“Learning to embrace yourself and your imperfections gives you the resilience needed to thrive.
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In my recent post about how I didn’t write in 2023, I got into some of the reasons that the words weren’t coming. I could say I was surprised by the amount of emails I received saying THANK YOU FOR SAYING THIS ME TOO I FEEL SO GUILTY, but I wasn’t. Truth is, writers are damn tough on themselves and, when we don’t write, we often give in to shame and allow our inner critics to run the show. It’s our fault, we think, if we can’t achieve our goals - look at how we prioritize everything but writing! If we were truly serious about our craft, we would (fill in the blank). We call ourselves names, break promises we’ve made to our writing and feel even worse. It’s a downward spiral. Don’t even get me started on the self-comparison, that pang of hurt when a friend or a writer we admire writes something great, achieves something, has a shiny new book on the shelves.
In all my work with mindfulness, meditation, self-care, and therapy I have found nothing to be as supportive to my mental health and writing as self-compassion.
We Americans have a tough year coming up - presidential election year. The world is filled with war and terror and horrors unimaginable (even for those of us with top-notch imaginations). We have a new year upon us and the tendency to push ourselves, to set expectations high, to fall into the old patterns of letting ourselves down…it’s all on the horizon.
But what if we could meet our challenges, our hopes, our suffering in a way that embraces all of it and leaves us stronger, more resilient, more clear and healthy, and inspired?
The data on self-compassion practices is clear: this approach works.
As many of you know, I'm in a clinical social work master's program and my focus is on the mental health of creatives, including pursuing a specialization in Bipolar disorder, which many in our community must navigate. I did an intensive research project this year which is developing into a proper study I hope to publish in the next few years after I conduct clinical trials: What I'm looking at is the underlying cause of depression and anxiety in creatives and what the best intervention might be.
So far, I've discovered that rumination - that tendency we have to dwell on disturbing events - is the culprit. We're not depressed BECAUSE of our creativity, but because of the process in which we engage in creating meaningful work. We are also uniquely susceptible to the inner critic and public criticism.
Mindful Self-Compassion, a program designed by psychologists Kristin Neff, PhD and Christopher Germer, PhD, is a promising intervention for creative dysregulation and distress. I also did research on its use as an intervention in high performing individuals, such as NCAA athletes, and the intervention supported less performance anxiety, better perception of performance, and less distress over mistakes. As a result of this, I've given a lot of thought about how I might use the breadth and depth of my training and experience with self-compassion to support the unique needs of writers, both in and out of the writer's seat. (We did some of this in this fall's Cozy Mini Writing Retreat, to great success).
We’ll be doing more self-compassion at the winter Mini Cozy Writing Retreat and I hope you’ll join me then!
It has been such a pleasure to write to you all throughout this year. I take such joy in sending you these missives, in writing them, in growing alongside all of you as we walk the writer's path.
May you be happy, healthy, safe, and inspired now and in 2024!
