Starting a Creative Practice

Creative practice: Refilling the Well with Art

As the smoke from the Canadian wildfires fills my neighborhood and little house with pine soaked soot that triggers my condition, I thought it was a really good time to talk about refilling the creative well through a creative practice.

My body would like to hyperfocus on survival right now, even though we are doing a perfectly fine job surviving. The anxiety this condition gifts me in these moments of a flare has a lot of chemical energy. Energy that needs guidance to prevent it from turning into neurosis, catastrophizing, and just generally feeling miserable.

This post is about becoming aware of the relationship we have with our bodies, our psyches, and the environment we’re in to see how that has an impact on our creativity. And why in this place of self-awareness, no matter the circumstances, no matter how far away we might feel from doing the artistic endeavor we have in mind, we are still helping ourselves to create.

So my understanding of creativity has changed a bit with being able to push back a lot of the numbness that comes along with this condition. I’m doing a lot of nervous system focused work (vagus nerve stimulation with a TENs machine), along with calming the immune system and stabalizing the mast cells. With the healing of my nervous system, a lot more sensations connected to emotions and thoughts are turning back on. Creativity is no longer just the logical problem-solving that my brain would like to categorize it as. Creativity is also an exploration of emotions and sensations, and how we feel about the things that come up in our work.

There is a being, not just a brain, in the creativity relationship. And that being needs to feel to be connected to the work it’s making. And that can be really difficult when dealing with chronic illness, where your sensations might be overwhelmed by pain all the time, anxieties, feelings of worthlessness, or hyperfocus to distract from any feelings at all. Chronic illness demands a lot from a being, not just the body. And even though there are many lessons to learn and ways to evolve into a greater version of oneself that never would’ve been available without such an intense catalyst, it can also suffocate the creative process when it’s too much.

Poverty can suffocate the creative process. Poverty and chronic illness tend to go hand-in-hand, both perpetuating the other. When you need your creativity to escape anything, it’s very easy to lose sight of the value of creativity outside of that external goal. It’s hard to remember why you turned to creativity before it became eclipsed by the desperate goal to survive.

 

Creativity versus the World

When creativity is muddled by one’s environment, the relationship with creativity becomes distorted. Our creativity is a reflection of ourselves, but sometimes it becomes warped into what it’s being asked to be by the problem we’re trying to solve. We start believing that creativity is a thing we do, an entitlement, something that should be able to turn on at a moment’s notice, forever ready. It should never lead us down the wrong path, but only the one we want, quick AF, and that it should automatically deliver us our goals.

You know, like it’s technology, something built to grant us our wishes and work exactly as we demand. We treat creativity like it’s one of the products we make, instead of the source of creation.

When one gets stuck in that dismissive perspective of creativity, you can start getting frustrated when it’s just not working the way you want it to. You can start getting angry that it’s just not delivering. And you can start feeling worthless, because it’s you, isn’t it? You’re the one not delivering. You’re the one not solving all your problems. You’re the one failing, and maybe you’re just not any good at this creative stuff. Real creatives make this look easy, so you can’t actually be a creative. You’re just an imposter.

A defective imposter, at that. (WTF brain? Why do you have to be so mean?)

We are bombarded with messages from people who want to make money by telling us how to feel about our relationship with the creative process. They tell us that the process is easy, and you just need to do these quick tips, buy their book, sign up for their course, invest your time and energy and money into solving your creative deficit. And that if you invest enough, eventually you will be rewarded with the results you want. The results you’ve been promised — the ones all those other creative’s are getting.

Surely, that’s what they did, right? They don’t struggle. Go on Instagram and see all the creative’s who make their work look easy. It can be easy for you too. Just invest in solving your creativity problem.

The thing is, there’s no such thing as a creativity problem. There’s nothing wrong with anyone’s creativity; the problem is in our relationships with ourselves.

Creativity lives within

We forget why our creativity exists. We forget the inner gains as we tunnel vision on the outer goals from creativity. We forget that beings don’t exist to do the same thing every day like machines. And by asking ourselves to do that — no matter the goal — is us asking ourselves to come up with creative solutions to harm ourselves.

We are not characters in video games that get better by leveling up individual stats for hours upon hours a day. There is a whole being that needs to be addressed, that needs to be fueled at all levels, and creativity is connected to that whole being. It’s not like a limb where the stress is felt only if you overwork the joint, or pull a muscle, or break a bone. Creativity lives in our nervous system, in the three main brains in our skull, in our muscle memory, our reflexes, our sensations of the world. It’s in our memories of the past, in our relationships with society, and with being human. Creativity is a part of our psyche, just as much as a part of our logic, and if we are doing things that fail to connect all those relationships properly, creativity can struggle to flow.

Chronic illness turned the question of what I wanted from my body into the immediate, frustrating answer of “I just want it to work”. And of course, the thing I wanted was impossible to have. I didn’t want to accept what I was experiencing. But it’s in acceptance that we remove a lot of the stress of chronic illness.

We already have a world out there refusing to accept that people break, that rest is required, that the demands being placed upon us to be allowed to live, never mind the quality of that life, are not only unrealistic, but damaging. Capitalism is an abusive relationship, and when you start believing the messages being sent to you, basic aging is suddenly a failure.

Creativity isn’t a light switch. It’s a state of being, and it’s only truly accessible when we accept it for what it is instead of trying to distort it into something more convenient. Feeding it requires taking care of all those things that we want to ignore as we focus on our goals. It is more demanding than maintaining a machine, because we are very good at ignoring the very big demands that are placed on us every day, and creativity takes a hit as a result. And if you have chronic illness, and are dealing with financial difficulties, or relationships where you are expected to be at a certain level all the time, no matter what, those stressors compound exponentially.

If you are someone who doesn’t accept. If you’re someone still asleep, thinking that you can force your way out of the situation of life with just a little more breaking of yourself for later gain, you are the problem that is killing your creativity. There’s only so much a being can take.

So how do you repair your relationship with your creativity enough to allow it to flow?

Accepting The Impossible, aka, Mindfulness

It starts with acceptance. Accepting all the shit you don’t want except. Accepting the emotions that you’re running from. It is shit to feel like a failure, and no one wants to feel those feelings for long. But in acceptance of those feelings, is also the acceptance that you weren’t given a choice.

This is life exactly as it is.

Unfair. Painful. Full of extremely unrealistic expectations from a species that is destroying the one planet it can survive on. All these demands are coming from a place of insanity, and internalizing them can only spread that madness further, and break us.

In a place of acceptance is the ability to feel again. It’s the ability to reconnect with your body and your environment. It’s the ability to reconnect your emotions to your thoughts and sensations, and to have a richer experience of being.

It’s about letting go of those expectations and demands that claim you can only do things one way: goal centric. The insistence that you should find a way to be productive while being creative.

The trap of creative productivity

There’s something funny about the concept of productivity, especially in this current world. If one were to think of a production line, productivity would be about making more things people need, faster. What does productivity currently mean when it’s being sold to us by the business self-help gurus? It’s about making money. It’s about making meaningless things, more superficial things, faster, so-called “smarter”, for the end goal of money. Where everything you do turns into a way to make money. Everything. Hey, you could write a song right now for fun… but would it sell?

It’s suffocating. Paralyzing. Until can’t do a fucking thing without having to figure out if you can make a cent off of it at the end, and they want to call that self-help. Talk about psychosis.

It’s not just art though. What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be when you grow up (or grow older)? Will it make money? Will it be attractive to a mate? Will it make you into a worthy person deserving of love and respect? No, not in this world? Then do the thing that makes money.

