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justice is a verb

January 25, 2017 / / 1 Comment

When millions banded together for the Women’s March following Trump’s inauguration, many of a certain persuasion decried this as an outrageously divisive act of liberal whining.

Far from it. I saw men and women of all persuasions and ethnicities united in solidarity. A great deal more than half of our country, and many others around the world, united to demand equal rights. It was not just a demand for women to not be seen as objects, it was a demand that everyone be treated as equal human beings; that Muslims not be ostracized, that Hispanics not be made to live in fear of losing the place they call home, that the LGBT’s not lose all the progress of acceptance that they’ve fought so hard for, that every American should be entitled to health care. These are pretty basic human rights, and enough people felt those rights being threatened that they couldn’t be silent.

Standing up and taking action for what you believe in is not whining. Being the change you wish to see in the world is not whining.

Was it whiny liberalism that prompted the British to revolt and leave behind a tyrannical monarchy that wasn’t serving the interest of the people? And was it whining when they dumped tea into the Boston harbor as a non-violent protest against unfair tax practices?

Was the Emancipation Proclamation whining?

Was women’s suffrage whining?

Was Dr. King’s speech about judging people by their character rather than their color whining?

Were the teachings of Jesus Christ whining? During his lifetime, I’m sure many saw him as the equivalent of a “whiny liberal,” and they killed him for it.

Let’s not forget that protest is what got us here. Dissent from a system that was failing its people is what made America possible. Standing up and doing something about injustice is what made America great.

So when we hear someone who wants to lead the free world brag that he can get away with grabbing a woman by the pussy* just because he’s famous, you better believe we’re not going to sit idly by and let half the population be seen as objects of his pleasure, property to be grabbed. We should see statements like that as a symptom of a greater problem, and it should be loud and clear that this is not okay. If taxation without representation was a valid reason to symbolically give the middle finger to the British monarchy, then why the backlash when we unite and wear hats and insist to be treated like human beings?

*If this word still shocks you and you feel the need to apologize for using it, remember whose mouth it came from first. It should bother you. Then think long and hard about whether the idea of talking about treating women in the way our president boasts about bothers you half as much as the words used.

If we are lucky, we are surrounded by people who have many different points of view, some drastically different from our own. That’s a good thing. That’s another reason that America is great. I take it as a good sign that not many people I personally know would have a problem with a women’s march and are more progressive than to use such a divisive and derogatory phrase as “whiny libtard,” but there are a few. I can agree to disagree with them without blocking them from social media or giving them the cold shoulder in person. (When they go low, you go high.) I try to avoid any kind of “us” and “them” language, because we are all “us”. That kind of language is divisive, indicates that a divide already exists, and it is best to avoid even thinking in the terms “us” and “them.”

Any time I’m tempted to use the word “them,” I step back and force myself to identify who I’m visualizing. Is it someone of a different political affiliation? I couldn’t care less if someone voted differently than I did, and I certainly don’t let a political party creep into how I identify myself or other people. Is “them” someone of a different gender? If I’m fighting for equality, we are no different. There is no room for me to think of anyone as “them,” as other than myself.

Social justice doesn’t come from sitting silently by. It doesn’t always look polite. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the right thing to do. Just because it’s polarizing doesn’t mean it’s divisive. Will I fall on the right side of history? I probably won’t know in my lifetime. But I would rather die knowing that the stances I took were out of love for people based on their intrinsic value rather than judging them for their actions, that I erred on the side of compassion rather than exclusion, and that in standing up for others I never put anyone down, even those who vehemently disagreed with me.

Taking a stand against bad ideas isn’t hateful. Hating bad thinking isn’t the same as hating the people who espouse those ideas. When you see something problematic, something that is hurting people, and you don’t say or do anything about it, that is wrong. We should love our fellow human beings enough to want to correct the injustices in the world. When we see all humans as humans and start seeing justice as a verb, that’s how we change the world.

 

train wrecks and snowflakes

January 18, 2017 / / 0 Comments

The importance and dire need of education in our culture is becoming clearer every day. Though I myself am neither a parent nor a teacher, my heart aches to see a better cultural climate for future generations.

