A Love Letter To Writers

Dear Writers, 

The world needs you desperately.

Your words matter. It may feel like you’re just sitting in a chair, clacking away at your laptop, but you are doing more than you will ever know. You are changing lives. You are shifting energy — yours and that of your readers. You are offering hope where there was none. You are a spark where darkness once reigned. Your stories offer relief and your ideas offer wisdom and your willingness to shine a flashlight on the murkiest edges of your humanity shows us that we are all murky — and we all have light.

Your life and your work and your art are required — now more than ever. Your writing matters deeply to the quiet souls who will never reach out to you, because they’re clinging to your sentences like life rafts. Your writing matters to those who do reach out but are less kind than your tender artistic soul might hope, because they’re so lost in their own misery they don’t see the beacon you’re shining for what it is — until many years later when something you once penned comes to them in a broken moment and offers a crack of illumination to their midnight. Your words matter to the friends and family and readers who adore you, both for yourself and for the words you give them for experiences they can’t explain. You bring hope, connection, healing, and light to those who can’t always find it for themselves.

Your words matter. If something is hiding in you that you’ve been longing to type out for others, then you are a writer — whether you have five readers or five million. And you have genius.

Don’t be alarmed by the word “genius.” Throwing that word around can be a trigger. Utter the g-word and every brain gremlin that ever assembled around your frontal lobe to cackle over your perceived failures and missed targets shows up with pitchforks to spear you. Roasting you over the flame, they howl so loudly that the voice of your wiser self — the one who knows you cannot fail, that you are whole, that you have worlds to offer — is drowned out.

But genius you are. Because you are here, because you have lived and you have stories and heartbreak and a command of words to illuminate what others can only feel. But if you’re not feeling your own genius right at this very moment, let me give you a spark.

{Strikes match.}

See that small light, right here in front of you?

It’s faith.

Faith that I will hold for you until you can hold it for yourself.

Follow this small light.

As you do, trust that other sparks will appear — sometimes off in the distance but often right in front of you.

Follow those small lights, those small sparks, and you will get where you need and want to go.

You will find your path.

And realize you’ve been on it all along.

I truly — madly, deeply, right-down-to-my-very-soul — believe you are here right now, reading these words, because you are a genius. Deeply gifted and full of potential and bright love tempered by messy humanity. You love what you do, you feel compelled and pulled and drawn by something you rarely understand — and you are so deeply needed in this world.

I’ve become obsessed with helping other writers (and artists and creators and makers and dreamer-doers) because I believe that together we can help each other learn our secrets — the secrets of our stories, our souls, our own innate wisdom. I’ve logged many years and many miles down this path but, as we all know, that path never ends. It’s always stretching out before us, ready to show us something new, something surprising. In one twist the path can shatter our world. But as we move down the next curve, our world is set to rights and our faith restored.

Sometimes with just one small match.

We all have the key that unlocks our genius. Maybe it was buried years ago and now we need to dig for it. Maybe we tossed into a hydrangea bush and walked away for awhile. Maybe you just need to try your key in a new door.

The key to our art is the key to ourselves. The key to ourselves is the key to our art.

In my experience, the key to life is simply feeling better. However we can from where ever we are. Learning how to feel better peels away the layers and shows us new doors and reminds us where that damn hydrangea bush is.

Art is meant to help people sob to their favorite country song or watch a movie and hope or read a story that gives them courage to confront what feels insurmountable. Artists make that stuff to help the world feel better. But artists need help feeling better too.

I want to help you to feel better — about yourself, your art, your path through the world, and the progress you’re making.

As we begin recognizing ourselves as the whole, loved, and profoundly human beings we are, we watch our writing soar. We write the pieces of our lives and souls that we long to write — and we help shift the world. Because that’s what writing can do if you’re willing to know yourself, dig deep into your soul, pull out the demons hiding in your rib cage and the gremlins creeping about your skull. It’s not always easy, it’s certainly not always fun, but I promise you — if you keep moving, keep taking care of yourself, keep creating, and keep digging into the messy bits of your life and soul — it will get fun.

Instead of constantly pushing, you’ll feel pulled. Instead of wondering what’s next or what do I do now or how do I do it — you’ll allow your intuition and a deep sense of quiet knowing to guide you. And it will feel right and propel you farther and faster than you would’ve dreamed possible.