Don’t dream. Don’t hope. Don’t wish to be better or to change the world — that’s not going to make money. Don’t BE unless you fit into this form. Settle. Then production line it.

Our environment decides a lot about how we feel about ourselves. It frames everything. And when you are stuck in an abusive environment, be it the ability to blame a bad job, a hurtful person, or dehumanizing societal norms, it is hard to find perspective. You’re in it, and become a product of it.

This isn’t a go live in the woods blog. We have to find balance.

These messages and distortions of us absolutely limit and cripple the creative process. We stop asking ourselves how to create, and instead focus on getting as many products out there as possible. It becomes all about the goal and not the creation. We lose the journey of exploration, the sinking into the psyche and pulling back knowledge, inspiration, emotion, pain, and reflections of being that we can share with others. Connect with others.

I’m not saying you can’t create to make money. I’m not even saying that can’t be the reason you show up every day to create. I’m in no way blind to the capitalistic hellscape I’m forced to participate in. If anything, I am still too connected and distorted by it.

What I am saying is that you cannot turn to that abusive relationship to maintain your creativity. And your creativity will be harmed because YOU will be harmed. There is no way to minimize down a being’s worth, their time, their talents, their reflections of emotions and philosophy into a production line, without inflicting great harm on a person. It is dehumanizing, and creativity cannot flourish in such a two-dimensional space.

Creativity is not a get rich quick scheme. Finding your bliss shouldn’t be one either.

Do not go into the creative field to make money, if you want to remain a creative by the end of it. Oh, we love the lie. We love to say that we can have 2 goals in a business model, the first goal to make money and the second to make the world better, or make the best product, or, I dunno, clean up the environment, etc. It doesn’t matter; the first goal will always take precedent. Always.

This is why businesses exist: to make money. Deluding yourself otherwise is bullshit. When you are participating in the act of making money, what your skills and talents are will never be as important as getting that cash at the end of the day. You will be valued by that cash, your entire sense of self slapped with pricetag of how much you are worth in this endeavor. It is not a community. It is not a lovefest between you and fans. It is a job. One that limits how you present yourself to the world to maintain that job. One that asks you to create things you might not want to create to maintain that job. One that can never truly be a reflection of you as a being, because the purpose of that job is cashflow, not self realization.

Do not turn to your job to become a better person; it cannot facilitate it. Become a better person and bring that to your job.

Or change the goal of your job, and give up trying to compromise. Maybe you’re already independently wealthy and you can do that. Maybe you’re like me, and your creativity won’t flow when you’re trying to compromise with this shit. Wonderful. Otherwise, stop drowning your creative process in a field that doesn’t reward the essence of creativity. If repetition is required to make a buck — if the production line is required for your creativity — you can’t go to work to refill the empty well. It won’t work.

Dedicating space to create

Exploring creativity outside of distorted goals is a good way to remember why one creates, and what creativity provides. Make a practice of it, a play date, a therapy session, a rest, an indulgence. Give yourself permission, and then give yourself time. Fall in love with what you do by doing something else that doesn’t have the same demands and expectations. And do not allow yourself to place demands on your practice of creativity.

What do you need? Not much.

You need a space to create. A physical space, one ideally with a clear schedule free of interruptions. And probably most importantly, you need to show up, ideally with a guilt free conscience and curious to explore.

You do not get to fail. Failure comes from a place of expectation, and creativity cannot be about expectation. It’s about exploration. It’s about feeling the process, and allowing it to be exactly what it is in the moment. Allowing yourself to be exactly who you are in that moment, the frustration, insecurity, boredom, curiosity, seeking, worried about time, lonely, in pain, etc.

You also don’t get to be bad at it. There is no expectation of a result, and therefore no way to judge if you’ve achieved that result or not.

When lost in the creative process, exploring, results meaning nothing. You can throw it out at the end if you want. You can daydream and never write a single word down. Just as long as you experience the process, whole body, and accept it all as it comes.

Creating for creativity’s sake. If you need your creativity to flow, you have to focus on the actual problem. You. You need a reset. You need a place to be, to do, without judgement, without expectation, without the noise and stress the world bombards with. You need a place to be free, so create it.

The creative struggle with my personal environment

I’ve been seeing my creative deficits since getting back into writing. It was much easier to focus on the executive dysfunction’s, partially because in some ways they’re easier to face. They’re also easier to communicate. I can say working memory, or attention span, and people can relate without asking too much from themselves.

It’s harder to communicate well in regards to — I don’t want to call it writer’s block, because it’s not. I could absolutely sit down and write. But I couldn’t feel what I was writing, and feeling is what writing is all about. And every time I would delve deep, and try to find where those feelings have gone, all I could find were feelings about chronic illness, about disability, about poverty, and about the society that has framed these things into abnormals states of being — there are millions of us with chronic illness and disability. Hundreds of millions of people are in extreme poverty, while billions are in societal poverty. It is normal!

But the world defines us into failures. Invisible. No one wants to hear about reality when they’re turning to the computer to escape reality. And the harder it was to feel, to connect with my body and my emotions, the more I internalize those distorted, frankly fucked-up messages that I was the problem. That I was abnormal. That somehow something intrinsic in me had made this the obvious end result, no matter how much I fought to get out of this pit our society keeps dark for those they don’t want to see.

So then my creativity came about in defiance of that. Still not feeling, still not accepting, still running away. Seeking ways to break myself to help escape and feel the other things — the exhaustion and frustration and failures — so I wouldn’t have to feel so broken as a whole.

A part of me saw that as long as I was physically ill, I could understand why I was failing, why I wasn’t being productive enough with my time and therefore wasn’t living up to the distorted capitalistic message. By participating in my self-destruction physically by refusing to rest, by investing all my time and energy — energy I don’t have — into getting out, I was finding a way to emotionally free myself from the abusive messaging bombarded at every single person when it comes to self-worth and how they spend their time.

I just had to keep breaking myself physically, so I wouldn’t have to hold myself up to the standard that was killing me to try to achieve.

Creativity is a sword with as many edges as you can imagine

Our creativity is a gift, that can create a door to these psychological cages we participate in building. We might have never come up with the initial message, and we certainly didn’t set the external world stakes for what happens if we disregard those messages and fail the expectations this abusive society gives us to survive. But we do participate in believing the message.

We participate in how we frame ourselves to that message, and how we think about ourselves in relation to that message. We can cage ourselves and that message, exaggerating and amplifying it, only ever comparing ourselves to that message, and calling that message “truth”.

We do this to ourselves long after the world changes. And from that mental cage, we leave no space for change.

It takes a lot of mental energy to trap oneself. It can also take a lot of creativity to keep oneself trapped, distorting any positive messages that point out that things aren’t necessarily the way we keep insisting they are. This also drains our creativity, and distorts our relationship with our creativity. It’s a skill, creating depths of emotion and sensation out of basic thoughts and words. That skill can absolutely cut us just as much as it frees others.

Letting go to be able to receive

The open palm. I don’t visualize a lot of things, but during my PTSD therapy years back, the open palm was this huge breakthrough for me. Where I realized there was no way to let anything in, no way to seek new information, new truths, new perspectives, etc, if our hand was clenched upon an absolute. As long as your holding something tight, be it an idea, belief, pain, memory, you cannot reach out to accept anything else in. One has to release it all to be open to what will come.

This includes how we see ourselves. How we see our past. How we see our journey and where we think we are on it. None of that can be re-created or reimagined if we are so tightly clenched to our preconceptions and definitions of things that are purely conceptual.

I think mindfulness mixed with art therapy is extremely healing. It helps to break down expectations, and face that we are the ones giving it value. That when we feel the worst stakes crushing down on us because we have failed to meet an expectation, we are the ones who participated in that relationship of thought and punishment.