I’m picturing a literal train wreck. I imagine that each individual car of a long freight train is self-destructing, disintegrating under its own weight. The conductor boasts about taking out many sections of the railroad that was laid in front of the train. He himself is boarding a train for the very first time. Many people can see that this is a problem and have spoken up, including some of those who are putting together this train. But the coal is being stoked and the trip is going to move forward as scheduled. Most people are already aboard the train and can only hope that it will stay on the tracks. Some are excited about this new conductor simply because he’s different.

I see adults who make it a rule not to use “no” with their children, even if that child is running straight into danger. I’m in no position to suggest how anyone should parent, but something abrupt and forbidding is the most appropriate response to a kid who has put himself in danger and does not yet have abstract thought. They must first grasp “no,” the shorthand of “you ought not to do this because X.” Growing up without the word “no” is no way to prepare for the real world. It’s a surefire way to make sure that child is self-absorbed and self-entitled and completely ill-equipped to deal with the harsh realities of rejection, competition, and the fact that he is not in fact a delicate snowflake. Delicate snowflakes do not survive outside the perfectly innocuous environment that overprotective adults have fabricated for them.

Delicate snowflakes become narcissists at best. Delicate snowflakes are unable to develop a sense of humor about themselves, and thus become deluded and seek power to compensate for their lack of acceptance rather than seeking to improve their character. They cannot accept that they are flawed, so they can never be wrong.

It’s pretty clear who our train conductor is. It’s as clear as when Meryl Streep spoke of him without having to drop his name or rank. The disintegrating cars are the people he has inexplicably placed in the highest offices. Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education is an absolute train wreck all her own. To watch her trying to answer simple questions from Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren in her confirmation hearing is pure discomfort.

I fear for the future of our children. I’m terrified of what will become of “education.” I fear for a generation of children without “no” in their vocabulary being educated in a system run by a different generation of snowflakes.

More than ever we have the duty to educate children in the home, or wherever we can. What does this mean for those of us who do not have children of our own? They say it takes a village. I believe we need to put as much wisdom and beauty into the world as we can, and to get this wisdom and beauty into little hands. This is why I’m so passionate about writing and illustrating. I want to create something that normalizes big truths to crowd out the “post-truth” that’s happening in our culture. I want little ones to be so smart and so well informed that they are equipped to recognize and do battle with the bad ideas, to recognize that what we are normalizing is not and should not be normal. That there are centuries of thought that came before the ideas of this precious snowflake’s mom that may just be more correct. And I hope that they are secure enough in their character to be resilient, to not be shaken by the “no’s” they will hear all their lives.

What comfort I can find in this situation is that we don’t have to put our faith in institutions. We can equip the next generation to create better ones.

your inner editor

January 12, 2017 / / 2 Comments

A favorite exercise of those who want to get over the mental block of writing and just get words on the page is to pretend there is no backspace key on your keyboard. The goal is to just write like you should, to type as you’re thinking and get into a flow state to get lots of words on the page. You’ll write much faster by turning off your inner editor. Just keep typing.

For those like myself who just can’t help but use that backspace key, there are apps that completely eliminate that temptation:

  • First, there’s nope.press. Any time you try to use the backspace key, you’ll be greeted by an audible “nope” instead.
  • If you need a little more incentive to keep getting those words on the page, “the most dangerous writing app” takes it a step further by deleting your work if you don’t keep typing.
  • Then there’s write or die. This is for the truly masochistic writer. Not only will it delete your progress if you don’t keep going, but it’s as evil as you want to make it beyond that. You set a timer and a word count goal. Then it’s up to you if you want a pleasant auditory or visual reward for continuing to type (such as nature sounds or kittens in the background), or an unpleasant consequence (like spiders crawling across your screen).

It’s such an ingrained habit to use the backspace key. I hate seeing mistakes on the page because I hate the idea of having to go back later to fix them. That’s me in a nutshell: I’d rather get unpleasant tasks out of the way right freaking now so I don’t have to remember to do them later. But perhaps I’m sabotaging myself more than I realize with this kind of mindset.

I find that if I write without a backspace key, I write slower so as to avoid mistakes. That defeats the point of the exercise. I’m supposed to turn off my inner editor. Mistakes aren’t the enemy. Failing to get words on the page is the enemy. Mistakes are a part of practice.

