If I found inner peace, would my Substack still be interesting?

resistance to healing

During a trip to Canada last week, I sat on a train traveling between Montreal and Quebec City and listened to a Spotify-curated playlist called “528Hz Healing,” thinking of all the things I have to change about my mind.

I had just read Chelsea Bieker’s newsletter “Setting the Stage for your Creative Work” and was contemplating her point about connecting with intention/vision. She writes:

What do you really want to be doing/writing/making? Are you offering enough space in your day to go within and connect with the deepest part of you to make sure that the things you are doing suit the you of you NOW. So easily we can be mindlessly doing things that no longer align. We can be wrapped up in stories about ourselves that actually don’t have any business being in our current world. But to identify these things, we really have to be willing to look honestly at ourselves.

(subscribe below & DM me if you want a free month of her newsletter, I have codes for two people!)

So I got to thinking honestly about all of the things that prevent me from full engagement with my novel. There’s my day job, of course, then the chores that need to be done and the relationships that need to be maintained, the texts, the calls, the hangouts. I could do a better job setting boundaries and prioritizing my time. But honestly all of that felt like surface level stuff, almost like the convenient and obvious cover up of the root issue. A voice came to me, descended upon me, really, in a strangely angelic or otherworldly way, and it said: you really need to be nicer to yourself.

Then this second voice came in and was like: ew????

I am a spiritual person. I grew up Catholic and no longer subscribe, but I do have a relationship with God. God now just looks much different. My personal definition of God is “the natural unfolding of things.” I’ve started to pray again (mostly on planes) but I’m not praying to a person so much as a cosmic force. I am working on trusting and surrendering to God, the natural unfolding, no matter where that takes me.

That’s the deep spiritual work. But I also have a bounty of crystals. I have a long history with mindfulness meditation and frankly, I am in communication with the tree in my backyard. A beautiful woman gives me reiki and recently shared that she senses a lot of anger inside me (I KNOW BITCH!!). What I’m trying to say is I am not averse to spiritual practices, in fact I love them. But I have noticed this…chilling disgust…when stumbling upon spiritual practices that involve self-love. Scrolling through one of my meditation apps right now, I get a feeling of excitement looking at the meditations around acceptance, attunement, breath, grounding—but “Heart-centered”? “Appreciation”? “Pleasure”? “Warmth”??? It’s borderline cringe to me.

I think I present myself, usually, as kind and warm. But I have felt, for a long time, like the softness inside of me is encased in a hard shell, like it’s an unshucked oyster or one of those geodes you need to slam a hammer into in order to see the purple sparkly crystal in the center. My reiki lady (she also gives me acupuncture, side note, I love it) told me I have a very sweet heart. And she said it so gentle and nice but it mostly made me sad, because I think it’s true that I do, but I feel like there’s this ring of fire around it. There is something that prevents me from fully leaning into softness, kindness, and love.

Chelsea’s newsletter got me thinking about how that relates to my writing. I realized that some part of this resistance comes from a fear that, if I am all love, I won’t be interesting. I’ll be high vibe and compassionate toward ALL, waking up with gratitude and heart-centered appreciation. What would my novel look like if that was my life? What would I write about?? When I sit down to write a Substack post, I am doing so to work through some internal conflict. Some way of thinking that doesn’t serve me, some pattern I want to break. The writing helps me find resolution, or at least acceptance in the not-knowing. This is true for my fiction writing too. I write to answer some question I have, a question I wouldn’t be able to understand through the lens of my own, actual life. In my current project, I am giving my characters an experience I don’t anticipate ever having myself, and that freedom, that space to play clears the way for an understanding of my own desire and fear.

As I read over what I’ve written here today, I now see that being nice to myself and embodying love doesn’t mean I’ll never have internal conflict to inspire my work. I can soften the hard shell around my heart, I can extinguish its ring of fire, and I will still have moments of feeling sad and angry or jealous or scared. I can write my way through those moments and still come out with a novel. But why doesn’t that sound satisfying?

I am afraid that I am my ring of fire. I am afraid that the edge that my darkness gives me is what makes me me, and if I lose it to love, I will be some watered down version of myself. I think it’s probably the opposite. I think love is expansive, and I think, probably, embracing it would help me uncover new depths of how I could interact with myself and with others, including readers. But I worry that readers like me for my darkness. I worry that no one wants to hear about my spiritual quest, they just want to hear about my publishing insecurities, or me drinking too much, or my fucked up parasocial relationships. Because that’s juicy and interesting and fun.

When I write a post like this that isn’t funny or juicy at all, I feel like I’m letting you down. But it does still feel like the me that I know. It’s the me I keep a little more private, the one who is confused in a way that isn’t cute or relatable, the one who is trying, earnestly and maybe desperately, to feel better in her brain.

I grew up admiring tortured artists. I listened to too much Bright Eyes and yeah of course I loved The Bell Jar. But in my later 20s, when I was the most immersed in my daily spiritual practices—meditating, journaling, waking up early to read Tara Brach and Thich Nhat Hanh—it occurred to me that I no longer thought that it was cool to be sad. I hope you’ll have grace with me with that sentiment, because of course I know sadness is a valid human emotion that should not be reduced to anti-coolness, I know that major depressive disorder is real and very challenging to manage. I’m not talking about that. I’m referring to the mindset I’m writing about today: that to be interesting, I need to be sad. I need to be tortured. And I felt so good when this realization dawned on me—it’s not cool to be sad—because it gave me permission to embody light and live in gratitude instead.

But that was before I started writing. At some point, my spiritual era gave way to a literary one. My Tara Brach books were replaced by Sally Rooney! I started to read novels about women behaving badly. Their inner monologues were dripping with judgment and cynicism (have you read The New Me?) and they were having sex with men they should not have sex with (Cold New Climate is soooo fucking good). Suddenly I remembered what was so delicious about being tortured! And in that, I lost the yearning for real love, the kind that can’t fully exist on paper.

I am still drafting my novel, but I also have felt, lately, called back to the spiritual. I’m trying to have a baby, and I know I will never be perfect for that baby, but there are some things inside me that I want to start healing because I don’t want to pass them down. I have this tendency to go all or nothing—I’m either reading and writing, immersed in my literary goals, or I am meditating and self-caring, absorbed in my spiritual ones. I want my literary and spiritual worlds to complement one another. I want the act of writing to be spiritual, and I want my spiritual seeking to yield stronger writing. I want to see what I am capable of expressing from inside my softness.

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*~*~* LPB RECOMMENDS *~*~*

a new segment in which i recommend a random thing that has made my life better lately <3

• Deleting photos off your phone!! How many photos do you have? I have 23,738! I am a photo hoarder and major memory keeper. I have yet to find a way to organize, store, and delete photos without being driven mad, but here are some tips that are getting me there:

1. Start with 2024 and work backwards. It will be emotionally easier to delete newer photos.

2. When it feels painful to delete, remember that, in a few years, you are way more likely to enjoy browsing through 100 photos than you are through 600. If you keep too many, you’ll feel too overwhelmed to dig into them. They won’t be as special. You’re doing this for the good of your future self!!

3. Try to focus on saving the photos that most perfectly capture the feeling of the year. So for example, when I look back on 2022, I personally want to save the photos that showcase my daily life (I love looking back on old photos that show details of my bedrooms or apartments from the past) or high points of the year (really fun hangouts, weekend trips, etc).

4. If you want to chip away at this slowly, make a daily habit of typing the current date into your photo app search bar & look through every photo you’ve taken on that day across the years, deleting the ones that no longer serve you.

   Tell me if you have any other tips please!!