When we do it because we lack self-awareness, it can be extremely damaging. But gaining self-awareness doesn’t mean it’s not extremely hard to let go. So there are things like a practice of art, a practice of creativity, that shows us it’s okay to let go and explore something new, and to be something — someone — different in that moment.

You don’t have to conceptualize consequences for being free. You can just be free.

Find ways to seek new sensations. I always wondered why art rarely focuses on olfactory senses, considering how memory works, how intense a simple smell can have on our emotions. There’s music, rhythms, and dancing, and moving that can unlock muscle memory and engage the nervous system.

There is the act of making visual art, finding a large canvas to move around and explore with one’s whole body, not just the eyes. Paint over it a million times — paint with dirt; it doesn’t matter. It’s the act of letting your body make a mark, to live in its environment and be a body being that’s important, not holding onto the results.

There’s telling a story, not worried about which words to use, using your whole body to tell it, possibly recording it to get the emotional cadence from the voice. Singing — one could try singing a story like an opera.

It’s about feeling, and letting art lead the way. Making art to help to connect with one’s feelings, giving them a safe outlet that’s contained for those who fear being overwhelmed by their feelings. Creating space for art can be about creating a safe space to experience feelings and sensations that one does not feel safe to have in their everyday world.

Trauma can make feeling seem dangerous. Art can provide safe space and acceptance. Ugly art, strange, distorted, raw, uncomfortable art can be so cathartic when dealing with trauma and trying to find worth in what feels worthless.

Reconnecting with the source of creativity is reconnecting with being alive

It’s so important. It is so healing. It’s a journey that never ends because creativity is what every living being is. Anything and everything you do can be creative, because it’s a part of existing as a living being.

We are not unfeeling machines that only do what we’re programmed to do. We are not inanimate objects for the background of someone else’s existence, meant to be neglected and dissapear because we don’t fit the mad conceptualizations of society. We are an amazing collections of atoms that have formed elements, cells, thoughts, will, and actions: that we exist at all is the creative force.

Returning to celebrate what it is to exist, to feel, to conceptualize, to act, is how we recharge our creativity. When we stop emulating the inanimate and the automatons, we remember what it is to truly exist.

You don’t need to buy a book for this. You don’t need to pay for a class. Although, it doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. The celebration of life can be shared, creativity flooding out, allowing us to change with our moods — allowing us to have moods — and accepting it all. Just ensure that you can do this practice with others without activating the judgemental inner self. If you feel like you need to perform, don’t trap yourself with an audience and claim it’s to help you heal. It’s not; it’s to continue harming yourself.

When one is recharged again, no longer growing dim as you’re changed by this process, you will find that your creativity flows again for those projects that just weren’t getting done before. Not only that, you find that those projects change as you return to them, becoming more interesting, more vibrant, more purposeful, because you have something to give them now. You’ve become connected to what you’re doing and have something to create, instead of mindlessly producing for some supposedly essential goal.

What is truly essential?

There’s something very sad about being asked to disconnect from the many things that tell us we’re alive, all in the name of survival through the exchange of producing meaningless things or selling our time. It’s dehumanizing. De-being-izing.

How many times has the world told us to put aside how we feel, how we think, who we are, all in the name of some supposedly greater goal of… what? Doing a job that doesn’t actually need to get done? Providing a service that doesn’t really add value to community? Replicating a trinket that’s tossed in the trash, or creating content that is unsatisfyingly consumed, leaving people hungry and empty and seeking the very thing they’re being told is inappropriate, childish, immature.

We just want to enjoy our lives while we’re living them. And unfortunately, the twisted world out there that humanity has crafted doesn’t think that’s a good idea. (Seriously, why? What’s the big fucking deal with enjoying life at any age?) The world tells us our enjoyment needs to be regulated, kept to a slim “if you’re lucky and make enough you can be rewarded with…” all so we’ll work more for those who profit off of us.

Fuck it. Give yourself permission to enjoy the moment, every moment, without giving a fuck about societal expectations to turn you into an unfeeling, unmotivated, lackluster robot. You don’t have to be something to be happy. You don’t have to know what you need to become to finally be happy in this distorted world. We are all being, this very instant, and it’s exactly enough.

Don’t become a dead product of a sleeping, unaware society. Creativity helps us wake up and remember the pure beauty of simply existing. Where we are all worthy and deserving without needing to prove anything to anyone. Where terms like failure, wrong, and mistakes are nonsensical concepts. If you don’t know how to break free, the creative practice can help show you the way. And when you bring that into everything you do, you never have to fear being disconnected from yourself again.

Character Driven Plots for Character Driven Readers

Using Story Arcs to Develop Characters with Plot

So, because I’m working on fine tuning this element in my database, seeing what I need to get the most out of it, I thought it would be a good time to talk about story arcs. I’ll let you do the work of looking up story arcs, because I am not a dictionary, but I will say plenty about what they are to me in the writing process.

Story arcs are the ebb and flow of plot, motivation, driving forces, and impacts in your book or short story. They are the reason the characters are here, and they are the reason your reader is here. If nothing is happening in the story, nobody is showing up. This makes story arcs essential to story telling, but for some reason people don’t seem to think much about them.

Usually stories are described by plot, usually only one plot. Sometimes they’ll be a B plot, like you see with sitcoms or cartoons or most anything on television where you have a main plot and a B plot to fill time. But story arcs aren’t limited to two things happening at once in the story; that’s just the formula of writing that’s been normalized and then memed, as people do. Story arcs can actually be quite complex and quite simple at the same time, in the same story, and they span more than just plot points. They are basically everything in a story from the blood pumping through the characters veins, to the events on a timeline, to the music swelling in the background. And when that’s truly understood, and you learn how to organize these concepts for yourself in a way that works for you, your stories can reach an entirely new level.

Breaking it down

This is how I’m currently organizing story arcs, and I want to start off by saying, I’m organizing it this way because it works for me. It might not be the same for you and you want to search for that. You want to develop your own tools that suit you for the best results.

For me, at the moment, story arcs are comprised of character traits, character motivation, environmental forces — and not just the environment, but the setting, the culture, the world that is driving events that can’t be pinned on a character. And, of course, impact.

Impact gets its own little note for every single piece of a story arc. Internal and external impact. Consequences and sacrifices. Motivation is essential for character driven story arcs, but isn’t necessarily present for environmental ones. But impact will always be there.

Sometimes all you have is an impact you know you want to hit, and you need to figure out what you’re going to write to drive to that point. It is the most important aspect of a story arc to measure, because it turns the internal into the external, pushing events through character reaction instead of just through environmental factors.

For the erotica and erotic romance I write, story arcs also include sexual tension, relationship arcs, suspense and tension in general. You can have setting arcs to mark the passage of impact on a space, or building, or city. A story arc could be an emotional arc, which is something I would tie to character arc. But depending on your character, it could look more like a stress arc, or mental illness arc, or a character power development arc, etc. You can have a relationship sacrifice arc, with an understanding that there has to be a sacrifice to reach certain goals between characters, even in the simplest of stories, and you might not know that sacrifice yet, but you know you need to plan for one to be there. Maybe you want a pain arc, because that’s how you measure drama.

Every story might have something unique you need to keep tabs on to ensure it’s going right, and you can call that plot, or character development, or tension, but I find it’s important to classify them all under one topic: story arcs. Because they’re not different, or something to be tracked separate from plot. They are the plot. This is everything required to understand what breathes life into a story, when plotting a series of events isn’t enough. You need to think of pulses, drum beats, a theme song a character is living and imbuing into the story in that moment that changes as they change. Or whatever works for you.