Your internal editor can disguise itself as your friend but really be a form of resistance that can go unnoticed for years. I’m realizing now for the first time that that inner editor goes deeper than with writing. I want to fix things as they arise, which may be taking time from what I really need to be focusing on. I need to get the bulk of the work done first, to get in the flow of doing it to get my best work out. You get your best work out on the first try when your thoughts are raw, not by editing them as they come out. Get out the good work onto the page as it exists in your mind now, in its most purest, freshest form. You can fix it up later. The important thing is to preserve the original thoughts. If you compile all of the time that you would have used backspacing or erasing or otherwise fixing little mistakes along the way (or doing things peripheral to, but ultimately distracting from, the task at hand), it will probably add up to a lot more time than you would like to admit.

There may be thoughts in your head that don’t get a chance to make it onto the page because you focused your attention to editing or something else, to something like writing down another idea as it pops into your head. Now your focus is on your to-do list rather than the subject you were initially writing about. Now you’ve broken your momentum. There were thoughts in your head about the subject you had started a flow of writing on, but you broke that stream of consciousness and aborted something that might have turned into a good bit of writing.

Just keep going. That is the important thing. You did the hard work of showing up, now you have to do the hard work of keeping solid focus and finding your flow state. You’ve sat down to do the work, you’ve eliminated distractions, now the really hard part is undoing that thing that has become such a habit in your creative life and every other part of your life. You have to turn off the part that wants to “fix it now.” If you’re a perfectionist like me, this is a deep-seated habit. But your work with will thank you for it if you just let yourself get into that flow state. Dive into the work distraction-free, without the pressure to be perfect, and you’ll be surprised what comes out of you. You could have pages and pages that would have remained in your head if you were editing along the way. You could make something much more beautiful than your editing hands normally allow if you can force yourself to turn off your editor brain, to let your brain go where it wants to go, unencumbered by the pursuit of perfection. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is the enemy of done. Ge get the important work done. Edit later. So what if you waste a canvas? It’s a first draft of an idea. You can paint it again better if you want to. The important thing was that you tried it on the page. You tried it on the canvas. You brought it into existence. There is absolutely nothing wasted if you write a super messy first draft. You do, however, risk wasting an awful lot if you edit as you go and don’t get all of the gems in your mind onto the page.

I imagine someone panning for gold. You can’t find all the gold out there. Know that going in. But if you want to find the quality gold, you don’t walk along the river bank hoping to find one perfect nugget of gold. You grab a ton of sand and sift through it. You take a pan full of dirt and let the current take it. You let the river do the work until you’re left with lots of little bits of gold to sift through later. Then you compile all those tiny flecks into something valuable. But you can’t find the flecks unless you sift through the sand, and you’ll never see them if your only goal is to find perfectly formed nuggets on the bank.

Similarly, if wheat harvesters walked through the field and gathered individual grains, at the end of the day they will not have even gathered enough usable grain to feed themselves. Instead, they glean whole stalks at a time. Later, they separate out the usable grain by allowing the wind to blow away the unusable chaff.

First you think bigger and just go forward. Go with the flow without worrying about precision. Later, you can pick and choose what you want use and what you want to throw away. You are a gleaner and a gold miner, but only if you don’t waste your time expecting a perfect end product to fall in your lap. It’s important to get the crud out of the way to uncover the good stuff. Send your inner editor on vacation so you can just WRITE WRITE WRITE (or draw, or paint, or whatever it is you’re passionate about doing). That flow state is where you want to be.

paper cranes and writing chains

January 1, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Good morning and Happy New Year, creative people! :) I’m excited for the new journey that is 2017, as well as committing to getting more writing done. I got a page-a-day 2017 calendar for Christmas, so I thought it might be fun to make an origami something for every day that I write. I’m committed to having 365 paper cranes (or whatever) to throw into the air next New Year.

The Community over at seanwes (you’ve heard me talk about them before) is going through a writing course together. I had gone through the free 30 Days to Better Writing course when it launched last year, but am excited to go through it again with some accountability from some really great people.

I invite you to challenge yourself along with me. I probably won’t share every day, but I wanted to put this out there as a kick in the pants for a new year of showing up and doing work consistently. Gotta keep the chain going!

30DTBW: Day 1

What made you enroll in this course?