This is my vision for us and I would love to hold it for you. Until you’re ready to hold it for yourself — and for others. Or, if you’ve been doing the holding — for so many people, for so long — let me pick it up and carry it for awhile. You’ve been pushing that boulder up the hill for long enough. It’s time to let it crest the hill and be swept up in the joy that comes from chasing that boulder, laughing as it picks up speed, careening through grassy knolls and ancient redwoods and past startled elephants. As we’re pulled by the work we’re here to do, we find the peace that comes from claiming the path we know is ours.

Love and all the matches I have,

Amber

Where Money and Emotion Tango

So many of our human issues are tied up in money. Both on a global scale and on a deeply personal one. Money in and of itself is a neutral force. But money easily absorbs whatever emotions we want to plaster on top of it. Money represents so much to us - love, power, success, freedom. Any one of us can have any one of these things without money, but we throw money up as a barrier to what we want. I know I sure do.

My tendency to under earn throughout my adult life has affected my self-esteem and my belief in my talent and my success. At times, to an unreasonable degree. Lots of people slam face first into this particular brick wall - especially artists.

When tying my self-worth up in my belief that lack of money equals lack of talent, I also had to admit that I never really invested in myself or in the kind of writing I truly want to do. Sure, you don't necessarily need money to do this, but you do need energy. To be fair, much of my work over the past five years was to get me to the point where I felt like I could invest in myself this way. I've been blogging for almost ten years. I wrote stories I cared about. I used words to preserve pieces of myself and my history. I did my best to adjust my lifestyle so that my energy was solid and my sensitivities managed. When I hit rock bottom, I did what I could to lurch upward. When I hit rock bottom again, I flailed and then I found help in the upward lurch. Some writers need writing to find themselves, some writers need to find themselves before they can truly write. I needed both. Not that we are ever found, of course, that's kind of a dumb phrase. We're always here, but maybe we're buried. Or we've slipped away from ourselves, our intuition, our deep knowing of who we are and what we're here to do.

I spent a lot of my thirties hunting for myself, digging through the layers until I found my center. Then I lost my center, found it,  lost it, then I found it again. So it goes with center-finding. Balance is never rock solid, it's always at the mercy of the wind. Until you realize that the wind can't blow you any farther than you choose to go.

But one of the things I still struggle with is money. Lucky for me, now I can struggle with money while actually having some. When my dad died, he left $40,000 buried in the woods (true story) and a piece of property that we decided to sell. Buried treasure doesn't last long when you have hospital bills and mortuaries to pay, but the property sale helped me get to the place where I always believed I should be at this age. Namely, solvent.

Some of me felt guilty that it took a parent dying to get me there. Sometimes it felt like blood money, but most of me didn't feel that bad about that. I was perfectly willing to look at it as a paycheck for dealing with the pain, anguish, stress, grief, and crazy details of death more or less gracefully. (Mostly less.) What I felt guilty about was that the money made so much of a difference to me. Shouldn't I have gotten there on my own? Shouldn't I have figured out money by my mid-30s? Shouldn't I have been more frugal? A parent's death shouldn't be a get-out-of-debt-free card. Maybe yes, maybe no. But spiritual counter-arguments of the "we all have our own paths and timelines" persuasion fall on deaf ears when you're eager to feel terrible about yourself.

Money guilt, even though I'm not in the same dire $257-away-from-being-flat-broke straits as I once was, still rears its goblin head to stick out its tongue at me. Especially when I choose not to earn it.

A few months ago, I did a scary thing. When my last two big freelance contracts ended at almost precisely the same time, rather than engage in my usual six stages of coping - panic, worry, panic again, get over it, write things that excite me for awhile, hunt for a new client, find a new client - I opted to skip the panic part.

Instead, I decided to buy myself two months to write what I wanted to write, to work on projects that fed me rather than drained me, to both invest deeply in work I want to do and take the adult's version of summer vacation. Three days after I made the decision, I finished my book of animal stories. Vindication! My choice was the right one! Tainted by only the smallest amount of guilt. Yes, part of the deal of buying myself two months of writing was that I wasn't allowed to feel bad about it, but the gremlins devour good intentions like candy corn. Then a few weeks later, my channeled blog was born. Now I'm creating some stuff for writers who want to learn how to use their intuition to make the whole process of writing easier and more fun and hopefully more likely to wow the world with their mad genius. (Do you know any writers who'd be into this? Send 'em my way! Are you a writer who'd be into this?) It's fun and I love it and now I get to love rather than dread sitting down to work.

But now I'm at the end of my two months. I deeply want to keep investing in my own work and I do have the means to do it, but the Real Adults Make Money (Preferably Lots of Money) belief is tough to elude. So are the gremlins of "this is self-indulgent" and "who are you to think you can make money doing what you actually want to do?" and the "lucky you, you certainly couldn't do this if you had a family to take care of!" All I can do is confront them head on and decide what's truly important to me. While doing my best to untangle my own issues around money and trust in myself and my abilities.

