Many of the highly creative, sensitive, introverted people I know go through intense phases of reinvention, often with life-transforming effect. We’re super curious. We crave personal growth. We use study and creativity to explore topics and ourselves. We venture into the world around us by sharing our ideas and what we create. We commune in ways that are not always mainstream. And so we evolve.

Such seasons of exploration and rebirth can be terrifying—storms of emotions, flashes of inspiration, the satisfying click as disparate ideas dovetail, and the resulting changes we know we need to make. This is the sag-and-bounce rhythm of traversing the web of the interconnected everything, intuition’s homeland.

With empathy, we notice events and problems. Can I help you? Can I help myself? Who am I now? The overwhelm of how much there is to discover and make better in the world can shut us down. I am frequently stunned by the world’s unaddressed issues, and by the fears that pop up when I set out to do bold things, especially when the bold things involve updates noticeable in public.

Practicing the art of reinvention means accepting our propensity to explore and break through barriers, including the solitude barrier. That is why healthy boundaries are so important—they communicate our updated sense of self, which we proclaim so that we and those around us can reduce falseness and thrive.

Reinventions occur on a range spanning from micro to macro.1 A tiny, new, better thought takes hold, accumulates more thoughts like it, and something alters as a result. Maybe that different way of thinking develops into a different way of being that leads to a milestone or a rite of passage, like a graduation or wedding, a job change, a new business, or a healing divorce. Sometimes, an evolution prompts an identity shift significant enough to warrant a name change.

I have a friend whose surname is Love. Cool, right? Especially when you find out he recently married a relationship coach. Except… no. My warm yet reserved friend has always chaffed against his surname. People tend to assume from his name that he is more affable and open to sudden familiarity than he actually is, and he’s grown weary of putting up stop signs to get people to back off from his name’s false advertising.

So, despite the seemingly golden opportunity for my friend’s new husband (the relationship coach) to change his surname to Love upon marriage, my friend opted instead to take on his new husband’s last name, which is (you’re going to love this) Ice. Yeah. Now, when my aloof and introverted friend introduces himself, his surname projects a more accurate first impression, one of We’ll see, instead of Come on in.

I know from my own experience the profound effects of changing a name.

Lately, I’ve been exploring writing with my other hand, my left hand, as a method of tapping into insights from subterranean aspects of myself. At my favorite table in my local public library, I opened a notebook to a fresh page and picked up the pen to write my name with my left hand, as a first foray. Then I would ask my left hand to answer a self-enquiry question.

But first, I’d write my name. I picked up the pen and began, lost in the concentration required to hold and move the pen with my non-dominant hand.2 I didn’t consciously think as I wrote. I simply, with mildly excited curiosity, “told” my left hand to “write my name” (Grace Kerina, obviously). But what emerged on the page surprised the heck out of me.

When I set down the pen and looked back at what I’d written (what “I” had written? who was that “I”?), I found a list of most of my names and nicknames over my lifetime so far. My left hand had, without my conscious involvement, delivered a list of my major reinventions, with commentary.

When I was a child, my family called me Lindy Lou. My birth name was Melinda Lou Lawrence, which never felt like me. Also, the M in Melinda always felt awkward to pronounce with my buck teeth. In my early thirties, I legally changed my entire name to Grace Ada Kerina. When I started writing novels in my fifties, I published under the pen name Alice Archer.3 My mother called me Clarabelle Crabapple when I was a kid and she got frustrated by my moods. What I remember about being called Clarabelle Crabapple is anger that I wasn’t being listened to, that my needs weren’t validated, and that I felt misunderstood.

I stared at the page in wonder as I realized my left hand had written to tell me I knew what I was doing, deep down, as I reinvented and renamed myself to express who I became. Those final two lines at the bottom convey my left hand’s all-in vote for doing more self-exploration using this method.

I could tell a similar story of reinventions occurring through jobs and businesses over the decades. And another whole batch of reinvention stories around romantic relationships. And on and on. I’ll bet you could do the same about the evolutionary updates in your life.

The trick to the art of reinvention is to not let the challenges involved in expressing our evolutions openly thwart us from continuing to evolve. Discovery and personal growth leave a trail of shed skins in our wake. Other people may well notice this.

If the people around you are bothered by your courageous acts of expanding selfhood, let them be. When someone doesn’t like your change, it’s because they have changes of their own to make, such as adjusting their expectations or their view of you to match the new reality. Those people have their own paths to travel.

Keep going in the direction you’re pulled. Each release of what isn’t you makes more room for what is you, simplifies and refines and essentializes you.

My favorite thing about reinvention is how the strength gained with each of our honest updates benefits the people around us. These mutual benefits extend outward into the web, prompting positive changes in society and in societal norms, turning our evolutions into a revolution.

About the Photo | Roofs Chronology

Konstanz, Germany, 2012

On the shore of Lake Constance (as the English-speaking world spells it), the town of Konstanz offers a multitude of great sights for those of us who take pleasure in (for example), lakeshores, architectural features that are beautiful apparently just for the sake of being beautiful (see the photo below as well), and enormous statues that rotate at the end of a pier.4

The above photo’s perspective of building roofs all packed together caught my attention because of the variety of beautiful features, like the painted surfaces on the building at the right, and the contrast in the ages of the buildings—all the reinventions as time progressed.

Years ago, depleted from weathering the end of a long relationship, I waited at the airport in Nashville for my cousin Yvonne to pick me up. She drove us to her house deep in the Tennessee countryside, where, over the next weeks, I remained stunned by my move back to the United States after living elsewhere for more than a decade.

In the refuge of my cousin’s small home amid the silence and the trees, I felt grateful, but also stymied. Now what?

Being a grown-up sucks, I thought. Where’s a womb when you need one?

I slept on a makeshift bed on the floor of Yvonne’s art studio, trying to be stoic about the mouse I could hear in the wall and the pressure of building a whole new life in a country that felt alien. I didn’t totally know how to go about it, and I sensed that none of the tasks ahead would be fun.

Despite my concerted efforts over the subsequent weeks and months, the adulting seemed endless, barely moving me forward. For example, reentering the American health-care system after living in Canada and Germany, which, in comparison, offered healthcare that was (hmm, how shall I say this?) sane, required exhausting persistence.

One day, Yvonne dropped me off at the teensy public library in the teensy town nearest her home in the woods. I walked slowly up and down the four or so short aisles of nonfiction books, hoping, I supposed, to find a volume titled Grace’s Brilliant Plan for Starting a Successful New Life in a Strange Land. Perhaps with a chapter dedicated to “Managing Overwhelm in Enormous Grocery Stores Larger Than Your Neighborhood Back in Germany.”

What I found instead was the arts and crafts section. One by one, with a surge of wistfulness, I pulled each of the few instructional art books from the shelf and flipped through them, careful to refile them correctly when I slipped them back into place. They stirred up a bittersweet nostalgia, as if I were already an elderly woman reminiscing about the olden days, when I used to play.

“Oh my. That was many decades ago, dear.”

But one of the books in particular throbbed a strong signal at me—Paint Mojo, by Tracy Verdugo. I tugged it back off the shelf to take a closer look. Approximately 100% of the keywords in the book’s subtitle—Creative Layering Techniques for Personal Expression—appealed to me viscerally at that moment in my life. I got myself a brand-new library card and checked out the book.

In Yvonne’s art studio (after we’d moved aside the inflatable mattress I slept on at night), we set up a large folding table in the middle of the room and sat across from each other, art supplies piled around us, the book from the library open between us.

For hours that day, we just… played. We chose one project from the book and followed the instructions, then we chose another. Which led to riffing on the processes. The results of our experiments on large sheets of art paper began to pile up. And we kept going, choosing more projects from the book, then zeroing in on the techniques we each were most drawn to and going further with those.

We may have taken a break for lunch. I don’t remember.

I do remember developing a burning passion for a particular shade of pink I discovered during a paint-mixing session, and discovering how cool that pink looked in proximity to black. I leaned in to follow the intrigue.

Toward the end of our play that day, Yvonne and I took to freeform exploration, going off in all sorts of different directions to pursue variations on what we’d just learned, trying stuff to find out what would happen if. Some of what we created we liked. Some we didn’t. We sorted and chose and did more of what we liked.

When Yvonne tried something on her side of the table that I really liked, I copied her. She did the same. We kept simply turning toward what we liked most, what felt best, most interesting, alluring, fascinating.

At some point, I became aware of an intense feeling of lightness and ease, sensations unfamiliar over an extended time of hard, diligent, grown-up striving.

Hey, check it out. My ability to play hadn’t broken after all.

Essential parts of me clicked back online, revving up to regenerate wholeness. The world around me snapped back into colorful three-dimensionality after existing in flat greys for far too long.

I laughed as we played that day. I could breathe again, there in that small room surrounded by many miles of thickly wooded countryside, in a chair at the center of a swirl of papers on which I’d experimented myself back into being.1

I wanted to document my experience, to encapsulate what I learned that day, as a reminder of how the simple act of playing generates both grounding and freedom.

I sorted through all I’d created and chose my favorite piece, then impulsively reached for a pair of scissors and started to cut out small squares of that piece, zeroing in on my favorite little bits of that favorite piece—the most beloved of the most beloved.

Then I shuffled the squares this way and that, trying out different juxtapositions and arrangements. Playing some more.2

Eventually, as the lowering sun slanted into the studio windows, I felt done. With the a bit of glue and a couple of cheap frames from the dollar store up the road, I had two talisman reminders to play anyway.

After that day when the child in me helped the adult shift perspectives, life got easier.

Play anyway. Even when your arms feel too tired to move. Even when your heart is heavy and the library only has a few books to choose from. Even if the weight of adulting seems endless.

Play because you deserve wholeness and laughter, no matter what else is going on in your life. If you crave self-connection and health, not playing is not an option.

There is no substitute for play. Play is where judgment dies, so that everything you want can recognize and find you.

About the Photo | Morning Tree

Western Missouri, USA, 2026

On a recent morning, I spontaneously decided to go for a walk before breakfast, despite the day’s bulging schedule of meetings and responsibilities. The summer heat, already cranking up, bathed my face and arms as I strode up the hill into the sunlight, extra energy in my step from doing something unusual.

I had stuff to do, things to get back home for, and my stomach rumbled from the delay of breakfast, but the light at play in a narrow band of thick greenery at the side of the road pulled my phone from my pocket without my conscious awaress at first, so eager was my playful self to explore the vision with photos. Tall grasses bounced sideways in gusts of wind to reveal a shadowy nook under a thick sapling. Further along the road, this magnificent tree stood alone and free above the surrounding field and underbrush, spreading wide and reaching high.