Why story arc?

For me, to put it simply, these are the things I need to keep track of in a story because I can’t just hope to remember it all. The process of identifying and developing story arcs is basically the organization of what already happens naturally in a story for me. You’re trying to find the pulse and make sure the rhythm matches the events. Usually, that pulse is happening already for a writer, and it’s just a matter of maintaining it by paying attention.

But sometimes you miss things, or the first draft opened up an idea into something else that needs exploring. Sometimes you’re so new to something, you don’t even know what you don’t know, which I think is basically everyone. We need to explore a topic and develop it to understand it better. And that’s what making story arcs is about. Developing aspects of a story that go beyond basic plot to craft a better story. Designing a plot to be character driven for the greatest impact, instead of just hoping it will figure itself out once you write “the end.”

The moment you decide something is a story arc, you have made a choice of what you’re valuing in your story, and that will have an impact on everything going forward. So better to make it a conscious decision than to realize nothing is there at all.

Formless

If you did bother to look up story arcs, you might have seen a bunch of writing systems telling you they can only present in certain ways to be “successful.” But writing systems are where creativity goes to die, so don’t take it to heart. Instead, explore what these arcs are to you and what feels natural as you’re writing, and if that natural impulse is having a strong impact on the story or fizzling out.

There are plenty of pulses in a story that don’t require a form or a resolution, but instead flare up when needed to push the story along or give it greater impact. Motivational arcs can be as essential as a heartbeat drumming through every scene, or they can flare up once in a while like anxiety, increasing intensity without needing to resolve. Behavioral arcs can take problematic character traits and drop huge plot points as an impact, or they can just be quirky reminders of who your character is and how they act out in the world. And if you find you think you need to change something so integral to a character because someone told you everything about character development is change, think about how impossible it is for most human beings to change, and why it feels so unrealistic when characters do it at the flip of a plot point.

Story arcs aren’t about one purpose, one form, one result. These are tools to control impact, to control reaction and hold tension and suspense. They’re the pieces of a story most people don’t bother to look at, but instead, again, hope just manifest by the end. They’re supposed to be adaptable to the story, not force a story to adapt to them, even as they craft the story. There is no final, proper form to reach for, but instead about understanding why something is going wrong, feeling flat or lacking impact. They’re the place one looks to problem solve a bad or boring book, a diagnostic tool, not a predetermined shape.

It’s essential to recognize these aspects and understand the orchestra you are trying to control, the music you’re trying to create. Each piece is going to ask for something different, is going to get its solo or contribute to the background ambiance. A wind instrument shouldn’t be treated like a string instrument; it’s not one thing. You’re not looking for a formulaic shape, but what that piece needs to be for the story exactly in that moment.

Creating impact out of plot

Story arcs allow for in-depth thinking and then plotting of elements of the story that can otherwise be missed and not developed to their best ability. And it’s in the complexity of that, or the simplicity that one breaks such complexity down into, that really gives power to story arcs. Stories aren’t just about things that happen, but instead about how people are impacted by things that happen. Places are changed. We want to feel an impact in the world as a result of events in a story, otherwise, how does one truly measure an event?

How does one measure the impact of something that is supposed to feel valuable to a character or monumental to a world, without reflecting it somewhere in the story, be it through their behavior or motivations changing? It can’t just be reflected in the plot, an A + B to C to hopefully = to D sort of thing. It has to be reflected in the environment of characters and settings. Even in emotional atmospheres. Story arcs can help you plot and measure the impact an idea has on the story, and I think that’s truly their power.

Brainstorming as part of the process

So how? How does one turn ideas for story into arcs that can be used to help progress and develop a story from start to finish? Honestly, the process of looking for story arcs in your ideas and fleshing them out is the best form of creative brainstorming one can do for story, especially when you’re looking in a way to ensure that these concepts are seen and felt by the reader and in the story.

For myself, organization is essential. Story arcs aren’t necessarily clear ideas that distinguish themselves from each other, and as a result you can lose track of them and fail to show them and resolve them in the story. Something that started out so important could suddenly be erased by a key plot point, or the moving of a scene and fall flat. Suddenly loose ends are forever loose, not just unraveling plot points, but making characters look two-dimensional and uncaring, making plot lines look completely unrealistic because they don’t have an impact. Where something that was built up to be impossible or enormous in impact is suddenly so easily overcome…

Yes, you can claim that was a character having character development of something to overcome a problem, but if you lose track of showing these points and making them feel believable, the reader has no reason to believe what you’re presenting to them. And if you miss out in fleshing a character to their full potential, the reader might not care about anything happening at all because there’s no representation on the page of these events having an impact on another living being.

Don’t assume reading comprehension is the same as mind reading. You have to write the story.

It can be easy to understand that writers need to convey details and visuals for readers when describing foreign worlds, futuristic technology, or magic, etc., but writers can forget that readers need that same guide when it comes to emotions. There is no reason to believe that your reader is anything like the character you’re writing, and if they’re not, if they can’t relate, you need to find a different way for them to relate to the character that isn’t the characters traits, behaviors, and situation you just assume are universal. You have to find a way to humanize a character to people that won’t understand that character, and that’s the importance of character arcs. Not just growth and development, plot points laid out in a row that you’re ticking one after the other as one progresses, but humanization of the character so that the reader can care about the events, can care about the character’s emotions as they’re going through plot points.

You can usually tell the difference when someone is going through a writing system, following an instruction manual to write compared to someone who has learned who their character is and is putting them in the story. It’s the difference of writing a story and building a story that challenges characters to grow. There’s more heart to the second type, engagement, where everything feels important because it’s coming back to character arcs and measurable growth. Instead of plot points which are just the choreography, pushing the character through the motions so the story can happen.

This is why I combine story arcs to include those character arcs, and include character arcs with plotting a book. In understanding that character growth and humanization makes a story impactful for readers, you change the way you look at stories in general. You’re suddenly not there about a series of events viewed through the eyes of a soulless narrator, but instead about characters you care about as you check in to see how they’re coping with the series of events.

Fucking how already, yeah?

So I explained the importance, and showed how focusing on story arcs can change someone’s writing in really intense ways. So how does one do it? Well, it’s really up to you.

How do you organize your ideas on the page? Sometimes it doesn’t start on the page. Sometimes it can be post-its, or note cards on a wall. Scribbles on a whiteboard in color-coded markers. I enjoy surrounding myself with stories and ideas, transforming my environments into a part of my brain. But because of my new visual limitations and how chaotic my plotting process can be, I’ve had to create tools on my laptop to mimic what I would do in real life.

There are already tools out there, digital ones, that might work perfectly fine for people. I personally love Scrivner, of which I’m dictating this post into, because of its design to nest and organize text, but it’s not great for this particular thing for me. I’m also a big fan of Scapple which can color code and create visual blocks of ordered text and images in a web/brain storm shape instead of a linear shape — but I don’t really enjoy all the fiddling involved. There’s also plotting tools that will plot your points on a line to create the illusion of time as an aspect of plotting. Those ones in particular don’t really work for me, but for some people really need a very time focused organizational style for plotting. It’s really about finding what works for you and experimenting.

For right now, I’m mimicking my Post-it style of multicolored post-its with notes written on them. My notes get to be far more extensive because I’m doing it on the computer and have created the element to give me the things I need, instead of limiting me to the constraints of an actual Post-it. Depending on the order I set, my story arcs will graph onto a model based on time, or based on the character and time, or whatever I really want at the moment, because what a writer needs when it comes to plotting a story changes in the moment.

