and tried to build an iron-clad defense consisting of forever expecting those criticisms and finding ways to head them off at the pass.
I’m going to attempt a broad-strokes picture of those criticisms, because the underlying patterns become clearer when we’re not bogged down by specific examples.
Please note that I don’t know if this is where my parent was coming from; this is what I’m extrapolating from their letter and from our past relationship.
Page after page was filled with examples of things that I’d said or done that ‘proved’ I’ve been a terrible person, basically since birth (apparently as an infant, I’d won the power struggle between us).
But what was interesting is there wasn’t anything like, When you did X, I felt Y, and that was really painful. Instead, the entire letter seemed designed to avoid all vulnerability, which left only blaming and shaming.
This blaming and shaming was couched in an illusion that this was objective truth, not their subjective experience, which led to weird inclusions like listing their professional credentials, multiple times, to—I’m guessing—demonstrate how right they were and wrong I was. (Because we couldn’t both be having subjective and equally valid experiences.)
This illusion of objective truth feels connected to a defense against vulnerability.
To say, Hey, I’m feeling this and that hurts, is a deeply subjective experience, and if the other person doesn’t respond with consideration, this could shove the knife even deeper. To express how we feel is showing something of our inner selves. The other person might reject us or ridicule us or use this tender intel against us. ‘Better’ to frame things, even to ourselves, as objective, universally accepted truths.
In the letter, this framing came out in what I can best summarize as, I’ve always thought this awful thing about you, and so does everyone else, because it’s so obviously the truth. Oh, you didn’t know? Gosh, well…I guess you wouldn’t because you have such a fragile, inflated ego.
I’ve seen my parent do this to other people throughout my life, and by their telling, they’re doing the other person a favor by #truthTelling.
[Working in real time: Writing this section has my pulse racing, both from reliving the feeling of receiving that letter, and also the childhood fear of breaking family rules by speaking poorly of my parent. I’m currently breathing deeply and affirming that I’m safe, and I have a right to express my subjective experience.]
Let’s connect this to my inner part who thinks it must keep me from doing creative work.
So, this inner part is lugging around the fear that everyone is waiting in the wings to tear me down, and when they do I’ll have to accept the ‘fact’ that everyone but me has known all along how much I suck. It’s embarrassing, really, that I didn’t already know!
[More real time: I’m letting myself feel how painful it is to have a parent who chose to say these things to me, at great length, instead of tending to their own pain. It really fucking hurts. I’m also incredibly relieved that our relationship is over.]
To this part, these painful beliefs are the ‘truth,’ and every day, the ‘best I can do’ is chase perfection in order to ward off having to believe this about myself a little bit longer. ⏳
Every chapter I edit has this part teetering at the edge of a cliff.
Will I be able to execute a perfect chapter…or will I finally have to accept that I’m terrible and always have been?
I mean, geez. That’s a LOT of pressure (and emotional turmoil) when we’re just talking about editing some pages. 😐
Here’s why I love journaling: After scribbling all this stuff out and sitting with my inner part and the feelings around editing, procrastination, and striving for perfection, I felt radically different about my creative process.
I’ve read books on perfectionism, listened to all the podcasts, and sure, from an intellectual POV I understood that it’s not actually the quest for quality work, it’s an attempt to avoid criticism, but I really, really felt the truth of this, maybe for the first time ever.
This felt especially liberating: the awareness that releasing my book will be a powerful thing for me, not in spite of its imperfections, but because of them.
Releasing the book sends a message to my entire system that not only is it okay to make mistakes, it’s a beautiful sign that I’m giving myself permission to be joyful and spontaneous and alive. 🌱
I’m giving myself permission to take creative risks, and even though the book won’t be for everyone, that’s absolutely okay.
There has never been a single piece of art, in the entire history of art, that everyone has loved. I mean, think about that. It’s hubris—and waaaay unnecessary pressure—to think that my book would or needs to be any different.
You know what’s interesting?
I didn’t feel anywhere near this level of vulnerability when releasing my non-fiction books. 📚 I’ve been reflecting (and journaling!) on that a lot lately, and I wonder if this particular blend of devotion (I keep showing up to write this romance, even on days when it feels like 💩) plus vulnerability (please reference this entire email for examples)…
…is a sign that I’m doing something that really, really matters to my soul. Something that might even qualify as a calling. It kinda feels like it.
I wonder if non-fiction was a way of dipping my toes in the pool, paddling a little closer to my childhood dream of being a novelist without feeling like I was belly-flopping in the deep end.
Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But I do know that building elaborate fictional worlds (ethereal cave gardens with hidden passageways!) crafting my world’s magical system (ancient grimoires and the Song of the Stars!), writing super spicy scenes (Prince Mathias is my 4ever book boyfriend)…
…all of that is so much more fun than giving up because someone might not like it.
Every time you take creative action, even if you feel afraid—that’s something worth celebrating.
Happy New Moon, my friend. 💖