That morning’s deviation from my routine just to go out and play, and that glorious tree in the early light, continue to feed me now, days later.

I’ve never lost, only gained, whenever I’ve played anyway. Join me?

Over the past few years, I’ve been on a mission to understand how to process fears. I don’t want to be bested by my fears in response to the world around me or the world inside me. The most helpful solutions I’ve found so far are the two activities of processing fears as physical expressions, and questing for surprising perspectives to sidestep into.1

Fear and anger arrive as buddies sometimes. For example, as happened recently when a dear friend passed away, my upwelling of emotion consisted of a natural human fear of death combined with a sharp anger that I’ll never experience another conversation with my friend, whose unusual way of being2 was very close to my own.

To process that uncomfortable soup, I high-stepped around my bedroom throwing punches at the air, gasping and grunting until I ran out of breath. I didn’t have the energy to worry about looking silly. For one thing, no one could see me, and for another, I had far too much stuff—too many built-up emotions and sensations—to release to put off doing something about it.

Once some of the shock at my friend’s unexpected passing began to wear off, I remembered a recent cluster map I’d done on fears. I dug it out to review as a potential source of sideways perspectives. Pouring out stuff into cluster maps tends to do multiple duty—simultaneously providing space for a free-form release of thoughts, and activating intuition to deliver fresh insights.3

Here’s the FEARS cluster map:

Creating a cluster map usually takes me so far out of myself I don’t really know what happened during it until after I’m done and take a look. Is it the same for you when you do a cluster map?

Two of the main branches extending out from the central circle of FEARS state that fears are scary and are finite—an encouraging combination. Another main branch wonders but who am I without my fears? Yikes. The riffs on that bubble extend outward to occupy most of the lower part of the page and consist of various doubts and potential solutions.

Another main branch from the center asks (in a box rather than a circle, so I know my subconscious mind particularly wanted me to take note), how can the fear be worse than the actual experience? Ah, yes, that phenomenon. An answer comes in a subsequent bubble: because of avoidance. The idea that avoidance of fear exacerbates the situation shows up in multiple areas. Apparently, I need reminders of this.

As I studied the spread of associations across the page, I settled. There, laid out before me, I found my own patterns of dealing (or not) with fears. That calmed me. The fear of not having my friend to talk with anymore, of getting stuck in fear patterns, and of having to confront my fears to diminish their negative effects all seemed more normal and okay and manageable, in part because the cluster map reminded me that everything is connected. There’s always a path from here to there.

What gave me the most relief in this cluster map’s collection of bubbles and lines was how often odd delights and humor found a way in alongside the fears, a good lesson for me in general.

Who are we when we let our hands, arms, pens, selves loose to make associations from a central thought-word in a cluster map, to open for instruction in this way?

We are the everything, obviously—all the things, all connected.

Which is why cluster maps and other creative enticers can be enormously effective psychological healing tools. We create, therefore, we connect and heal.

All of this gives me more peace about my friend’s passing, more solid ground, like an arrival at a welcoming lighthouse—only to discover that I am the lighthouse.

We are all like this, I believe—little, lost, wandering, worried bits of contracted energy—until we set out in earnest to create safe space for ourselves to really be who we really are, our messes and fears included. That’s when we glimpse the lighthouse as us.

We may wander away again (always seeking, seeking). But the lighthouse-ness of our own hopeful selves (our revolving, beckoning homelight) pulls us in to do whatever we need to do to cohere. Such as high-stepping air-punches, scribbled blurts into a cluster map, the extended sweat of a long hike, speculative art-making, or the risk of an outstretched hand to a loved one who understands us.

We’re each like a cluster map of revolving aspects and experiences around a core of ME and linked to other pages of other people, other MEs. Our lines flow and extend and join.

Whatever journey we’re in the midst of, our still-wandering bits do know the way home. You can test this by following the pull of something you love.

About the Photo | Eastward

Western United States, USA, 2021

In the summer of 2021, I’d had enough of worrying about wildfires along the West Coast and hightailed it to parts east for a couple of months to visit friends in Florida and Tennessee. I’d decided it was okay to lean into self-care by simply absenting myself. The resulting restoration turned out to be magnificent.

I took the photo at the top of this article from the plane as we flew eastward for a long time over the troubled cloudy and smoky skies of the United States west of the Rocky Mountains. After we’d passed the Rocky Mountains the skies cleared to scattered puffball clouds and lush green land.

Somehow, in times past, the idea of creativity took on a definition that separated us from it, as if we could possibly exist without having it, and as if some people have it and some people don’t.

That outdated notion keeps us locked inside a mistaken creative identity, thinking we have to rely on luck or special tools to make the art we yearn to make, or to fully live the life we most want to live.

Instead of defining creativity as an ability to imagine or make something unique, what if creativity is trust in our own alternate reality?

Using this updated, more inclusive and accessible definition, we access our ability to be creative by leaning into the special and unique world each of us naturally, unavoidably, and constantly occupies as ourselves. I know this is a simple idea, but I’m amazed at how often I lose touch with the source within, and how much people I know also struggle with locating a path to being more authentic about their creativity.

Just yesterday, I spoke with a professional artist friend who’s had a long and fruitful career, including awards and public recognitions, and yet he confessed that he still struggles at times to connect with the part of him that knows how to relax into trusting that original ideas will come. He talked about the difficulty of engaging in self-enquiry around artistic practice, especially around playful exploration. When he came across probing questions online that invited him to examine his inner landscape around this issue, he immediately turned away in avoidance, uncomfortable with where his answers might take him.

I know that particular artist well enough to know something about his history and the push-pull tension he experiences between always wanting what he makes to be excellent in other people’s opinions, but also wanting to make something unique. Trying to figure out what might sell sometimes gets in the way of determining whether or not the thing created is a genuine expression.

I consider all such wrestling matches characteristic of a life affected by false overlays of history, as I call them—those experiences, large and small, of when our genuine creative impulses were stomped on or dismissed. Little hurts of dismissal add up, especially if they started when we were too young to decide for ourselves what we thought of our own creative efforts and to stick up for ourselves in the face of dissent. The big hurts may have convinced us we can’t be creative at all—and, oftentimes, we can’t when we’re struggling under those overlays. That makes it harder to find the secret, hidden core of us that believes we are creative.

The crucial piece is that since our unadulterated inner authentic self is the source of our creativity, then we can’t be separated from our creativity, not ever.

What does it look like to operate under the definition of creativity that is trust in our own alternate reality? Here are some examples:

• Making something even when the overlays call it “ugly”

• Toying with your answers to these questions: What is my alternate reality? and What do I really think about this? and What do I actually want?

• Admitting to yourself what you most love, what you truly love, and taking action to support yourself around it

• Deciding to move and then moving in a direction that feels true to you, even though someone else disapproves

• Letting go of something you realize you don’t resonate with, in favor of something better for you

• Giving your alternate reality inside you a chance to exist in the material world by making or doing something, anything, even if you can’t yet see how the end result will turn out

• Gathering some physical items that represent your secret core desire, as reminders that you know what you love and what you want, even in the times when you can’t consciously access that internal place

• Defending the space and time you need for exploring creating from your own alternate reality, even if it’s only a few minutes now and then

• Spending quality time with yourself by being fully present as you make something

The way we can consciously touch that inner realm is by practicing, like by trying the suggestions above or others you discover and stumble upon for yourself. We thus build self-trust. We practice figuring out how to trust our own selves.

Believe me, I am practicing this too. I’m often scared as I practice this. I sometimes cry. But what I find interesting and promising is that when I cry during a creative practice, the reason mostly has to do with the moment an overlay lifts off and dissolves. The emotion is one of sudden relief followed by a sense of greater freedom and greater self-trust.

I get to those moments by trying something, by practicing, despite the voice that tries to stop me, and by moving my body in the material world to attempt to make something that originates from the place that’s true inside me. This can bring the overlays into conscious view, making them ripe for dismantling. The more free of overlays we become, the easier it is to access and trust our own alternate reality as we make things—including making a life.

If it feels like it may help you, you can use my trust in you as a back-up boost while you practice giving your yearnings space to exist in the world outside of you as your creativity.

About the Photo | Portal View

Hochburg Castle, Emmendingen, Germany, 2012

On a bright, beautiful day in May, a friend and I took a day trip from where we lived in Freiburg, Germany, to the ruin of Hochburg Castle, near the town of Emmendingen. I romped gleefully hither and yon with my camera, captivated by the nooks and crannies, the heavy stone, and the unknown stories within the former rooms turned into open-air courtyards surrounded by crumbled walls.

This particular photo moment gave me feelings of recognition. I know the closed-in sensation that yearns for a clearer view, for an escape hatch through which to soar into a sunlit space welcoming to my spirit. But I also acknowledge an affinity for closed-in safety, for shelter from the storms of life. Somehow, the contrast between the two settles me more than having to choose one or the other.

In the same way, I consider the effort that is at times required to access the flights of authentic creativity to be worthy of our experience. Contrast helps us identify the openings.

If you struggle to share your genuine self in your writing, you’re not alone. When I worked as a managing editor at a publishing company specializing in self-help books, I witnessed firsthand the internal conflict authors confronted as they tried to zero in on their messages. Should I tell my whole truth? Or tell only part of my truth? What if my truth hurts someone I love? What if not sharing this hurts me? How much should I share to help someone else who’s going through what I went through?

Because of the deadlines and agreements involved in the traditional publishing process, the authors we worked with didn’t have the option of not confronting their fears around being vulnerable in their writing. More often than you might expect, this pressure-cooker turned emotional, as the safety of writing in private moved into the stark reality of exposure in the public sphere. The intense process of becoming an author who bares a tender heart and shares vulnerably in public prompted tears, misdirected anger, excuses, bargaining, rebellion, and more. We saw it all. And we dealt with it all.

One of the most effective methods for helping authors through their conflicts around vulnerability was to remind them that even though exposure comes with a risk of judgment, their willingness to share their own story (as they’d wanted to do when they set out to write their book), would help their intended readers recognize themselves in that story. Recognition of shared experience builds trust and fosters deeper a connection.

Have you ever searched Google for information about something you’d never dared tell anyone about, a secret or a shame or a confusion you didn’t know who in your life to talk with about? I have. Plenty of times. The feeling of realizing that I’m not the only one, that other people (sometimes lots of other people, according to the large number of search results) have searched on this topic before me, relieves and reassures me. When I can read what someone else wrote about my issue, my gratitude is profound.

Writing vulnerably and with a tender heart powerfully binds us to our readers—whether we’re writing self-help, fiction, poetry, marketing copy, magazine articles, or anything else. But how do we actually do this?