Random tangent to rant

I’m sure it’s clear at this point, but I’m not a fan of writing systems. I’m not a fan of someone following an instruction guide thinking that’s the way to write, because rarely is creativity or any kind of development allowed within a writing system. It’s a reverse engineered plan focused on hitting points, metrics, as the essence of the story and turned into a pattern of plot that needs to be resolved. Nothing else. And when you’re focused on hitting those points, it’s very easy to lose sight of what makes the story actually interesting, what makes a reader show up, what makes you show up. If you’re showing up to follow a formula for some other goal at the end, you’re not showing up to write a story and figure out what the purpose is for it all.

That’s not to say that all formulaic writing is shit. It’s just to say that when new writers are following a formula, they’re not learning to write. There learning a formula. It would be like comparing it to solving something with a math formula. When you’re handed the formula, you’re not taught how to problem solve to reach that formula. You’re not taught to understand the ins and outs of how to get to that endpoint. You’re just handed the shortcut without the experience, when it’s the experience that allows the shortcut to make sense.

It’s not a system. It’s a process…?

Anyways… There’s nothing special about writing story arcs. It can be done on post-its and note cards or paper or laptop. It’s as basic as brainstorming your story, and then breaking down those ideas and plotting them into little bite sized points that you then organize in a way that works for you when you think about your story. It’s making a spot for impact, for motivation, and connecting plot to characters and their motivations as events of impact instead of “things just happening.”

I don’t even think of story arcs as having a beginning, middle, and end, because there comes a time when you need to define what the hell beginning, middle, and end even mean in regards to the transformation of character and plot. (how many pieces does one replace of a boat until it’s a different boat…?) That kind of nonsense is not helpful in plotting. It’s not helpful in brainstorming to demand any rigid structure. Story arcs are a theme to explore through a piece, a way to connect characters to the events of a plot. Organized well enough so that you’re not missing important stuff while in the weeds of writing.

The nice thing about writing stories is you get to say a problem is resolved, instead of out in the real world where most problems hang there, being coped with, no definitive beginning, middle, and end. It usually satisfying for readers for problems to be solved, and cathartic for the writer. But that doesn’t mean that’s how you have to write a story. Your readers might hate you, but many people don’t write for their readers, but for themselves.

At least knowing the story you’re developing, and presenting to the world will be far more clear and done better if you bother to build story arcs and take the time to break it down and organize and ensure that each part is felt.

Right. How.

Because I do look at story arcs as plotting not really in time, but measured in impact, that’s how I write my notes for them. There will be a title or label to express the gist of the story arc, and then a note of information about the brainstorming process for that story arc. Why it’s there, what you want from it, possibly what you’re hoping to resolve or what sacrifice must be made.

Story arcs don’t always come with a solution, but instead they’re just full of the drama of a moment for a character. You have a very cool idea that you want to develop further, and ensure that it ends up in your story, even if you don’t necessarily know how to do that part yet? Make a note, call it a story arc, and develop it into something that works.

So once you have that story arc, for myself, I create editions so that everything to do with that story arc is connected, and I can’t lose track of anything. I need strong visual organization for my brain to thrive when it comes to writing conceptual text. So I color code, and make sure that main idea holds all those smaller ideas that fit into it. Then it’s about breaking down the story arc, brainstorming where these pieces are going to come up and how it’s going to reveal an impact on the characters, on the environment, on the events. Which scenes these pieces of the arcs are going to hit, and why.

It’s just notes. It’s just brainstorming. There’s no magic to it. Even how I organize is just whatever is easiest for me. It’s not a magic spell or special ritual where if you follow all the steps, you’re guaranteed a perfect story. It’s just essential design work as you take the time to develop a story, and it doesn’t need anything special.

No end form to reach for, no bs you must do it this way. You just have to work on developing the story in a way that you can track and ensure the impact is connected to the characters and their actions.

Character driven means acceptance of chaos.

If you fail to do this for plot, you risk building an intricate, exciting maze with plot twists and daring car chases, only to drop a dead cricket in, hoping something exciting will happen. (I don’t know why the cricket is dead, but it happened in the most boring way possible, promise.)

If you’re plotting out your character arc next to that story arc, or better yet, you just create plot arcs that are character driven, you don’t have to worry about being the kind of writer who makes their character jump through hoops for no apparent reason, and the character obeys because they’re boring and have no motivation beyond that the author has put them there to react.

Even with a little life in them, you don’t want your character to just be a mouse in a maze of your creation, simply hunting for cheese. Domesticated. Knowing everything is going to be fine if they follow the rules. You want them to be fully fleshed out, fighting the maze, fighting being there, fighting the unknown author who would dare drop them there in the first place, having emotional reactions that translate to behaviors that have them doing things like burning the maze down — something an author would never have designed — as the character goes and makes a better story.

Your characters need to be more impulsive than you, more motivated than you, and have no care about what you want in this process for them to drive a story, otherwise it’s just redundant and gone to plan, another heist movie where they tell you what they’re going to do, and then they do it, and maybe they kill a throwaway character, and everything’s okay.

You can’t have something new when you’re not allowing it to happen. Rigid structures of book writing preventing change, prevent adaptability. Something wild can only happen if you feel daring enough to let it. When you have an adaptable structure to maintain in regards to story arcs, allowing you to keep tabs on motivations, behaviors, impacts, tension, etc, you’re more willing to let the story become something better, something outside of the formula you find all those other stories living in, because you can see that it’s not pure chaos. The characters can still work in this change, and impacts can still look realistic and genuine to the moment.

—

I have so much to say about this topic, but I don’t feel like killing my eyes editing anymore today. So yeah, that’s that for now. Enjoy my enthusiastic lecture from a writer who can’t get their shit together enough to get back to writing beyond talking about writing. I’m sure it’s totally motivational.

I’m truly passionate about this topic — it’s everything about writing to me, the problem solving, the orchestration of trying to create an impact in a reader. And it’s fun. Loving what you do is damn fun, and more people should find what they love in what they do.

Branding When Disabled, AKA, Bitter AF

I wonder what my relationship with self worth and money would have been like if I hadn’t been born disabled in an end stage capitalistic hellscape. You know, a privileged hellscape, with tvs and refrigerators.

It fucks up a lot of things. How I think about what I spend my time on. How I value the things I do, and if I can ever truly value myself because of how fucked I am on the scale of those metrics. How I’m smart enough to know it’s all bullshit, but when it kills you — because that is the stark reality of our world. Having no money, being in long term poverty, is a death sentence. And the longer you’re in poverty, the more impossible it is to escape.

So I’m smart enough to know it shouldn’t be how I value myself, but I cannot escape the consequences of my failure to compete. My failure to win a broken game in a broken system created by a broken species.

There is no untangling that from what I do in the world, because what I do is what this world claims to value. The productivity of the worthy human — unless you’re already rich, then anything you do must automatically be valued. The things we do to contribute to this broken system. It decides I must feel guilty to rest when I have a condition labeled chronic fatigue. Where everything I do ends up being evaluated in my head of “is it a worthy endeavor?” based on return of income. Because I’m a drain on my family (they would never say it, but it’s absolutely the truth), the one who “if only?” can either save us or continue to pull us down.

Disability isn’t getting easier with age. Quite the opposite. Ageism is creeping in, and I’m noticing how others just don’t see those who are older, don’t clock them as existing at all. Society doesn’t value age, and certainly doesn’t value wisdom. People want to “get ahead” instead of seeing life is a continuous journey of coping with being alive.

And I constantly fight with the part of me who just wants to be allowed on to the side of winners, the side I’m never going to belong on… because this disability thing? It’s part of me. It defines so much of my existence.