My issues with money are mostly just my issues with myself - where I don't trust myself, where I don't trust my work, where I don't trust the world. But trust is a muscle. All you can do is lean on it and hope it grows stronger.

Ask For a Sign and You'll Get One

Turns out, I'm not going to live forever. It also happens that if I want children, my childless days will be coming to a rapid halt in the very near future. I'll be 37 in July, guys. Which gives me a rather short span of time to do everything I want to do ever before kids muck it all up. So in the next year or two, I need to have many amazing adventures, spend a month in Bali and France, learn how to earn a lot of money while also having plenty of time to hang out with babies, and, I dunno, buy a house or something. It's a hefty to-do list. What does a person do when they suddenly realize they don't have forever to do all the things they want in life? If you're me, you decide to devote yourself wholeheartedly to writing animal stories, and pretending you have answers on youtube. Because animal stories are obviously the way to get to Bali and also have plenty of money to pay for babies. Cough.

I'm forging a path that doesn't necessarily make good, common sense. Do I believe it's possible to have what I truly want in life? Absolutely. Do I have any idea how to do it? Nope. But to build the life you want, one that doesn't necessarily look like everyone else's, you have to listen to yourself. You have to get really clear on what you truly want to do, what you truly have to offer, and offer it up in the best way you can in that moment. 

I have anywhere from one to three years to make a lot of things happen for myself before it's baby go-time. It feels more possible than ever, but only if I follow my intuition. Because that's the only thing that can tell me how to get where I really want to go. 

I literally wrote the book on freelance writing (fine, one of the many books on freelance writing), but I've started to realize that freelance writing isn't actually what I want to do. I don't want to write for other publications, I don't want to hustle, I don't want to pitch. It exhausts and drains me and it's taken me fifteen years to admit that. In Turning Pro, Steven Pressfield talks about shadow careers, about career paths that resemble what you want to do but are really just a form of resistance. I've been resisting what I actually want to do for a decade and a half now. In many ways, I do love freelance writing. I love talking to people about their jobs and their passions and their businesses and I love writing about burlesque dancers and chefs and mountain climbers and canny CEOS. And I will happily continue to do it until what I actually want to do begins to make sense in the real world.

Here's the paradox: In order for writing animal stories to make sense as a career choice in the real world, I have to abandon the real world. I have to allow myself to dream in a way that felt foreign even just a few months ago. Because I want to be an artist - yes, a writer, but not a writer in any of its more professional, practical forms. I want to write ridiculous stories about talking raccoons who wear cravats and go on adventures. I want to channel for people, something that I still have trouble saying out loud because what?

Owning what you really want isn't always easy, especially when what you really want wouldn't make sense to most people you pass on the street. But that just makes it even more essential that you do it. We need the strange and unconventional and creative in this world now more than ever. Because if we keep doing it the way we've always done, we'll keep getting what we've always gotten.

Last week, we drove along the coast of California until we hit Esalen in Big Sur. When we pulled up to the gate, they handed us a key that sent us here:

photo-6

Sometimes the universe sends you a literal and unmissable sign, and that sign says, "Go right ahead and be an artist, you irrepressible hippie, you." And so I shall.

Because When You Stop Being Utterly Fascinated By Your Own Life You Have To Find Some Other Way To Occupy Your Time

The more interesting my life gets, the less compelled I feel to write about it. This is new for me, because writing about my life used to be my favorite thing. Mostly because it was how I figured out myself and my world. Either I've gotten speedier at diagnosing the misalignment of my internal cogs or I've stopped caring. But since I love writing, when I stopped being super intrigued by myself, I had to write about something else. So my inner world spit forth a tiny British town full of nattily-dressed raccoons, scone-baking dormice, world-weary lemurs, and not-so-clever foxes. Since I also love this blog and wanted to share, I posted my first raccoon story with zero explanation or introduction, which led one person to wonder if it was some extended animal metaphor for my life. (It was not, though I dearly wish it was.) I presume it lead everyone else who read more than a paragraph to scratch their heads and wonder what sort of illegal substances I've gotten into this time. (None, surprisingly.)

I've written about nine of these animal stories and don't seem to be stopping, so I may keep sharing them here. Or I may not. For everything is subject to my whim and that's the way I like it. It seems to be shaping into a series of stories for kids in the six to ten range, so if you have one of those and think they might like reading/hearing about raccoons and displaced giraffes, let me know and I will send you chapters as I finish them.