Let’s take a closer look at where the ability to be vulnerable comes from. The degree to which we’re able or willing to share genuinely is affected by things like childhood experiences, current dynamics in close relationships, personality traits, ingrained habits, and the extent and quality of our friendship networks, among others. The effect of these types of influences is our level of self-trust around sharing.

Exposing a vulnerability—sharing a truth that feels risky to share—is easier when we trust ourselves to assess the risks with self-compassion and take care of ourselves, no matter the outcome. In other words, giving to others is easier when we give to ourselves first. No one else can tell us what’s right for us, including when it comes to deciding what to expose about ourselves.

But what if how we are on the inside meets with disapproval on the outside? Anticipation of rejection can stop us in our tracks, freezing the flow of creativity. A powerful tool for building self-trust around creative vulnerability is to reclaim love from the clutches of trying to be cool.

Coolness is the enemy of the tender heart.

How good it feels to love without concern that what we love or how we love is somehow uncool or unacceptable. If you’re like me, you’ve had experiences that drove home the pain of rejection for being who you really are. If we’re not careful or vigilant about healing these old wounds, they can keep us from actively connecting with what we love in the present. Without that internal connection, creating suffers.

What you love informs everything you create.

What did you love as a kid, back when your enthusiasms sparked and pulled at you to follow and you did? In that soft place of uncoolness, what treasures captured your attention?

A round pebble reaches for me. A tiny green bug on the tip of a blade of green grass waves hello with one leg. A seed pod rattles when shaken. A stranger’s shopping list tucked among the cans at a grocery store asks to be claimed.

The beauty of someone not considered conventionally beautiful. A kind word from someone who understands. A pen and a piece of paper. A silence long enough to find myself within.

Loving with a tender heart and sharing from there magnetizes treasures. Define cool for yourself. Check in with the circulatory systems pulsing across your neurons and through your heart and into your gut. Create what really matters to you. Put it out there. Release it into the wild to roam. What if your creation is exactly the right answer for someone who’s scared and googling questions in the dark?

Previously published on Grace Kerina website in 2022.

About the Photo | Red Houseboat

Degnen Bay, Gabriola Island, BC, 2009

When people get to know me well enough to find out how much time I spend alone, they sometimes worry that I get lonely. This most often arises when my more extroverted friends ask about how I’m doing since I moved to a new location. They want to know if I’ve made friends yet and what I’ve been doing to engage in local events and meet people. I craft my replies with some care, because I know my friends only want to be assured I’m okay and living a good life.

The thing is, I am rarely lonely, even when I don’t know anyone locally. I have lots of friends—though they are spread across a few different countries, or are inanimate (to most people), such as trees or favorite rooms or pieces of furniture or other belongings. Certain authors are some of my best friends.

The photo at the top of this article of the red houseboat in the peaceful bay surrounded by magnificent nature depicts the feeling I have when I am alone but not lonely: I am part of an extensive, networked whole that delights and feeds me, charms and inspires me. People are, of course, a big part of my life and my world, but interacting with people often and in real time is not a thriving path for me, or for a lot of other creative, introverted, highly sensing people I know.

We can be alone in our own way while also being surrounded by nourishing connections.

In 2008, when my mom was in her early seventies, I interviewed her to find out more about her experience of being a highly sensitive person who’d raised a highly sensitive daughter.

Mom is Nancy Dunn Lawrence, or Nan (she passed away in 2011, but she’s still my mom). She raised me in a time before the trait or the term highly sensitive was popularized. In this conversation, we shared about my childhood and what it was like to be highly sensitive with each other in the days before knowledge and tools about highly sensitive people (HSPs) were readily available, as they are today.

[Text in brackets are my comments added after the interview.]

GRACE: What was it like having a baby with a head the size of a watermelon? I mean, what was it like having a highly sensitive child?

NAN: I didn’t think of you as highly sensitive. The term I would have used back then would have been “independent.” I used to joke about the fact that you were born screaming. After I knew more about you, I figured you’d been complaining about your lack of control over the induced labor because you’d have preferred to have chosen the date of your birth for yourself.

The next thing that really made me aware of what I called your “independence” was the ongoing ordeal with socks, which started when you were about two. We had to put them on and take them off about four or five times every time you got dressed because the bump at the toe always bugged you and I had to keep readjusting them until it didn’t bug you.

GRACE: What if you’d said, “Never mind—let’s go”?

NAN: You’d yell and refuse to have your shoes put on. No negotiation. No make-do. It had to be your way or nothing.

And then there was the day of the dress. I was getting you ready to go to pre-school when you were four. I had one dress washed and ironed and in the closet, but you absolutely refused to wear it. I didn’t know why. While you were at school that day I washed and ironed all the dresses you owned, and from then on you could choose for yourself every day.

GRACE: Does knowing now about high sensitivity alter your view of early incidents like that?

NAN: Yes. It’s interesting to try and adjust those memories, basing the causes more on high sensitivity than thinking of it only as stubbornness and independence. You always had such strong opinions about what you liked and didn’t like (and you still do).

I remember telling my own mother once (and I don’t remember how old you were at the time) that you were so independent but that I couldn’t imagine where you’d gotten it from. She looked at me, rolled her eyes, and said, “You don’t know?” Looking back, I think I must have been the only highly sensitive person in my whole large family. I can see how the strong needs and the hyper-awareness of highly sensitive children, like you and I both were, get interpreted as being so unique as to be weird.

GRACE: As challenging as it must have been sometimes, you handled things pretty well. Whatever you thought at the time was the cause of my “independence,” my memory is that you did things that helped me.

NAN: Well, I couldn’t think of what else to do. I didn’t know how to find socks that didn’t have bumps, so I kept on rearranging them until you were satisfied. It was probably a very good thing that you were stubborn since things like bumps in your socks mattered so much to you.

There were other things that stood out about you which I now think were part of your high sensitivity, like your creativity. I was always delighted about that.

GRACE: You were always quite creative yourself [Mom graduated in 2008 from a two-year production-weaving college program—at age 73]. I completely loved all the art classes you found for me, through public parks or wherever. They can’t have cost much because we didn’t have much money, but you found a way, and those experiences provided me with so much pure bliss. I totally loved them. Thank you for that.

And thanks for the library experiences, too. My memory is that every time we moved to a new town [which was often] one of the first things you’d do was take me and David [my younger brother] to the library to get us all library cards. And there were never any limits about the library. We were never, ever told we couldn’t check something out, and you never put limits on how much we could check out. I remember leaving libraries all across the southern United States with stacks of books up to my chin, giddy with the bounty.

Also, you’d often offer interesting, creative suggestions whenever I’d tell you I was bored. You’d say things like, “Go read the dictionary” or “Write a poem in your mind—that’s what I do.” [Mom’s graduation project from the production-weaving course involved weaving her poetry.]

NAN: Thank you, sweetie. But you’re forgetting the teenage years, when I cowered in my room.

GRACE: Right. But remember that I didn’t know what was going on then either. I only knew that so many things felt so wrong, and it all made me feel very angry. I had no idea how to get a grip on things, on myself.

NAN: I know. Neither did I. And I wasn’t in the most healthy of places then either. Most of the time it was dreadful, but along the way I figured out that things were easier when I didn’t try to argue with you. It was easier to simply let you do what you wanted to do.

For instance, when you were in high school I used to wake you up in the mornings, but you’d be so upset with me that I decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore and bought an alarm clock for you. It was a simple solution, but it made my mornings much more enjoyable! Now, knowing about HSPs, I suspect you desperately needed sleep to stay grounded or balanced, and when you hadn’t gotten enough you woke up cranky.

Another interesting thing was that you’d sometimes announce in the morning on a school day that you needed to go back to bed. At some point I realized that if I made you go to school on one of those days, you’d get sick, but if I let you stay home and rest, you’d be ready to go back to school the next day. You seemed to know when your body needed to rest, and you didn’t abuse the option to stay home.

GRACE: Seriously, I can’t thank you enough for those things. They really made a difference.

NAN: Well, if I’d known then about high sensitivity and if I’d had any resources about it to call upon, it would have been easier to know how to be your mom.

Although maybe there were some things I was doing right… I just thought of something else. Do you remember when we lived in Hawaii, in that duplex? You and David had found a tree branch that you really liked. You asked me for help with making it stand up, and I gave you a jar you could put rocks in so it would be heavy enough to support the branch. You put it on the stoop between the two doors of the duplex and had a great time decorating it. I was inside the house, but I could hear you through the screen door. At some point our new neighbor came out of the other side of the duplex. She must have seen your branch then because she said in a scornful voice, “What in the world is this?” I knew you well enough to picture you pulling yourself up to your full second-grade height and looking the woman right in the eye as I heard you say very clearly and firmly, “My mother says it’s interesting.”

GRACE: What a great thing it was to grow up with a champion—well, with two champions, since Dad was no slouch in that department either. Now that you know about the trait of high sensitivity, what advice would you give to yourself back then and to other parents who are raising HSP kids now?

NAN: The biggest and most important advice would be to listen to your HSP children. If, as a parent, you know about high sensitivity, you definitely have a big advantage because you know to listen when an HSP child says they’re too hot or too cold or whatever. You know that the child is probably not just being irritating. If you’re not highly sensitive yourselves, you ought to read all you can about the trait so you can better understand it. But the primary thing is to trust your highly sensitive children when they tell you about themselves.

GRACE: Is there anything you’d like to add?

NAN: I sometimes still feel like a kid myself when I’m surrounded by adults and I’m having an HSP need that I’m having trouble getting met. It’s frustrating to tell people that the light is too bright for me so I need to turn it off, or that I need the background music to be turned off so I can hear what people are saying, and to get a response that clearly shows they don’t believe it should be a problem. They may go along with the adjustment I need if they like me well enough, but I’m amazed I need to say the same things every single time. It’s frustrating.

So, I’m glad to have this conversation with you, Grace, to add my one voice, however soft, to the growing awareness about highly sensitive people, in the hopes that more education will continue to result in more tolerance and understanding for us all.

GRACE: Thanks, Mom. I love you.

NAN: You’re welcome, sweetie. I love you, too.

During the interview, Mom also told me about three of her favorite books (I’ve quoted her comments about why she loved them):

• The Trouble with Poetry, by Billy Collins – “His poems are simple, accessible, and moving.”