I can point out ableism until I’m dead, but that doesn’t actually do shit. It doesn’t tear down the wall that would allow me to breathe easy because my needs will suddenly be met. It doesn’t make things easier on my loved ones, who have their own limits and disabilities disregarded by this society because it doesn’t fit the allowed definition. People who are just doing everything to get through, who are erased from the conversation because they don’t get a label, but they can’t fit with the winners either. I have a level of privileged with this poverty sentence to at least be visible by this label, while they’re struggling without it.

Any help is never going to be systemic change. It’s never going to be true stability, but a love bomb as people come in and then disappear when they start to feel the immense weight of it. It’s a lifetime, disability. It’s not solved with a pill, or a windfall, or a thought and prayer. It’s a lifetime in a system that has decided disability deserves poverty. And what is poverty? Slow death — sometimes faster, depending on the area. But I’m in a civilized country. They draw this shit out.

I think a lot about the confusing privilege I observe of people who aren’t struggling yet feel confident in asking for help, setting up a fundraiser, being paid to basically talk about whatever shit hits them in the moment. While I know so many who can’t make ends meet for so long, who feel so worthless that they could never ask for help. And when they do? How the world looks down upon them, like they did this to themselves. Like they’re crossing a line to dare ask for help, when others demand the same like it’s trivial and are handed it and more.

Why is it so different? I can’t even do a donate thing without feeling monstrous. I need to feel like there is some sort of worthwhile exchange. Here’s a bunch of stories for $10. Sorry I’m so sick I haven’t updated. It will never be “support me to stay alive.” Yet I see so many who can say “support me so I can be comfortable”. “Support me so I can be rich.”

What has this society done to people, where to be born into the wrong side of classism is to be psychologically groomed to accept that if shit is hard for you, it’s your fault? Society isn’t here to help those who need it, only to raise up those blessed enough to have classism reward them in the first case. Like, how did generations of humanity end up here, our fucked up, xenophobic social species picking a target and rationalizing the target for being picked, in both directions?

What madness to have been born into a game that doesn’t require participation to ensure winning or losing. To feel inherently wrong or entitled based on how you’re perceived in regards to worthiness of wealth. Because it’s not “wealth”; it’s life. Money is the right to be alive or not. Not a privileged, not a handout, not a charity. When the government taxes you, they are taking a piece of your life and saying they are owed it for letting you live where you’re living.

Except if you have so much money that to be taxed is absolutely nothing.

But we don’t tax those people. We reward them. Because we’re fucked as a species.

I think there’s an inherent empathy to be born with the losers, to have to constantly question a system of society that has chosen winners and losers. The winners don’t have to question — it’s dangerous for them to question, because they know, instinctual, how society turns. They aren’t special, they aren’t inherently worthy of more than others. They’re just associated with the winners. To be associated with the losers is the first step in becoming one — because classism is association.

It’s not based in genetics, or intelligence, or something genuine to the individual, but in the social wiring of humans as they reinforce small differences until they become rationalizations and reasons why. Why are things unfair? They would say because people are different — but that’s only when one group of people punishes those who are different from them. They rationalize their innate xenophobia onto their targets, never looking inwards. Because inwards in the truth — no one is so different that they deserve to be born into a situation that will kill them. And no one is so different that in a society that could support everyone, that they get so much more while others die with nothing.

None of this is justified… but everyone is participating in it.

Why does networking open more doors than hard work? Social association. And if you let in the wrong one and become associated with a loser? Social assassination. There are no bridges up because of that second part. Just a few people crossing the class divide, knowing they can never look back or they might return to needing to survive instead of thrive. Education looks like a bridge, but they’ve priced that so far out of reach, ensuring anyone who can’t afford it without loans will suffer the rest of their lives for daring to try.

Exploitation of classism happens at the educational level, but not a true path out of classism. The networks in academia reinforce classism. They give jobs to those who already belong, and weed out those who don’t. They have transformed the system of apprenticing, reinforcing the working class, who will never be the upper class, forced to be in debt for the right to have access to a living wage. With a promise if you just throw down enough money, you’ll get ahead. Because McDonald’s — a minimum wage that isn’t a living wage — requires a degree now.

So who are the people who spin their disabilities in the third person for legitimacy, writing in the language of the winners? Those already born there. Who know they’re supported already, and don’t feel it a burden to ask. Where else can such a mindset come from, truly? The haves, not the have nots. And I can’t mimick it, because it disgusts me, the lack of awareness. The confidence when in such a web of complexity, because they have never had to see that complexity and empathize.

Or they have, and they use the words anyways.

People are just memes. This social pattern is just that, a pattern, that can be adapted to. It’s not inherent; classism is just groups of people only seeing certain other people to be worthy like them because of perceived shared sameness. It’s tribalism, because our xenophobia has not been overcome, and tribes can be faked. People do it all the time. There’s a reason narcisists and sociopaths are usually found at “the top.” They fake it really well.

But then what. Winning? What is that beyond survival, but the reinforcement of the social inequality one has been fighting the entire time? It doesn’t break the system. You contribute to it. There’s no rising tide raising all boats, but a burning of bridges and a firm locking of a mask on one’s face to ensure they will always fit in. Depersonalized until you’re talking like them, in their limited language of tribal human.

I cannot burn myself when I need to survive for others. But to walk a path with full self awareness that stands for everything I’m against? I’m not capable of that either, not well, not with the exuberance and determination needed to do it well. And if you’re selling out in a half-assed way, what’s the fucking point to begin with?

When not overcoming their personal demons through raunchy, fun stories, Sadie Sins lives with their 4 mischievous cats, writing about sex positivity in dark erotica, and fighting for disability visibility and the toppling of class inequality. Here’s a list of all the things Sadie Sins has overcome to get here — and we assure you, they belong here and don’t really struggle in a way where you would feel uncomfortable to see a real human being and the pains of reality and decades of poverty. No, everything is cool, disability is easy — hey, and being non binary is very trendy right now and not a transphobe magnet at all.

I don’t think I think too much, not really. I honestly think that the majority of people don’t think at all, and it just looks like a lot in comparison. Because it’s right there. We are all contributing to this society, yet no one is making the rules. Our instincts are driving us, and humanity is fucked. I dream that there is intelligent life out there, because my greatest sorrow is to think humanity might be the epitome of what life comes up with. Like fuck, how depressing.

…Humanity has overcome a gigantic list of atrocities to get to this place, (mostly ones it committed,) and it still hasn’t learned that the only battle it has is with itself. Humanity has conquered a globe, the dark, the atom, and is swiftly annihilating the only place in the solar system it can survive as a species, and it can’t stop itself. Because it’s not self aware.

Humanity is a mess of evolutionary instincts that aren’t here to design, but to survive, and unless it adapts and takes on a new way of living, asap, it will drive itself off the cliff it’s digging deeper and deeper. Humanity thinks a bigger bad will finally be what pulls it together to be a better species, but humanity also thinks that violence is the only way to gain cooperation, which is why it has mimicked its modern societies on tribalism. Where humanity chooses who will be sacrificed to feed its rationalization of the deep seated fear that without inequality, self worth and self purpose will dissolve.

I don’t get a participation trophy for being human, but my fuck, I want one. Because this is a world I didn’t choose, but I’m stuck participating in it anyways, having to pick a side, pick a spin, take care of my socials who depend on me to not drag them down by being just as flawed as everyone else, but in a way that isn’t accepted by our insane as fuck society. Disability: the unacceptable human flaw. Not genocide. Not hoarding of wealth. Disability: the thing societies really don’t want to face. Because hey, truly facing disability makes able-bodied people question why they’re being asked to break their aging bodies for worthless goals in the first place.