My other project has been creating a youtube series with my friend Ben. He's an official licensed-in-the-state-of-California therapist. I'm not licensed to do anything in the state of California except drive and even that seems a bit questionable at times. But if you spend a great deal of your life trying to figure yourself and the world out, you end up with a lot of opinions. So we turned on the camera and started talking about things like making friends and rejection and finding your life purpose.

Someone called it Car Talk for Therapists, which tickled the hell out of me because I always loved Car Talk. I couldn't care less about cars, but they always sounded like they were having so much fun. That's sort of what we're hoping will happen with this - we find ourselves very entertaining, thank you - but we're still experimenting. The videos are here, if you're interested. Now that we've made a bunch of them, we're looking for ways to make them as fun and useful as possible. Suggestions and heckling welcome. 

Dreams Deferred

When someone dies, they leave behind a lot of stuff. Emotional stuff, yes, but also a shed full of thirty-year-old gardening magazines. To the best of my knowledge, the only time my father ever tried to grow anything was when he bought and planted a rosebush. His definition of gardening was building an electric fence around his flowers to keep the deer from chewing on them. An electric fence seems like overkill, but given that he peered out his front window one night and found a mountain lion on his porch gnawing on a deer haunch, maybe it was warranted.

At least the lion avoided the roses.

Dad lived up in the Santa Cruz mountains, miles down a dirt road, on ten acres of land that includes redwoods and a stream. Not bad, if you like that kind of thing. I remember lying in a hammock strung between two redwoods and reading Calvin & Hobbes in the sun. I would go stone hopping along the creek, followed by one of Dad's more adventurous cats.

Going through his stuff after he died, I began to fully understand some of our shared character traits. Dad had tons of educational materials he bought and never opened. So do I. He thought about writing a novel for years - we talked about it and he had copious and carefully organized plot notes. As far as I can tell, he died before he wrote the first chapter.

It's a form of resistance. You take the first step and then you drag your feet on taking the second step - sometimes for years. But what I've learned since is that you can always make a new choice. Just because Dad didn't ever start his novel doesn't mean I won't ever finish mine. Just because he never cracked open his audio courses on world religions doesn't mean I have to go to my grave having never finished reading my copy of Die Empty. It's easy to get lost in the comforting warmth of familial bonds, but his choices do not have to be mine. His struggles don't have to dictate my eagerness to build and create and learn.

Dad loved fantasy and science fiction. Sick to death of endless recitations of Goodnight Moon, he read me The Hobbit when I was three years old. I'd sit on the couch next to him with my sippy cup and security blanket and absorb tales of trolls and wizards and rings of power. He had vast bookshelves of the stuff and spent years upon years developing ideas for his own series without ever putting a word to paper.

He left behind a lot of stuff. My question is, what did he take with him?

Stephenie Meyer says her Twilight series came to her in a dream, and she transcribed her world of glittering vampires and adolescent fantasy onto paper and sold millions upon millions of copies. I like to think that will happen to Dad in his next life. That he'll wake up one morning and the plot line he spent years upon years developing in this life will burst into his brain fully formed, and all he'll have to do is copy it down. So maybe the work of this life won't be lost.

If you want to extrapolate wild theories based on a belief in reincarnation and soul memory, this could explain people like Mozart. You spend years, decades, lifetimes learning the rules, practicing the notes, playing the scales. Maybe you spend three deeply aggravating lifetimes being on of those people who tries and tries and never quite make it - and then you get born Adele and win Grammies and Oscars in your early 20s, after making the whole world shake with your music. I don't know. But I like to think that's possible and that my dad will get to see his work in print, even if the author plate holds a different name and picture.

Isn't that a nice thought? That even if you die without fulfilling a dream, all your work of this life could pay off in the next. Maybe nothing is wasted. So if you love something, do it. If you're bad at it, who cares? Even if you haven't the slightest hint of talent, practice as hard as you can. Maybe it will pay off two hundred years from now when you look completely different and have a license for a flying car. Maybe I should keep singing in the shower. Just because I sound like a choking alley cat doesn't mean that a few rounds from now I won't be Taylor Swift.

I like to think that maybe my dad will be born into another body in ten, twenty, fifty years and he'll want to be a writer, and that plot and world that he spent decades of this life developing and dreaming and researching will come to him, fully formed, like it was coming from another time or place. Maybe he won't understand it but he'll trust it and run with it. And the book he wanted to write in this life will be written in his next.