• The Findus and Pettson children’s books, by Sven Nordqvist, like Pancakes for Findus – “I love the illustrations, with all the secret and strange things to be found in them, and the relationship between the old man, Pettson, and the feisty cat, Findus, makes me happy.” [Grace: I discovered these books via a German boyfriend’s young son, and introduced them to Mom, who took to them as much as we all did. My favorite Findus and Pettson book is When Findus Was Little and Disappeared. Here’s an article about the books: LINK (be advised that NorthSouth Books no longer publishes them; instead, see Hawthorn Books, which offers a couple of short articles about the books and the author: LINK and LINK.)]

• Bad Cats, by Jim Edgar – “This book’s ability to make me laugh is off the charts.”

A version of this article was previously published online in 2008.

About the Photo | Nan and Grace

Photo by MM | Western North Carolina, 2001

A few years after I went off to college, Mom moved from the Midwest to Western North Carolina to make a new life amid the rich arts and crafts culture there. The photo of the two of us at the top of this page was taken at a lake near where she lived.

I can’t resist adding the photo below as well, of Mom with her new grandson (my brother’s son), because her facial expression and demeanor that show patience, love, and interest in the face of emotional outbursts is familiar to me from my own childhood and young adulthood, like she’s saying, Okay. Well, that’s a feeling. Go for it. I’m here with you.

[ANNOUNCER] Welcome, ladies and gentleman, to today’s qualifying round in the 26th Annual Open-Air Writing Tournament. On this beautiful spring day, all but the most cautious of contestants will leave their rain gear behind as they set out to test their limits.

Here come the twenty hopefuls! By the end of the day, only six will remain to compete in Thursday’s final. Who will make the cut? Wily Will Hampton and his alarming facial expressions? Witty Magda Karek and her surprising turns of logic? Pernilla Sabro and her furiously paced quantity?

The judges will weigh three factors: choice of writing setting, number of words written in one hour, and quality of the final product.

We’ll introduce the contestants in a moment. First, let’s take a tour around this stunning national park, the setting of this year’s Tournament...

===

[ANNOUNCER] Good afternoon. I’m here in the southeast corner of the park with the judges and a sizeable crowd to watch newcomer Freddie Barrie get to work in his chosen setting. He’s picked a bench under a huge tulip tree in full bloom, with a panoramic view over the valley.

A Tournament staff member hands Mr. Barrie an official blank booklet. The sudden click and whir of cameras from the risers packed with media representatives garners a single, possibly anxious, glance from Mr. Barrie as we all wait for the signal.

And there goes the bell! He’s off. He runs to the bench, whips a cushion out of his rucksack, and sits down even as he pulls a Space Pen from his front left pants pocket and yanks off the pen’s cap. No movements wasted here. Mr. Barrie means business.

Although the Tournament’s overall topic of “Fathers and Feelings” has been controversial, so far today it’s turned up some remarkable writing. For this qualifying round, Mr. Barrie has opted to randomly choose a sub-topic for the first of his two 30-minute writing sets. He received the topic in a sealed envelope from an officiant at the judge’s table. Now settled on his bench, Mr. Barrie tears open the envelope, reads his topic, and a small smile flits across his face.

The crowd remains hushed and expectant. We watch Mr. Barrie intently as he stares out over the valley, pen poised. Unlike most contestants, who start writing immediately, Mr. Barrie tends to allow the clock to tick as he collects his initial thoughts.

Ah! He’s off! His pen flies, sun flashing off its silver casing as Mr. Barrie bends over the page. The view from his bench is forgotten. He’s only got eyes for the words. It’s very exciting to see this young man so intent on his task this early in the set.

===

[ANNOUNCER] The warning bell has sounded at the 25-minute mark. Mr. Barrie appears to be struggling to wrap things up. At the 22-minute mark he got a writer’s cramp and dropped the pen, but rallied immediately, standing and jumping around for 17 seconds, waving his arms, obviously trying to increase his circulation. A vigorous massage of the hand and he was back to editing what he’d written in the first fifteen minutes, as shown by bursts of writing on fresh pages, interspersed with searches through what he’d previous written.

Wait a minute. Look at that! The crowd murmurs as Mr. Barrie wipes a tear from his cheek. Hold on. The camera crew tells me they can confirm it was a real tear. He’s made himself cry with his own writing! This bodes very well for the quality of his creation, ladies and gentleman, and for his final score, which might just be enough to send him on to the final round.

There. The final bell has sounded. A runner dashes out to snatch the booklet from Mr. Barrie’s hands and sprint it to the judges’ table, where the booklet is rubber stamped with the date, time, and Tournament seal, and all three judges sign the back cover.

Judge Evans walks with the booklet to the podium where he adjust his tie and the microphone in preparation for the honor of reading from Mr. Barrie’s first-set booklet. As is the time-honored tradition, Mr. Barrie folded down a page corner to indicate where the judge should begin his reading, which, in this case, looks to be about three-quarters of the way through the 30-page booklet. It’s time for us all to hear what Mr. Barrie has come up with, writing there on his bench in the warm spring air amid the falling blossoms.

Previously published on a Grace Kerina website in 2013.

About the Photo | Text

Freiburg, Germany, 2012

On a clear March day I went for a walk in the neighborhood where I lived in Freiburg. A little ways down the street, this huge tulip tree drew me closer. Dropped blossoms spread in a circle over the lawn, sidewalk, and street.

Sometimes, when I’m writing or taking photos, when I’m pondering about what to write or assessing potential photographic angles and subjects, I’m struck by the wonder of how much fun is to be found in creative activities. If you’re reading this and you’re a creator of some kind (I know you are), I send you thanks and appreciation for your imagination, curiosity, and inventiveness. When you make things, you help me, and everyone else, by hosting that energy. I hope you keep going to make more of what you most want to make.

Making something—that’s simple enough. Simple and enough.

Even before I set in motion a move from Oregon to Maryland, and thus entered the birth-canal restrictions and challenges unique to relocating from one home to another, I’d flirted with the idea of safety-loading. And then, in the midst of the move, breathless under the cascade of a shifting task lists, fostering a feeling of safety became a lifeline.

Heightened uncertainty about the world and our place in it—whether due to our own choices (such as deciding to move) or events outside our control (such as politics, big weather, worrisome global shifts)—can threaten to destabilize us toward frozen fear. Refuge from dangers can be tough to locate. Maybe, we reason, safety isn’t even possible. After all, the multitude of problems coming to a head at any given time loom with menace and cast dark shadows over the future.

If we don’t feel safe now, and haven’t felt truly safe in a long time, how can we feel safe in the future? Where are the exits to light and ease? Who has the secret password to pop us out of danger, like right now?

In such a state, I tend to absent myself from the present moment and idealize previous times and places. I tell myself the story that life used to be simpler, better, less terrifying on a daily basis. Remember boredom? Remember when years on end seemed to pass by without major upheavals? When did that change? Was it the long siege of Covid-19? Was it waking up more and more to inequalities and systemic atrocities? Was it the long slide to maturity that left behind the healing escape of innocent ignorance? Yes and yes, but wake-ups, including collective wake-ups, are necessary at times.

The world itself is not appreciably different, I don’t think, except in the details. Maybe our ability and our willingness to ingest more of the reality of the world is different, as the ugly underbellies of long-tolerated injustices continue to roll up into view.

But we don’t need to be less tender in response. That’s not the answer. We need to be more strategic in our management of our tenderness. To be totally clear: Our tenderness is absolutely essential—our constant suffering because of our tenderness is not. Suffering as a way of life does not itself lead to the big change required in the world, big change I’m convinced we—as highly sensing empaths and intuitive creative explorers—are uniquely suited to shaping.

I propose a recalibration of attention, via the practice of developing an ongoing awareness of instances of embodied safety. When we notice actual, right-here-right-now safe moments, we acknowledge those moments as such, and thereby build a personal foundation from which it becomes less risky to radiate tenderness. By piecing together individual moments of feeling safe, even tiny instants, we get better at recognizing them. As more such moments are consciously curated, collected, stockpiled, cherished, and accrued, we retrain our brains and senses to look for safety and to register its presence. You might be surprised by how often your normal days already include more moments of safety than you expected, even if your life doesn’t currently feel overburdened or out of your control.

In the same way slipping dimes into a piggy bank over time creates a steady increase of financial options, piling up safety awareness can cause a baseline shift toward options that stabilize internally and radiate tenderness outward, a burgeoning level of trust that we are okay and can handle whatever may come. Maybe we can’t handle every darn minute no matter what happens, but we can handle more than we might have expected before we started actively looking for and stocking up on safety moments.

Consider these examples of safe-feeling moments: The satisfaction of a favorite meal, when taste buds and satiated belly prove the presence of nourishment. The sensation of freshly laundered lounging-around clothes after an end-of-the-day shower, their virtual warm hug a physical solace. The satisfaction and pleasure of starting the next audiobook in a beloved series. A walk around the block on a day of dramatic sunshine and clouds, breeze and breath and views coalescing to reassure that the natural, beautiful world endures.

Whoever you are, wherever you are, you can tap into bits of calm alignment inside the stream of your life and despite humanity’s currents of sorrow.

If you zoom in to your experiences of instants that actually give you a feeling of safety, and aim to name them to yourself (a stranger’s peal of laughter in the grocery store, the good-ache of shoulders after clipping the hedge, a really cool type font, discovery of a new website that lights up curiosity, a speck that’s a hawk in flight out beyond the tallest tree, freshly clipped fingernails, gluten-free chocolate cookies), you may quickly realize that what makes you feel safe, what gives you a felt-sense of comfort and well-being, is really personal.

Sure, shelter, having enough food, and those types of basics are likely to be on everyone’s safety lists. But as the curator of your own safety feelings, your collection of experiences will be as densely individual as you are. You are the only person who can do this, who can recognize what actually makes you feel safe. This is important, because, with ever more of this type of personal information on hand, you’ll likely start to notice patterns, and that will allow you, in turn, to even more readily and purposefully increase your safe-feeling foundation. And on the process builds.

For example, I’ve learned over time that when I’m pounced on by a fretting session, what works better than desperate attempts to calm down and be mature according to other people’s standards, is giving up and treating myself, instead, like an infant. I retreat to the womb, so to speak.

What this looks like is getting into bed (or remaining in bed) and burrowing under the covers to soak in warm quiet stillness as I regress to the bare bones of what I know. I talk aloud to myself in a gentle voice. I talk to identify the factual, neutral circumstances of the situation that’s bothering me (remembering my father’s dictum: the facts are friendly). Then I examine what thoughts I’ve attached to those facts. When that’s clear, I admit to whatever uncomfortable feelings those thoughts have been generating. Finally, I try on different thoughts to find a true but different thought about the facts, a thought that makes me feel better. In doing this process1, I regress to the safe place of remembering that I can change my own thoughts. I can return to the conception of an upset for a redo. I can pull the womb-like protection of deciding for myself around me and hide from further input as I turn myself in a tight space to get ready to meet the wider world.

