Brain Spew in Lieu of Wit

Note: This article was originally published July 29, 2020 on my now-defunct website for AMA Creative Solutions. I have completed the most minor of edits, so what you see is what was published (barring a glaring and obnoxious error). We are rarely taught writing warm-ups, which you spend 10 or 15 minutes on before getting into your immediate project. These warm-ups help you develop your skills, narrow your focus to what you will be working on in a session, and help build a transition point in your writing routine. One of my personal challenges is shifting from other tasks into writing, which prevents me from focusing on the words and usually leads me to work on chores (or checking social media or working on administrative work or going back to conversations or any number of other hurdles to actively writing). We are (sort of) taught how to outline and draft in school, but these are often expected to be stages of a project more than a warm-up to dive into a project. The way they are des...

  One of the most constant conversations with my friends is how to keep up our creative endeavors while we're fighting depression and anxiety. I know that I personally feel hopeless in dragging my pen through depressive numbness and overcoming the defeatist terror that comes from feeling like nothing I say matters, or has been said before, or is wildly inaccurate. I'm notorious for freezing and going dark (creatively and otherwise) when I'm depressed and overwhelmed. What I ultimately forget, though, is that writing is part of my self-care. Not writing is akin to not cleaning my house or  not showering. Unfortunately, like any self-care, being creative through depressive lows and anxiety spikes requires practice and patience. Journaling (the Writer's Sketchbook) My anxiety and perfectionism tell me that every work should be a masterpiece, that anything less than brilliant is not worth putting in words. This, naturally, blocks my creative process. I know  that nothing...

Self-care is hard . Self-care is, ultimately, how we maintain our social, physical, emotional, and psychological lives. It gets tricky when you have mental illness, neurodivergence, physical disability, chronic pain, and other chronic ailments. Part of it is attaining the  executive functioning  to accomplish the thing in the first place, but it's also because it's complicated and variable. We are inundated with what "healthy" looks like, which is discouraging and infuriating in itself, but we can't always accomplish it all (or at all). How do we prioritize important self-care without depleting our resources (or spoons or spell slots )? What does healthy look like to us ? How do we keep up with it at our worst? There isn't a singular answer, obviously, but I'll try to take my own methods and expand them into something that can be a bit more general. Honesty The most important part of developing my self-care habit is being honest with myself. I'm n...

I have spent the past several years working to build discipline. I want to stop flinging myself from moment to moment and becoming frozen in the infinite and terrifying possibilities of the future. I want to finally  follow through on a plan deliberately and directly. I want to be the determined, diligent, laser-focused person I read about in self-help books. I continue to discover that the process of becoming a disciplined person is both more complicated and significantly simpler than I had initially realized. I am, by nature, a stubborn and goal-oriented person. I am lost when I find myself without a destination, as if I'm untethered from reality. I have leant heavily on calendars and lists, often over-organizing to the point of distraction and panic. I ground myself in these things... often to the point of immobility. I am also the person who finds validation in being Busy. Even as I build space in my schedule, I am still overworked and only stop when my body shuts down. Th...