I had made a habit of writing daily for a couple of years, but have fallen off the wagon in past months. When I saw that the Community would be going through the course together, I thought starting the new year going through it with accountability was a good jumping off point to get my habit back on track. I need to be very intentional about writing every day, and a lot. I have a ton of work that I want to accomplish this year and can’t let anything get in the way of my motivation. I can’t get distracted, I can’t make excuses for myself, and I can’t let circumstances or discouragement keep my word count down. I made a public commitment to write a series of books. I’m dying to write and illustrate them, but I can’t illustrate what isn’t written. Having a binder of notes on my desk is not writing. Intending to outline isn’t writing. Telling others that I’m going to write books isn’t writing. I need to get words on the page. I need to write thousands and thousands of words. The fun part will come when I get down and dirty and do the work.

What are 3 ways you think writing will benefit you?

  1. It will help me accomplish my primary passion, which is to write a series of books normalizing the ideas of the Great Books of Western civilization for a young audience. This is something I need to be transparent about and start talking about (even though that’s something very uncomfortable for me) if I’m going to commit to actually getting it done. Research and study and reading and bouncing ideas off of people much smarter than myself will also be a huge part of the first stages of this project, but they don’t mean anything if I’m not putting words on the page. I need to write an awful lot of content before I can start editing and shaping it into the form of a publishable book.
  2. I know from experience that writing helps me cope with depression and anxiety. It is my reflection time. I fell off the writing wagon for a good portion of December, and I could see a huge difference. I was irritable. I was more impatient. I was missing out on that first-thing-in-the-morning therapy session to clear my head and focus my heart. As an introvert, I desperately need this time of reflection and focus and “me time.” I had been doing a lot of extroverting without taking time to reflect and recharge, and it was taking a toll on me big time. My husband was also laid off in November, so with him being home all of the time it was more difficult for me to get any time to myself. Writing helps me articulate those things that are weighing on my mind. I can leave them on the page and go forward with my day without those things still rattling around in my brain. I was leaving these thoughts in my brain, and they were becoming heavy.
  3. If there’s one skill in the world I want to hone the most (out of way too many things I’d love to be good at), it’s writing. I have many interests, but the thing I truly want to be in life is a writer. So it’s crucial that I practice this skill every single day without fail. I can’t call myself a writer if it’s not something I do obsessively. Writing is a muscle I need to flex more than any other creative muscle because it’s the thing I care about most. The more I do it, the more I’ll love it. The more I love it, the more of a priority it will be in my life. The more priority I give it, the more likely I am to keep going and succeed. It’s the thing I want to build momentum with, and I build momentum by doing, by writing a lot, by showing up every day.

What are you afraid of when it comes to writing?*

I’m afraid of my writing being useless. Brain dumps are therapeutic, but I feel the pressure to make things that have purpose. When I write, I want it to help someone. I want my words to be part of a greater whole. I don’t want them to sit silently in a long string of meaningless journal entries.

On the other side of that coin, if I write something that is intended to be shared, there is a ton of vulnerability in sharing those words. Will people get what I’m putting out there? What if I’ve been too vulnerable and transparent and the wrong person sees it and judges me for it? What if no one sees it and I’ve done all that work and poured out my heart for nothing? If I’m putting myself out there as someone who’s passionate about writing, there’s the expectation that I shouldn’t completely suck at it. If I’m projecting myself as something, there’s the pressure to be competent.

*These unfounded fears are exactly the reason I write this blog. There are thousands of ways that Resistance sneaks into our brains and makes us believe that our work is meaningless. Mind over matter, friends! Show up and do the work so the Muse can get stronger than these stupid little fears that try to trip us up and keep us from going further up and further in.

What sacrifices will you have to make in order to carve out half an hour a day for writing?

The only thing really required of me is to be more disciplined and focused. I already am in the habit of waking up at 4am to write (now I couldn’t get up later if I tried). I get up, shower, get dressed for work, make a cup of coffee, then sit at my desk. I usually have 30-45 minutes of writing time before I have to leave for work. The temptation is to fill that time with other things I need to get done. I very often fill that time with other tasks, and that’s something I need to get out of the habit of doing. Those things need to go on a to-do list for later on in the day. The chunk of time between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. is non-negotiable writing time. It may be necessary to set aside a chunk of time after I get home from work to see that those things get checked off the list so I’m not tempted to carry them into my writing time.

 

What are you doing to encourage your creative momentum this year? In what ways are you committing to showing up every day? What do you look forward to saying you’ve accomplished by the end of 2017?

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