I regress to the womb fretful, but I don’t stay forever—just for a while, to wallow in the coziness and minimal stimulation long enough to midwife a shift toward power, centeredness, and sovereignty. I allow myself to be comforted, and I am the one comforting myself.2

What if you already do collect safety moments, but without registering them fully? I’m betting you experience more comfort than you know you do. I did. When I started safety-loading in earnest, the instances I found piled up fast, magnetized by my attention and their own growing mass.

Collect all you can. Pet the cat for an additional five minutes to foster the purr and slow your breaths. Chew the bite longer to savor more. Search for the moments when nothing is exploding or overtaxing you, when you can nod and acknowledge that you are—genuinely, really—okay right now. Remind yourself of what is actual, rather than what threatens to be dire or is only imaginary, or what is dire and real but not actually happening to you right now.

The actual instant of the needle’s prick of the injection is so short, so miniscule, compared to the anticipation of the pain. What I’m saying is for us to learn to practice living in the comfort that crowds all around the actual pain moments, until we can readily tell the difference.

When in your life as you are currently living it do you experience moments that evoke words like oasis, rest, space, luxuriate, beauty, cozy, satisfaction, replete? Find minutes when you can honestly tell yourself, I’m okay.

Increasing your own feeling of safety can, bit by bit, provide gentle course-corrections.

Collecting comforts infuses the sorrow with hope.

Let’s broaden this topic of safety. I’ve gradually come to understand that I belong here on Earth, and so do you. So do we all. Furthermore, we are of the Earth. The Earth made us, sustains us, and cradles us. We are not separate from Earth. We, humanity, are not evil interlopers bedeviling the Earth to death. That perspective can divide us from the truth of our belonging and provoke fearful hiding and an avoidance of life. You and I were meant to inhabit our sensitive bodies with our intuitive souls in our current lifetimes. Living fully includes believing that we genuinely, truly deserve to be embodied during this period of Earth’s and humanity’s history.

I’m glad we’re here together. Thank you for showing up. We’re okay. You’re okay. Now and now and right now.

In this moment, as I think of you with affection and a soft heart, another safety-loaded coin drops into the bank.

About the Photo | Garden Practice

Vancouver, BC, 2008

In the city neighborhood where I lived in Vancouver, we had a tiny garden out back. My friend who I lived with spent enjoyable hours coaxing garlic, lavender, and a ton more from that patch of dirt. His young-adult son, whom I adored, allowed me to persuade him one September afternoon to practice his ukulele in the garden, where the light, his intense focus, and the lush growth infused me with feelings of gratitude and protectiveness. A treasured safety-loading moment for sure.

For the past six months I’ve been in a two-person Master Mind group based on the idea put forth in Napoleon Hill’s book Think and Grow Rich. We meet on Zoom every week (and share emails in between) in an ongoing and intense discussion of business ideas and how to apply them to our specific businesses to forward our aims and serve our people.

Our common ground helps. We’re both INFJ Myers-Briggs personality types,1 writers, and teachers, and we share certain perspectives. We understand each other, but we also differ in valuable ways, making our exchanges compelling enough that we shifted from one-hour to two-hour weekly calls, to delve longer into the discoveries that invariably arise during discussions. There’s something extra in the synergy.

Napoleon Hill acknowledged the presence of an enriching additional energy that can arise in a Master Mind group, calling it the “Third Mind.” He said that the Master Mind “is the principle through which you can accomplish in one year more than you could accomplish without it in a lifetime if you depended entirely on your own efforts for success.”2 Already, I can vouch for that statement from my own experience.

My Master Mind partner, for whom I’m endlessly grateful, is the brilliant author and teacher Lauren Sapala, whom I first met ten years ago, when I reached out for coaching after I read her gift of a book The INFJ Writer. Through the various colleague and client roles we’ve taken on with each other since then, friendship has grown. I highly recommend Lauren’s newsletter and books, and her classes for INFJ personality types. She has a genius knack for showing us how awesome we already are.

One of the things Lauren and I do is read books about business and share about them. The first book we read that blew our minds was The Science of Scaling, by Benjamin Hardy and Blake Erickson, about the benefits of trading the heaviness of complexity for the agility and scaling power of simplicity.

We’ve traveled through other books as well, including Russell Brunson’s The Secrets Trilogy, and Jim Collins’s Good to Great and Turning the Flywheel—all of which prompted enthusiasm around the metaphoric club table on our weekly calls. We also follow up with practical applications of what we’re learning, each in our own ways. At times, my progress seems mostly conceptual, but gradually the nuts and bolts of my business are changing as a result of the Master Mind’s collaborative force field.

One of the ideas we play with is Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept: At the intersection of the answers to three questions is a sweet spot of focus and clarity that can drive and guide business success. The three questions are: What can I be the best in the world at? What am I deeply passionate about? and What drives my business’s economic engine?

Lauren and I explored and pondered our answers to those questions, to try to zero in on our potential sweet spots. By a couple of weeks ago, I’d identified a version of a Hedgehog for my business—which definitely helped, but it didn’t feel super streamlined, not yet. The click I craved hadn’t arrived.

For both of us, something about the teachings we’d studied so far wasn’t working. I caught myself feeling unwieldy and inappropriately unruly, as if I were trying to cram important aspects of myself and my business into a too-small room. Was I destined to not be a successful business owner because I couldn’t tame my propensity for wandering curiously off the map?

During a recent call, Lauren said, “You know what we’re both best in the world at? We’re best at creating the original things we create. You’re best in the world at being Grace Kerina. I’m best in the world at being Lauren Sapala.”

Master Mind energy sparked in the air.

My whole body registered Lauren’s words as truth. Instead of trying so hard to pare offerings down to a single, simple focus that could scale bigger, what if we offered our richness of original options under a unifying conceptual umbrella? The rightness of the notion connected with me in a sigh of relief.

With that opened portal in place, I began (as I inevitably do) stalking the internet, local public library, and favorite online book sources for further education relevant to my updated vantage point.

The book I found, the right book at exactly the right time, wasn’t a business book, but a melange of mythology, philosophy, poetry, and self help—Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin.

Shaw, a mythologist who’s been a wilderness rites of passage guide for almost twenty years, writes in a style dear to my heart, so dripping with poetic turns I feel drunk after a few paragraphs.

The wild twin is not unique to me; you have one, everyone has one. That’s the message from the old stories. That the day you were born, a twin was thrown out of the window, sent into exile. That it wanders the woods and the prairies and the cities, lonely in its whole body for you.3 —Martin Shaw, Courting the Wild Twin

As I listened to the book (I recommend the audio version, which is read by the author), I felt the press of all the many alluring things I semiconsciously suppress in my daily life and in my business life in order to dovetail with expectations originating from outside of me. That pressure has gradually diminished since childhood, but nevertheless makes itself known still in restrictions persistent and new.

I felt those suppressed joys rise then, as lost strands that want to come home to my consciousness, want to twine with me as the fully realized, unified self I’ve always yearned to be, despite myriad thwartings weathered in countless moments in the slights of society and mainstream assumptions.

From Martin Shaw in Courting the Wild Twin:

Who is the wild twin? I first caught the perfume of my wild twin by walking with muddy boots through wet grasses to my scrubby woodland den as a six-year-old. As the trees swirled I caught a scent and started to cry without understanding. I wove a pheasant feather in my hair.4

I believe that in the labor of becoming a human, you have to earnestly search this character out, as it has something crucial for you with it. It has your life’s purpose tucked up in its pocket. If there was something you were here to do in these few brief years, you can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key.5

If you don’t attend to your Soul’s vitality with intent, then suppressed it’ll run you ragged.6

My wild twin has been evident, for sure, now that I know to seek the signs.7 Evident in the way I write novels by downloading, by setting my own self aside to allow something unrestrained and beyond-me to arise and speak through my fingers on the keyboard. Evident in the topics I’m drawn to explore and write about, to share and collect, and to reassemble in fresh perspectives. Evident in the questions I ask, which often make others uncomfortable or (and) remove overlays of falseness. Evident, simply, in what I love.

More from Martin Shaw:

I’m not telling you what to pray to, the celestial-or-otherwise shape of the thing, but find something to adore and keep talking to it.8

You are enough. This is the major, deadly, ice-riven mountain to traverse. That you, yourself, are enough.9

These messages—”you are enough” and “find something to adore”—are likely familiar to you by now. They are worth reprising. I know I need to keep hearing them. My hope is that I’ve managed to pass them along to you with care, and with some of the unifying, synergistic energy of the Master Mind and your own wild twin.

If experiencing a Master Mind association with someone appeals to you, there are opportunities to be found or created that are worthy of your bravery. If someone specific comes to mind, could you ask them to explore it with you? You could sign up for Lauren Sapala’s newsletter to be notified about her classes, where you can come into contact with and share space with other compassionate, INFJ, highly sensing, intuitive, empathic people.

About the Photo | Forest Lair

Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, 2010

For a span of a decade, I visited Gabriola Island from my home in Vancouver, then lived full-time on the island for a couple of years—out on the far end of the island, away from the ferry dock. The paths available from the little house on the water where I lived splayed out in all directions, met the rocky beach and the sea, or wound up hills through high ferns, and remained quiet, mostly, free from the burr of human sounds. I think my wild twin closed in then, shadowed me. Perhaps inhabited the forest lair—walls and a roof and a missing door—almost unseen in this photo.

I first learned about Elfchen poems when I lived in Germany and attended intensive German language classes. For many days I showed up with my classmates, studied the material, participated in exercises, and did my homework. I loved those classes because they clued me in to linguistic secrets and I inevitably also learned more about English as well.

On the last day of another season of German classes, we learned about Elfchens. No, not a race of small elves, but a poetry format called, in English, elevenies, consisting of eleven words in a specific format of words per line: one, two, three, four, then one word per line, in that order. For example, here’s an Elfchen I wrote on a winter day:

Stunned,
captured by
plummeting cold and
the scope of sacrifice.
Pierced.

Elf is the German word for eleven. Adding –chen to a noun in German gives it a sense of being wee or dear. The word Elfchen (always capitalized, as are all German nouns) translates literally into English as little elevens.

In the class, our teacher introduced us to the concept of the Elfchen, then asked us to pair off with the person sitting next to us and take turns reading the Elfchen about friendship from our textbook to each other... while looking deeply into each other’s eyes. (Yep, that really happened in a government-approved, fluency-track, hard-core course in Germany. It’s time to bust up some stereotypes. Not only did the teacher instruct us to engage in deep eye contact with other new German-speakers, but that entire chapter in our textbook was about friendship.)

