I’m on a path to trust myself. I didn’t choose this path of study, it was given to me through meditation and rituals I’ve been undertaking as I’m searching for a new approach to life. What’s interesting is radically trusting myself is leading to openings I didn’t expect. If you had asked me before this journey if I support myself and encourage myself, I would have said “yes,” with no hesitation. I have a pretty solid self-regard, I respect myself and my artistic output, and I enjoy the person I am. I’ve done a lot of work to get here.

Well, this new journey is teaching me new levels of self-support and self-regard. What I’m learning from practicing deeper levels of trust in myself:

• It’s very easy for me to deny myself rest. I’m a great planner and I can put together a plan for executing projects very easily. I can even give my a pass for a certain level of wavering from the plan, as I usually build in buffer days. But when I divert from my projections for rest, I start to wonder what’s wrong with me. If I’m resting instead of creating, I feel like I’m not doing all I can to bring my voice and vision to the world. Validating my need to rest is completely new to me. In moments when I’m trying to work, or planned to work, if I’m not producing, it’s hard for me to let it be okay that I’m not moving forward as planned. I’m learning to trust my inactivity. I know for a fact that no matter how long my periods of rest, I will definitely return to creating. I don’t doubt that, yet I regard rest suspiciously and I don’t support it. I’m learning that it’s okay for me to rest—and that I don’t need to put guardrails around my need for rest. Long periods of rest don’t need to be regarded suspiciously. Whether my periods of rest are short or long, I can trust myself to return to action.
• In tandem with mistrust of rest is my ability to push myself, especially when I see the finish line in sight. I remember after one day of pushing myself all day, I was exhausted. And I was starting to despair. Having recovered from burnout, I fear that meeting my creative goals will push my back into an unhealthy state of pushing past my limits. When I meditated on this feeling, I got a clear message. I was told: Don’t be dramatic about your needs. And don’t make it a holistic issue. When you’re tired, rest. When you have energy, work. It’s as simple as that. It may seem strange that this is a realization to you, but I realize my narratives about work are more damaging than the energy required to do the work. If I only work when I have energy and I stop and rest when I’m tired, I’ll never get burnout. The work is not in charge, I am. And I don’t need to suspect that I won’t reach my goals without pushing myself. I simply need to trust that whether I work two hours, four hours, or eight hours, I will cross the finish line at the perfect time.
• I have long been desired to return to a play space with creativity. Ideas are not the problem, I constantly have ideas. But paired along with the ideas is the feeling that I’ll never be able to achieve them. My story is that I don’t have the time or space to invest in my creative ideas… or even have the mental space to be creative. None of these things are true. One of the practices that aligns with trusting myself is trusting my ideas. Rather than looking at my ideas as impossible goals, I’ve been practicing activating them. And believing I’ll have the time and space to follow through on them. The Substack is one example of that. I want to be creative with writing, so I’m playing with writing twice a month. A quick engagement that gives me the connection to creativity without boundaries, deadlines or mandates. I wrote two more stories there: Folding Filth Until I’m Free and Like the Animal You Have Become. I hope you enjoy them.
• I’ve also been thinking about how to tell the story of the rituals and visualizations that have ushered me into this new phase of my life. Simultaneously, I’ve been inspired by I’m Fine I’m Fine, another Substack that’s comic-based. Well, through a series of evens recounted here: the discovery of a comic book in the park sparked an idea to start an image-based Substack about the journey I’m on. As I dove into the process of making the first post, I realized I would never have allowed myself to do this before my experiments with radical trust in myself. I would have judged my ability to make comics. I would have said, I believe in myself “but I’m just not a comic artist.” This is helping me to realize there are so many ways that I’ve been curbing my own creative expression. If everything is a product or a project, then I’m looking at it through the eyes of judgement, needing it to measure up to some external standard of “quality.” Ultimately, if I’m focused on creative expression, there’s so many more things I would create and so many more ways that I would interact with the world. Self-trust is leading me to experiment with more modes of self-expression.

This is an exciting time for me. I’m hopeful that I can continue to expand various modes of self-expression, creative expression, and healing expression—not as a means to an end, but as a practice of radical self-trust; as a practice for validating my ideas, my expression and my existence.

Onward,

—K.