Being sick is easier than living with my brain. It won’t filter the complexity out. It’s gotten healthier since understanding the allergy thing — it’s just adding to the web, seeing more strings of what’s wrong with the situation I’m in and what I have to do to either 1) overcome in a selfish human way, or 2) fall into the pit with the targets who aren’t allowed out. There’s no 3rd option. There’s no pretending that I get to walk a line that will be a bridge, or raise a tide, or topple a system. I can lie to myself, but I’m not self deluded — oh, to be so fucking self deluded!

The system reflects the species. Humanity isn’t changing. Evolution didn’t suddenly decide intelligence was the way to go when people no longer needed intelligence to survive. And even if it had, it didn’t erase all those instincts that got us here. We hit a plateau. Cooperation should be the next stage — we’ve built a tech infrastructure ripe for global cooperation — but it’s the banding together against the other, tribalism, still winning, violence and dominance at the core. Someone has to suffer for balance. Humanity can’t perceive good without evil — such nonsense.

Every time a nation talks about helping another, there’s always so many healthy, comfortable voices going “what about me?” The privilege of the privileged getting the last say.

Well, I firmly remember the things I’m trying to escape as a human being, so I guess it’s time to write instead of think. Because writing is my selfish escapism. Coding is my selfish escapism. Looking anywhere but at the mess of a system I’m participating in is both my escape, and selfish as fuck, and I am painfully, bitterly aware of it.

Sadie Sins is bitter, disabled, and takes offense to trying to sum up their human experience into a slick, depersonalized blurb that perpetuates the continuation of dull stereotypes that either erase or valorize the disabled when we are all fucked humans. Sadie Sins doesn’t want to talk about being disabled, but feels required because of how it interferes with their ability to be a productive robot that produces creative results on demand, and how mentioning illness and disability “the wrong way” results in healthy people running the fuck away as if disability and reality are contagious.

Sadie Sins is in the middle of healing from a decade of debilitating symptoms, and is pushing themself to be okay enough to do shit that they may or may not be okay enough to do, because poverty from years of disability is killing Sadie and making all of their decisions. And now Sadie realizes they are in the middle of dealing with the trauma of that when facing the task of branding. Because they’re too close to it, and it means too much right now, and although some pain has stopped, there are wounds that are finally being allowed to be felt, which are infected, amputating pieces of the soul, and suck balls. And branding isn’t actually that fucking important and can wait.

Branding Through Trauma

Taking on Impossible Projects

How to take on a project when you don’t know if you can complete the project

As I reach the end of the creation process of my story reference database — finally — I thought it might be nice to talk about how I got here. To the end. The same end as one might find at the end of a book, or the end of a trilogy, or of a series. The end of a project that was too large to fully conceptualize, now actually completed.

This is a project I didn’t know how to do on all levels. I knew a little HTML from running the website, but that was it. I didn’t know the language. I didn’t know the syntax or what form anything was going to be within these foreign computer languages to give me the results I wanted. I didn’t know the limits of what I was asking for, and therefore didn’t know the right questions to ask. I didn’t know the path to start on, to branch to, or if I needed multiple paths to get to my destination.

The only thing I knew was that if I was ever going to write again, I needed to take this journey, because my brain was too broken to be able to write without the correct support system.

That might seem huge, unrelatable, but it’s not. This is where I come from when it comes to tackling an impossible task — you have to believe it’s impossible for whatever reason. It’s for everything I haven’t done before, and therefore I don’t know if I can do. I don’t know how to do something until I do it, and I certainly don’t know how to do it well until I mess it up enough times. This is how things that feel impossible get done — by doing.

When I decided to make this database, it was when facing the largest psychological hurdle I had ever faced. I was very aware that my brain was the most broken it had ever been, and that I couldn’t write anymore (among other things.) In that reality was not only the impossible goal I wanted to reach, but during a time when my brain was struggling the most. It should have been impossible.

Why wasn’t it?

In some ways, I truly don’t know. Because it was impossible. How could I have gotten here when I couldn’t remember the names of my characters anymore? Where I had no visual concept of what they looked like in the scene, or what the scene looked like… But the thing is, these weren’t new problems. My brain had always struggled with visualizing what I was writing, it was just worse now. Yeah, I couldn’t remember my plot arcs, or how to stay focused to form proper ideas out of my rambling sentences… but again, not new problems. They were just presenting in new, more difficult to overcome ways. And I could see that without some foundation of support — without a brain outside my flawed brain — I was far too overwhelmed to be able to juggle all these aspects to move forward.

ADHD and Executive Dysfunction

I’ve always had ADHD, but I first truly understood it to impact my life in high school. I had been an obsessive reader, reading a book a day, then something had changed in my brain and I couldn’t focus on reading anymore. I changed my values at the same time, told myself that if I wanted to be effective and change my life, I needed to be present for it. But that was how I coped with having the thing that I did — my identity as a reader — stolen for me so completely. I adapted and pivoted so well, I could pretend I hadn’t lost a piece of me.

ADHD defined me after that point, the executive dysfunctions and cognitive fog becoming my identity when I wasn’t lost to impulse and novelty. It wasn’t until the end of my 30s that I even had an inkling that I had ADHD. When I started this database, I didn’t know of my ADHD and autism, and the many executive dysfunctions that go hand in hand with the way my brain works. I learned as part of the journey of building this database and getting back to writing. It helped me understand how my brain works, why what was happening was happening. And this knowledge gave me a much more useful perspective on my path going forward.

A Lifetime of Impossible Tasks

None of it was new. I had been adapting around my executive dysfunction since my teens. The most prevalent was my poor working memory, and difficulty in storing short term memory into longterm. I was blessed with a level of intelligence that allowed me to deduce in the moment answers that others could memorize. If I studied the hours before, I could hold answers that would be long gone a week later. I passed complex math classes that way, only to realize I had no memory of formulas later. And it got worse when my immune system was flaring from living in black mold, my cognition dropping. But in those moments I was blessed with a superhuman level of neurosis that I substituted for my broken motivational system.

Even as I say blessed for both these supposed “positives” that got me through, I understand they were also completely self destructive. Neurosis is such a painful mental illness — no one asked if I had OCD back then; no one noticed that the thing I was relying on to get through what everyone else seemed to do with ease was so damn destructive. And intelligence — there is no harder prison to escape from than from an intelligent mind. Especially when mental illness comes rearing from the chemical imbalance of a raging immune system.

I needed self awareness to break out of these two gifts turned curses — and to be fair, I would say self-awareness is the sharpest double-edged sword out there. But I did gain it in my 30’s, at the same time my body failed along with my brain.

Self-Awareness: The Prison Breaker

Self awareness allowed me to see that what I thought was me failing impossible tasks up until that point, was me looking from the wrong vantage. And when my body failed and my brain was inflamed, and I was the sickest I had ever been, I took on the first impossible task that I knew was impossible, and I decided to become a writer.

And I did it. Sick as fuck, barely able to lift my arms for hours upon hours every day as I was struck by weird, mysterious glitches. Having maybe 4 hours a day of mental clarity, of my body suddenly moving like nothing had happened at all. During this time — when broken and well — I wrote stories I didn’t know how to write. And I kept writing, and self publishing, and at some point it wasn’t about me becoming a writer. I was a writer.

I had done the impossible. And then the impossible decided to double down in my late 30’s. Something in my brain broke differently, bigger than ever before, and I found myself staring at the walls most days, unable to get my brain to focus long enough to collect a thought, never mind do a thing. I couldn’t write. My executive functioning had failed so greatly that I couldn’t remember to do most anything. I was completely defined by the walls around me because my object permanence was gone, and I couldn’t remember there were rooms on the other side of doors.