On that day, I was sitting next to a very nice man from Afghanistan with big dark eyes and eyelashes that threatened to whap me in the face every time he blinked. We giggled, and then (because we really trusted our teacher) locked eyes and talked to each other in Elfchen about friendship. I barely suppressed my tears as we read the poem to each other. I felt too shy and vulnerable to actually cry, but the exercise touched my heart. (Check out this beautiful, spare Amnesty International video of Europeans in Berlin holding four minutes of eye contact with refugees. I dare you not to cry.) Eleven words each later and the entire class was a bit giddier, the energy distinctly more... present.

Next, we wrote our own Elfchens, in the same teams of two. First, my Elfchen companion and I wrote one about his new baby. Then we wrote this one about home, translated here into English:

Home.
Who says
where it is?
Perhaps it is actually
everywhere.

We were a class of about 20, from Afghanistan, Chile, Iran, Iraq, Thailand, Canada, Macedonia, Romania, and more, all sharing a budding common language of German. In other words, we were all sort of between homes and in the process of expanding our collections of home.

I was impressed that the process of creating a poem of eleven words about home, in the presence of others in my same immigrant situation, made me feel so good and connected, like the Elfchen concept was a tool that allowed me to open a magic door leading to expanded possibilities. The experience both excited and settled me, grounding me in a sense of creative richness.

Wait.
A moment
of silent restraint
to sculpt possibility’s cup.
Hold.

Try an Elfchen of your own. Eleven words. So short. But watch out. There seems to be something mischievously elfin in the Elfchen after all. Like participating in a stunt with mirrors, engaging with an Elfchen may show you intriguing glimpses of the trickster in your own life and creativity.

Previously published on Grace Kerina website in 2014.

About the Photo | Freiburg Window

Freiburg, Germany, 2008

The window and eaves in the photo above, along with many other such carefully decorated architectural features, often distracted me as I walked through town to and from my German classes. The beautification of objects even when not necessary for utility is one of the things I miss about living in and spending time in Germany (France drips with this quality too, as I suspect other European countries do as well; my direct experience is mostly in Germany and France).

Another example of embellishing an everyday thing is this extravagant door and doorway (and indeed the entire building, inside and out, which a friend of a friend got me a tour of one day, to my delight) of the building for the archbishop’s ordinariate (an administrative division of the Roman Catholic church) in Freiburg. The building was designed by architect Raimund Jeblinger (1853-1937).

Although I am a reserved person, I often travel with other people. Actually, because I’m a reserved person, I enjoy taking trips with other people, especially long trips. I know that whatever discomforts I experience during the trip will be over at a known end point, but in the meantime truer-than-normal moments tend to occur with trip-mates, due to the forced proximity, which accelerates familiarity. It’s harder to hide behind polite socializing on an extended road trip, and I crave the rise of authenticity as a function of trip duration.

That is my version of an extreme sport.

I’ve done multi-month field-study trips, and countless shorter environmental field trips, cross-country driving trips, and excursions to other countries. I’ve traveled with family members, friends, fellow artists, fellow science types, and more. In every one of those often-intense compressed experiences, people can’t help but reveal the weird things that make them happy.

Beth, a fellow college student, loved geologic formations, to the point where she’d frequently blurt out statements like, “Oh! Oh! Around the curve up ahead is that amazing [insert detailed geologic feature description]—remember?” even though the last time we’d traveled that remote California state road had been on an environmental field trip two years before.

As another example, it wasn’t until I took a road trip with a friend that I learned of his obsession for a particular type of music that led me to discover I prefer less shrill vocal ranges.

People I’ve traveled with have revealed obsessions with trains, bakeries, trailside vegetation, tracking wild animals, the astrology of group dynamics, visual patterns, famous dead authors, cooking with garlic, and a whole lot more, all of which prompted their incandescent joy.

Taking trips with people is only one way I eavesdrop on people’s deeper psyches without the stress of living with them for extended periods of time. Plying my side-gig as a bookkeeper is another adventure into the secret lives of others (of course, doing so with nonjudgmental appreciation, and as a sacred trust).

I’m not saying that having a sixth sense for trains, or spending a high percentage of income on blingy, gold-plated kitchenware is weird in itself. I’m saying that when we gravitate toward specific adorations to the point where we develop magnetized radar, it can be labeled by others as weird.

As much as I value insights into other people’s authentic lives and affinities, it’s not always easy to share my own happiness-generating eccentricities. Depending on our histories around what happened when we revealed actual things that made us happy in the past, we may now prefer to keep them under wraps. We may even hide them from ourselves, or hide the strength of our fascinations from ourselves—thus depriving us of more happiness.

The joyful ways we play reveal us—to ourselves, most importantly. Only we know the breadth of our own collections. Our totality, our indivisibility, coheres in what we value, down to our bizarre exultations.

What do you always notice? When you crave the relief of joy, need a spike of wonder, a thrill of discovery, where do you go, what do you do? What enchantments do you return to again and again? What fascinated you as a child at times when you felt safe and free? If you truly believed someone else wanted to hear, what fascination would you gladly tell them all about? What might your fascinations reveal about you?

Taking photos is one of my obsessions, in part for the self-discovery. Why do I want to take a photo of this? The answer often surprises me. During a trip I took to Aix-en-Provence, France, amazing sights abounded. But the photos I most savored disclosed what felt like the secret life of the city.

Here’s a volunteer terrarium I found in the middle of a street, next to a plaque honoring the artist Cezanne, who lived in Aix-en-Provence.

In a back alley, I noticed this entrance to “’L’Effort Artistique,” which Google translates as The Artistic Endeavor, and which juxtaposes nicely with the crayon-like scrawl on the wall beside the door.

Other understated sightings through my camera lens on that Aix-en-Provence trip:

A couple of years later, on another trip to France, I caught sight of an intriguing control panel outside a doorway. I wanted so badly to take a photo, but felt cowed by the group of cigarette-smoking, stern-faced people clustered nearby staring at me. At first, I couldn’t make myself stop to examine the control panel under their intimidating gazes. But then I mastered my courage and turned back to snap a photo. I mean, look at it. How could I not document this?

The things I noticed and photographed on those trips to France showed me how much I care about subtle, semi-hidden, inconspicuous, life-affirming energies, and peeks into private lives and cultural customs.

We are drawn to particular, peculiar stuff for our own very good reasons.

But if we do not allow ourselves to heed the magnetic pull of what we consider fascinating, no matter what someone else might think, then we do not honor our own intricate selves. We do not learn more about who we really are. We do not, in turn, sometimes, therefore, enrich other people by showing them what they might not be aware of in our shared and wondrous world.

All the weird things that make you happy open portals of safe passage for you. They give you strength and secure footing. Maybe you’re not comfortable sharing them with anyone else, or are only comfortable sharing them with super-trusted fellow oddballs. Whether or not you share them, curate them for yourself, show yourself to yourself. Your true affinities overflow with importance.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You love all the things you genuinely love because they are part of you, and you are important. You can’t not love the things you love. Other people may consider them dumb, worthless, immaterial, or too freaky for words. Believe me when I tell you (as a long-time bookkeeper and as someone people seem compelled to tell their secrets to) that whoever diminishes you for whatever devotions you embrace, they are kidding themselves that they don’t also have unusual affinities going on themselves.

The more we accept the weird things that make us happy and embody the energy of positive self-regard, the more we radiate love to those around us. Yep. I’m that woo. We, you and I, are here in part to beam love. The only way we can do that without hurting ourselves is to practice loving ourselves first, including all that occupies our strange crevices and shadowed corners where we tucked away the bits we wanted to keep safe.

Basically, you are a treasure trove of really interesting bits and bobs. Dig in. Linger. Play there more. Make yourself happier.

About the Photo | Ducks on Ice

Tegel See, Berlin, Germany, 2010

A close friend lives within walking distance of Tegel See, a large lake in northwest Berlin. On my first winter visit to Berlin, we bundled up to take in the fresh air on a walk-and-talk along the path hugging the water, where we found these ducks. Like my mother the weaver did, I share a love for repeated patterns and appreciated all the colors and motifs situated this way and that, including the ice pieces.

About fifteen years ago, a writer reached out to ask me for support with a book she was writing. As a pathologist, mother, shaman, and more, Sarah Seidelmann intrigued me. Our conversations about her book expanded to include all sorts of things, including her spiritual guide (Alice the Elephant), her ADD, her family, and her artwork. How did she do it all? I wondered. At the time, I felt like I could barely manage to coordinate three different important paths in my life, much less as many paths as Sarah continued to show me about herself as we got to know each other.

That first book was What the Walrus Knows. The next book she wrote was Born to FREAK: A Salty Primer for Irrepressible Humans (“Why everything you’ve been told is wrong with you is absolutely right with you”). As we moved the book from rough draft to finished manuscript, I delighted in how much of Sarah’s personality, stories ,and wisdom infused her work. Most of the time as I read her books, I notice myself smiling with delight and recognition, finding myself in the encouraging pages.

Sarah kept creating, kept finding ways to give herself more and more permission—over time and through many different experiences—to embody her curiosity and her multitudinous, sometimes contradictory, irrepressible selves. Born to FREAK offers a panoply of options—from stories about Sarah and other FREAKS, interesting sidebars, quotes from Alice the Elephant, and a hilarious index1 in the back of the book, all of it collaged into a unique reading experience. I came away feeling more patient and open to the parts of myself pushing up out of the ground seeking light and acceptance.

It takes courage to share our wondrous facets with others, especially the facets that strongly contradict each other. The pathologist who likes to decoupage. The crusty orthopedic surgeon who likes to rescue puppies. The man who likes to dress as a woman. The stoic ornithologist who likes to decorate cakes. But it’s these very contradictions that reflect our humanity. When we foster our perfect contradictions, our multitudes, we can make the world a better place.2 —Sarah Seidelmann, Born to FREAK

Some years later, Sarah’s self-published What the Walrus Knows found updated life as The Book of Beasties, released by a traditional publisher. Those books share Sarah’s interest in animal totems, or spirit animals, and how sightings of beasties, as she calls them, in our daily lives bring connection, information, and assistance from the natural world.

Sarah also wrote a book about boundaries, filled with her own illustrations. She wrote a memoir about her journey from physician to shamanic healer. She wrote a novel, and created an oracle card deck, and designed an app.

I didn’t edit every book or product Sarah has written, but from our first meeting I became a superfan, hooking into the fountain of creativity flowing into her books, her newsletter, and her eyes-open, “let’s explore this” approach to life—including life’s tougher aspects, like death, divorce, our relationships with our own bodies, and more.

The essence of what want to tell you about Sarah is not only that she is a captivating and prolific creator, which she is, but that she is not unlike you and me. Those of us who are highly sensing, intuitive creators who question, who access worlds beyond the material world, and who accept the life in all things—we have the potential to bring forth magnificent creations, more so as we increasingly learn to shed the self-repressions we took onboard before we could choose for ourselves how to thrive.

You were born to FREAK. Embrace the fact that not everyone gets you.3 —Alice the Elephant, Born to FREAK

One of the reasons I do the work I do of writing and sharing around the specific soup of topics I swirl in, is that we cannot hear often enough that we are good and right and fine and beautiful just the way we are, no matter how many survival-necessitated layers of false and stifling beliefs piled up on us since the early times in our lives when we tried so hard to exist as ourselves within our childhood relationships and in all the times we’ve run afoul of mainstream society. We need all the tools and inspiration we can get around how possible and important it is to truly bloom.

Never stop chasing after love. Even if the po-po are on your tail. Even then.4 —Alice the Elephant, Born to FREAK

Sarah continues to experiment and quest and burst forth. Her efforts and eurekas are shared with transparency, and for that—for her—I am eternally grateful. She has taught me to persist in trying to claim the timid but true parts of myself and offer them the gift of space to exist in my consciousness, at first, and then, in time, to peek out and make eye contact with a more populated playing field.

Through all of my interactions with Sarah, and in the creative work she continues to evolve through, she has modeled for me an abiding code of generosity. It’s my pleasure to introduce (or reintroduce) you to her.

Sarah Seidelmann Links

For a lift of vibrancy and inspiration, subscribe to Sarah’s newsletter via her Website. For a boost of colors and fun support, check out her Visual Art. For humorous and insightful learning and discovery, read her Books and App.

About the Photo | Sky Blooms

Washington, DC, 2025

Not long after I moved to DC (for the third time), I rode the subway to the National Mall to pursue an afternoon of wandering amid the grand architecture.

Poking around places with my iPhone in hand, ready for photo ops, is one of my love languages. I turned off my brain to lounge in a dose of overdue downtime, and let my senses lead the way. That’s often how I tune in to get a handle on anything that might be bothering me.

On that day, the sense of myself I got from the photos I felt drawn to take was… weird. I ended up with fewer than ten photos, unusual in itself, and an odd lot they were, like the photo below. I decided I felt tired of rigid rules and complying, in general, and started daydreaming about dinner. Just then, in a small patch of green growth amid all the concrete, I spotted the flowering trees in the photo above. That one photo breathed me back to life.

Funny, all the different ways creativity sneaks in.

I could barely stay in the chair. I wiggled, unable to contain my anticipation. The auditorium at my grade school thrummed with the combined excitement of what seemed to me like every kid from every class talking at once, with parents and teachers doing their best to manage the mayhem. Finally, the day of tryouts for the big school production had arrived, and I couldn’t wait to get starting learning all the songs my friends and I would be singing.

I still remember the silly audition song (“Mairzy Doats”1). Under my breath, I practiced the fun homophone lyrics. I was ready.

One by one, my friends left their seats to walk over to the person handling the singing auditions, and they all were told immediately that they were in. Of course they were in. I didn’t even know why the school needed to do auditions in the first place. It was a grade school production. Everyone got in.

Well, except me.

The rejection gobsmacked me. How could they keep me from the sheer joy of singing with a bunch of other kids. I simply could not understand it.

Back in my seat in the crowded auditorium, all the movement and life drained out of me. I bowed my head and tried to understand. My mom, sitting right there next to me, didn’t seem worried. I mean, she had a great voice. Hadn’t I inherited it? What had gone wrong?

During the decades since then, I occasionally catch myself humming the “Mairzy Doats” audition song. I catch myself and chuckle, with an undercurrent of discomfort that makes me check in with myself to see if I’m okay, if I’m reliving that feeling of rejection for some reason.

A few years later, in middle school, I signed up for chorus class. There wasn’t an audition. The teacher, Miss Tatro, was one of my favorites. We were a small group of students who sang for fun and sometimes performed in the auditorium in front of the whole school. I loved being surrounded by the songs and the voices of my classmates, nestling against them shoulder to shoulder, feeling their bodies move as they breathed. As a very shy child, I treasured the bulwark of belonging in that chorus group, which felt like the only way I could possibly survive the challenge of standing in front of the entire school to perform.

To prepare for a big event coming up in the auditorium, we practiced the song “Feeling Groovy,”2 by Paul Simon, for weeks. We seemed strong and ready. Then, not long before the performance, Miss Tatro did something that thrilled me. She singled me out to come to the front of the classroom where she’d set a xylophone on a little table. She gestured for me to sit in the chair and bent over to instruct me quietly on the rhythm to play while the others sang. I had a feeling like, Me? Really? She wants me to do this special thing?

For some reason, I didn’t mind playing the xylophone on stage next to the chorus—alone but nearby. I wasn’t singing, but we were still making music together, and my self-consciousness didn’t flare up to debilitate me.

In high school, I sang in the youth choir at church. What an amazing group of friends they were. They teased me about my voice, of course, but everyone teased everyone, so I laughed it off. My best friend, Sally, also an alto, stood beside me when we sang. She had a spectacular voice and sometimes sang solos.

I also took piano lessons in high school. That didn’t last long, because after I while I got bored trying to keep remembering the patterns of which keys to hit in which order to make a tune. In other words, my ears weren’t involved in “playing the piano”—not even a little.

At some point, probably around that time, it suddenly dawned on me why Miss Tatro had invited me to play the xylophone. I very belatedly realized that I truly did have a terrible singing voice. And by terrible, I mean I have no musical ability, not in any traditional sense. Oh, sure, I could belt out every single lyric with precision when I sang along to my treasured Cher’s Greatest Hits album at the top of my lungs when I was home alone. But, I reflected (as my epiphanies continued), not because I had the skill to channel the musicality of the album I’d pledged my teenaged allegiance to. Nope. I loved that album for the amazing stories the songs told and how those stories made me feel. Cher and I, when we sang together like that, we were one, sisters in a world of heartache. We lived and hurt and found strength together.

After that, I stopped trying to sing in groups or within anyone else’s hearing, ever. In situations where everyone else was singing, I faked it, mouthing the words and smiling. I wasn’t embarrassed or mean to myself about it. I just understood that I couldn’t sing in the way most people would define singing.

Fifteen or so years after I graduated from high school, I lived on an island in Washington State, a short ferry ride from Seattle. A couple who I met through the small-community grapevine hosted full-moon nights on their rural property. They’d build a campfire, pull up some logs to sit on, drape blanket over the logs, and we’d all sit around admiring the full moon and talking about whatever. They also played drums. Super casual. No biggie. They had a bunch of drums of different types. The drums would be lying around. People would show up, grab one, and join in with whoever else was banging on something at the time.

I declined to participate. Drumming seemed way too close to singing and reminded me of that whole history. No thanks. The people who showed up at those full-moon nights were awesome though. I got to know them over time, and not only at full moon nights, but as a wider, deeper community.

One night, a lot of people showed up. I lurked behind someone and cautiously picked up a wee drum. Tap tap tap with my finger, not even loud enough for anyone to hear, not even me. Tap tap tap. Month after month, tap after tap, I got a little more used to trying things on a drum. Then I felt it. That sense of being together. The synergy of the collective I’d always wanted and loved in a choir. I stopped hesitating and beat the beats more confidently, played in cahoots with the beats of the other people around the campfire.

And nobody told me to leave. Or hinted that I didn’t have talent. Or looked at me funny when I tried to do something with my beats that felt interesting to me, that felt like it might pull together everyone else’s beats and make more of a whole of the all of us.

On a winter full moon night, the Pacific Northwest rain fell and fell. Beside the campfire spot stood a small building on short stilts, like a rough studio. We didn’t build a fire that night, but piled into the studio. The top half of the wall facing the campfire area folded down so we could get a feeling of being outside, even though we were inside. The roof overhang kept the rain out. The best part was the hammocks. We each grabbed a drum and settled into one of the hammocks strung up in the studio at different levels and across different corners, so that we could nudge each other with our feet to set the hammocks swinging, or poke the person diagonally above in the back. We collated into one big, floating, swinging band of drummers, the rain on the roof joining in.

Gabe, a guy I worked with at the computer store where I did the bookkeeping, was into music in a serious way. He had recording and mixing equipment at home, and strong opinions about what types of music he considered good. We invited him and his girlfriend to join us for drumming night, and they did. It wasn’t raining that night. Gabe brought a weird contraption to the circle, along with little portable amp. With wooden drumsticks, he beat out some rhythms on the circles on the contraption and I saw how it worked. We all drummed around the campfire for a while, then Gabe, who was sitting near me, held out the wooden sticks to me and gestured to the portable drum pad doohickey he’d brought. Who, me? I asked him with my eyebrows. Yeah, you, he answered with the drumsticks and his smile. Come on.

I took his place on the log and he showed me how to hold the sticks, and how each of the different circles sounded—and then we all started making beats together again. It took me a minute to sense my way into the rhythms using the newfangled drum, but gradually I got it. And then I started to experiment with it, playing with making different patterns that included everyone else’s beats as well. That drumming session went on for a long time. Playing on the drum pad, I felt mesmerized, lost in a dreamlike way in the flow of beats as they cascaded and multiplied, divided and ran on and on. I became hypnotized, and then exhilarated. When I finally stopped, I realized I’d been the only person playing for a while, and I didn’t know for how long.

I looked around the circle, prepared to be mortified all over again for not understanding that I had no talent. Had I crashed through everyone else’s enjoyment, like I’d probably done all those times with my singing? Then I looked at people’s faces and saw their huge smiles. Gabe explained to everyone about the coordination required to make different beats with different hands, as I’d (apparently) been doing, though I hadn’t really been consciously trying to. At the end of the evening, he pushed the drum pad into my arms to borrow and encouraged me to keep going with drumming.

When Miss Tatro pulled me out of the chorus, singled me out because my voice sucked, she put me on a rhythm instrument, that xylophone. Despite all of my unsuccessful singing experiences spanning so many years of my life, I’ve ended up not feeling inadequate or rejected or excluded because of them. None of those rejection feelings compare to the wonderful knowledge that someone—Miss Tatro—cared for me and my sense of self-regard, which she strove to protect. And even, maybe, she knew I had my own secret gift of rhythm all along.

I only needed to let go of striving for the talent I wasn’t made for and dare to play around and take a chance on discovering a latent talent, one that gave me the squishy heart of what I’d most wanted all along—the joy and inclusion of making sounds with other people, the feeling of belonging in a play group, which I’d already been part of for many full moons by then.