So I did it again. The impossible task to become “functioning” was met and conquered.

I didn’t magically overcome the impossible, but instead built an executive functioning board along half of a wall, using words and symbols on dry erase notecards to spark my memory. Putting items in a To-Do and Done column so that I could stay on track. And as long as I could remember to look at that board before and after each task, I could do things again.

Eventually, I was able to combine those tasks into routines, my brain growing back, reconnecting. And when it glitched, the board was there, waiting to help.

And then I didn’t need the board at all… but I was still broken. My brain couldn’t adapt to my limits like it did before. I still couldn’t write.

Looking at the Impossible from a Fresh Vantage

Pinpointing my mental deficits and learning the term executive functioning were the pieces to the puzzle I needed to eventually realize I had ADHD and find a doctor to help. It led me to understand the role hormones play in ADHD as we age. And when they finally noticed my adrenals weren’t producing enough cortisol and that I had adrenal insufficiency, I learned how the adrenals play a role in hormone production.

I’d say it took at least a year with the appropriate cortisol supplementation for me to fully heal from the severe cognitive decline I had been living in from the untreated adrenal insufficiency. I’ve gotten a lot of my brain back, and the ADHD treatment has given me much more executive functionality than I’ve ever had before. Now, when I look back to when I started writing, and when I started making this database, I am truly left in wonder and absolute awe as to how the fuck I actually got here.

Because I can see from this perspective just how broken I was. When before, while living in such a struggling brain and body, all I could see was the tunnel vision of task after task, goal after goal, step after step. In that place I never allowed myself to believe I couldn’t do something. My only question was how?

Self Doubt Cannot Exist When Doing Impossible Things

You can cry. You can rail at the universe for what it has done to you for making shit so unfair. You can fight reality all you like. But if you want to do what feels like the impossible, you can never doubt yourself. It cannot be part of your identity. You can never doubt that you are going to reach the goal you’re reaching for.

The reality is, you could drop dead tomorrow having never reached your goal. But that’s not how living beings get things done. We need to be oblivious to reality when it comes to these tasks that seem so impossible. We need to be blind to the time it takes, to sacrifices made, and to our emotions when something inside of us screams ‘I’m done and I don’t want to do this anymore.’

When it comes to impossible tasks, we do not start out being the person who can complete the task. We start out being the person who will be changed by the process of trying to complete the task. And even though this is everything in life, not many are aware of how this is just the way things are.

The Motivation Has To Be Bigger Than The Goal

When I decided to become a writer, it wasn’t any easier for me to read. I had stopped reading for years, and had only come back to it because I had gotten so sick that my body would freeze and refuse to move for hours on end. Chronic fatigue isn’t sleeping all the time. It’s being in a body that refuses to move, bored out of your mind, demanding an escape. All you have left is your imagination to see you through, to remind you what living is, and that impossible task to start a business when I could barely lift my arms didn’t actually feel impossible. It just felt like the only thing to do to get through the moment.

Making this database was the only thing that I could do to be able to be a writer again. I did not write during the time I was making this database, because I couldn’t write. Making this database didn’t actually give me back the part of my brain I needed to be able to be a writer again. But what it did do was keep me focused on my goal — my impossible goal — of being able to write again while my brain was broken. It gave me hope when I saw that I could learn a new skill, a new language. And even when my cognition would drop and I would lose it all, it reminded me that I could get it back again when it came back and the code would work.

It gave me something to measure my achievements, small as they might be, while going through the process of my brain healing. While distancing me enough from my written works that I wouldn’t put my failures on to them. Because that was something that I was seeing as well. I was so focused thinking I couldn’t write, that I was going to ruin what I already created, instead of seeing that my brain was broken. It was easily promising to become a complex, and I knew that was detrimental to being able to go forward as a writer if it was allowed to sink in and take root. I didn’t want something else growing to trap me in this prison of a brain.

Taking the impossible journey was as simple as breathing. It promised something more when there was nothing. Taking on these tasks has to mean everything, otherwise why would anyone take on the impossible?

Preserving You During The Impossible Failures

Self awareness showed me where I was self destructing once again. I had learned by now, could see clearer each failure.

I transferred my end goal of being able to write, into the goal of being able to create a support system to write. The goal was the same, but when failure inevitably would strike, it was about the failure to create the needed support system instead of a failure to write.

Dealing with my vision disorder, and having my insurance provide the worst coating on what was supposed to be vision support screen glasses, was a failure of the support to help me see, not a failure of my vision. It was a failure of capitalism, of a society that thought any sort of glasses wasn’t automatically a vision aid, not on my failing sight.

It might sound so small, these little distinctions. These little transferences of where to place the pain and blame when things don’t go the way we need them to go. But it’s essential on this journey. It maintains mental well-being and self-esteem. In science, no one ever says your vision failed because you can’t see a virus with your bare eye; it’s that you failed to use or obtain the correct tools, and therefore couldn’t see what was there.

It’s a shifting of expectation and pressure that one places on oneself when we try to be accountable for everything we can’t control. It removes the question of if one is good enough, and again brings you to the how does one do something no matter abilities or talents. We’re brought to how to achieve the goal, instead of asking why all these parts of you aren’t good enough to let you reach that goal.

It’s not about owning the limitations, but about owning the solutions.

The Journey is the Goal, Not the Goal

I learned a new language and pattern of thought when my cognition was at its weakest. I held onto motivation when I literally had a failure of motivation as a result of ADHD. I was able to create the support tool I needed when my brain was at its weakest. And if I’m brutally honest, even with this support tool, at that point of my health I don’t know that I would have been able to write. I would have, because the tunnel vision would have allowed it, but without a healthier vantage, I’m not sure I would have been able to get past my perfectionist neurosis. But it would’ve given me hope and sent me looking for the answers that would help. And that is everything about taking on the impossible.

You need hope that it’s not truly impossible.

Our experiences don’t always change us into the person we need to be for the goal we’re chasing after. Sometimes they reveal that we want to be someone else. That the goal isn’t right. And that’s okay. Self-actualization is not an A+ B always = C formula. What we put in might define or shape the results, but that doesn’t mean we understand why our results are so unique and different to what we imagined.

Just like we can’t know the book we’re going to write until it’s written, wanting to be a form, a career, a completed task, an achieved goal doesn’t mean we know who we are going to be on that journey. So we have to be kind and forgiving, instead of trying to be that goal. Because if we are cruel and unaccepting of reality, fighting ourselves, filled with dissatisfaction and hate on the journey, that is the form we’re left in. The goal won’t define us; we define the goal.

So not only can you not doubt that you can do the impossible task, but you have to realize it’s not about the task at all, it’s not about the goal. It’s about you on the journey, because that’s what’s going to fuel and sustain as you do the impossible. It’s going to be why you show up. It’s going to be why you decided to take on the impossible in the first place when you have never done anything like it before. And it’s going to show you that you’re not as smart as you think you are when you look at something that seems impossible.

What we think is impossible is just our limits of imagination and experience. We haven’t become the people yet who know that it’s not impossible. It’s only in taking on the journey of the impossible that we ever get to discover the truth: impossible is just a concept, one we create. Our belief isn’t truth, isn’t fact, but just another limit we place to hold us back from meeting reality.

We’re a collection of scattered atoms with consciousness defining something we haven’t even attempted as impossible. It’s pretty nonsense the longer one even thinks of it. We have no idea what is actually impossible or not.