If you’re ever bummed about not being as great at something as you want to be, consider the essence of what you crave. This is not a new idea, I know. But maybe you need a reminder of it now and then as much as I do. Thankfully, multiple paths exist to reach the core of a yearning. May you find all of yours.

About the Photo | Long Climb

Kaiserstuhl, Germany, 2013

On a springtime hike through the vineyards of the hilly Kaiserstuhl area near Freiburg in southwestern Germany, I encountered the stone stairway in the photo above, instead of the usual switchback trail. I climbed willingly, an aspirant enticed by the possibility of something better. Eventually… a bench, on which to rest and decide if the direction I’d been headed was still the direction I wanted to go.

Originally published in Lived Experience: A Literary Journal from the Mountains of British Columbia, Number Four, Lillooet, BC, Canada, 2003.

I emerge from my mother’s womb with the fully formed personality of a cranky dictator. The first person I yell at is the doctor. “Don’t need to spank this one,” he says, eager to hand me to a nurse.

My parents take me home from the hospital and give me a tour of the house where the three of us now live. “This won’t do at all,” I think, and immediately implement a plan to lull my parents into believing I am a good, sweet child. After two and a half excruciating years of pretence, I am rewarded with a subject: my brother, David.

“I’m not sure I want a boy,” my mother says to my father. “What if I don’t even like him?” Most of the couples my parents know personally at this time have horrible children, all of them boys.

“Relax,” says my father. “Let’s just be happy he’s healthy.”

David looks perfect to me, small and pale, with big blue eyes that telegraph a clear message: “Hi, I’m new. What should I do now?”

I spend the next few years wresting control from Mom through a series of Zen-like training sessions designed to spark David’s unilateral devotion to me.

*  *  *

“Hey,” I say at the age of five, “what do Kleenexes taste like?”

David and I share a huge bed with a red ribbed bedspread. The middle-of-nowhere Arkansas night climbs into our room through the open window. Pecans fall from the tree over our house and clatter onto the roof. The cicadas are loud enough to make us raise our voices, but we’re so used to it that we don’t notice. Our bedside light is off by now, but the big cream-colored box of Kleenexes on the shelf nearby glows in the dim moonlight. The next ready tissue waves at us in the humid breeze.

“Let’s find out,” I say.

“Okay,” says David, “what a good idea.”

He’s closest so he gets the box and politely offers it to me first. We each pluck one tissue. I fold the white fluff into my mouth. David watches carefully then copies me. We stare at each other. A whole Kleenex is way too much to handle at once. They swell up. Saliva is sucked into the Kleenex with the force of a vacuum. We spit our first efforts onto the sheet with little gagging sounds. This makes us laugh. We try very hard to be quiet but are less and less successful as the experiments continue.

We sit cross-legged with the box between us and try strips of tissue, then pre-wadded balls and tiny torn squares. “Try chewing really hard for a long time,” I say. We separate the two-ply sheets and try one whole sheet of one-ply.

“Not bad,” says David after he’s perfected the tissue cigarette and the fatter Vienna sausage roll. We swallow, of course. We’re not wimps.

Mom knocks on the door and comes right in. “What’s going on in here?” Light from the hallway floods the bedroom. Before her eyes can adjust to the darkness, we throw the bedspread over our feast of sins. “What are you two doing still awake? For goodness’s sake, it’s way past your bedtime.” We lie in bed with immense guilty grins. She knows something’s up, but she’s a softie. “Now settle down,” she says as she closes the door gently on her way out.

*  *  *

“Let’s play school,” I say. We are ages seven and five. We’ve moved to a miniscule town in the Mississippi River Delta. Our father is the minister of a small Baptist church nearby. Our house is brown, inside and out, with brown furnishings, including a set of brown encyclopedias and a big brown upholstered rocking chair that makes me nauseous to sit in.

“Sure,” says David, as usual. The brown curtains are closed against the November night and we are left to our own devices until bedtime.

“I’ll sit here. Pass me that notebook.” I squeeze my skinny legs into the small spaces on either side of a chair we’ve put into a cardboard box that’s open at the top. My bare knobby knees stick up out of the box. My hair is gathered into two high pigtails that each hold about six strands of blond hair. A pair of blue plastic cat’s-eye glasses compliment the purple bowler perched on my head. I open the spiral notebook onto my lap and sit up straight, as befits a teacher in command of her classroom, or a queen confident of her empire’s adoration.

“What do I do?” asks David. He stands before me in a matching shirt and pants set and shiny black loafers. His chubby belly stretches the front of his shirt. His short hair pokes up. I ponder. What task shall I assign to this youth who waits patiently for my bidding?

“I need a pencil,” I say.

He sticks an index finger into the air. “I have an idea,” he says. “I just have to ask Mom for something.” He races off.

Our mother takes a photograph. I sit on my throne under a purple crown. A piece of white string is tied to my Royal Pencil, which hovers over the Sacred Notebook of Proclamations. The other end of the string is tied to David’s right wrist. He stands in front of me with his back toward me, as though we are in a procession headed out the door to the street where crowds of excited subjects hold their breaths with anticipation. His left fist is raised, as if he swings a bell to announce us. I am tethered by string to a boy who beams into the camera with the joy of the newly knighted. Sir String the Royal Pencil Monitor and his Queen!

*  *  *

A few years later we are eleven and nine. We live in a converted summer cabin in a small town in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Sometimes babysitters come over.

“Hey, Dave,” I whisper while Mom shows the new babysitter around, “let’s see how many scrambled eggs we can get the babysitter to make for us.”

David puts his hand over his mouth and giggles.

“What if Mom finds out?” he asks.

“What if she does? The darn babysitter just wouldn’t stop making eggs. What could we do?” He shrugs, convinced, and looks at me with the utter devotion I planned all along.

Or is it spinelessness? I start to worry. What will happen when he leaves home and tries to get along in the real world without me? Awful people will use him for their selfish reasons and he’ll follow along. Naive and defenseless, his life will be ruined. I decide it’s time to toughen the guy up.

*  *  *

“I’ll hold this baking pan and you try to hit it with your fist, okay?”

While our parents take their after-dinner walk, we clean up the dishes. We live in a suburb of New Orleans. I am thirteen. David is ten.

Without hesitation David hits the metal cookie sheet I hold toward him at face level. What a nice clang of thunder.

“Hit it again,” I say, lured by the hint of violence in the sound and the act.

This time I shove the pan toward David when I think he’s ready to hit, but instead of louder thunder I hear an awful crack. I’ve accidently smashed the pan into David’s face, hard enough to break a front tooth. He stands with a hand over his mouth, his eyes huge.

I didn’t mean to hurt him. Nevertheless, I look with curiosity to see if he’s gotten tougher, to see what he’ll do. Yell at me? Hit back? Surely, he’ll be angry. How could he not be? If I were him, I’d howl in rage without a second’s thought.

Nothing. He stands there and looks at me with a question in his eyes: What do we do now?

Mom and Dad will walk in the door at any moment. I’d better think of something. “Man oh man,” I say. “I’m in so much trouble now.” I start to cry.

David doesn’t seem to think twice about what to do. He leads me into the dining room to a chair and pats my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he says through the hand over his mouth. “Don’t worry. It was an accident. I’ll tell Mom and Dad it was an accident. It’ll be okay. It wasn’t your fault.”

*  *  *

“Hi, Miss Librarian. I’ve got a book to return.” A boy with straight blond hair appears at the checkout counter. He is twelve and earnest.

“Hmm. This book is overdue by five days, son,” says the librarian. She is stern and hopes to teach this boy a lesson. Rules have reasons.

“I’m very sorry, ma’am.”

“That’ll be five cents,” says the librarian. She peers at him over her glasses.

“Yes, ma’am. Sure. I just have to go to my room and get it. I’ll be right back.” David runs out of the library, located in my bedroom, skidding around the corner on his sock feet.

Ten days ago I’d called him into my room.

“Now listen, David,” I’d told him. “Check this book out of my library today, keep it past the due date I’ve stamped here in the front and then return it. Got that?”

“Sure. No problem,” he’d said. “Do you mind if I read it?”

I am fourteen and full of unruly hormones, while David languishes in childhood. We live in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I spend much of my free time in my closet with the door closed, perched on a high stool measuring stamp perforations by the light of a 40-watt bulb, or on my bed with a book. Night after night I turn out my light, get into bed, put the family’s portable cassette player next to my ear under the covers and listen to the soundtrack from Camelot. Puberty has set in. I’ve grown into a school-marmish nascent bookkeeper, the short-fused type who keeps a set of poison-tipped darts in her book bag.

*  *  *

The problem with David is that he never questions me and the chain between us is always too slack to properly yank, though I continue to give it my best shot.

“AAAAAFTERNOON DELIGHT!” How high can I turn the volume before the speakers blow? I wonder. David and I are in our father’s bronze Buick LeSabre, headed to Tulsa to visit our mother. Our parents are divorced, I’m home from college for a holiday, and David lives with Dad and his new family in a little town about twenty miles north of Tulsa. I’m at the wheel, so I get to be queen of the stereo.

David cowers in the far corner of the passenger seat, his face screwed up against the onslaught of high-decibel music. Finally, he musters all his courage and yells, “Would you please turn it down?”

I don’t. He shrinks, his hands over his ears, and stares out the window as the needles of the Tulsa skyline rise up out of the flat gray landscape. We are both miserable.

*  *  *

Throughout his childhood, David fights my long reign of terror like Gandhi fought the British. He fights me by going limp and smiling as he hands me his heart, over and over again.

He introduces me by saying, “This is my big sister! She taught me how to swim!” Throughout his life, until I leave home for good, he capably manages my career as the Big Sister. He sets the stage for me over and over again, then claps from the wings, rents the limos, and trots back in alone through the stage door, unnoticed, to make sure the costumes are cleaned and ready for the next show.

The only time David gets center stage is when I am ill and confined to my bed. He puts on spectacular one-boy variety shows for my eyes only, until I hoot with helpless laughter. When he is sick I spend hours in my room writing exercise sheets of math problems and multiple choice vocabulary tests which I present to him on his sick bed. He always says, “Thank you,” and accepts them with a gracious smile.

Mom needn’t have worried about not liking her boy.

*  *  *

Now I’m forty-two and David just turned thirty-nine. I live in Vancouver, on the west coast of Canada with my husband and stepson. David lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife and son. In spite of my failure to toughen David up, and against all the odds, he has a good life. He and Julia have no debt other than the house they bought in December. David excels in his career. Their son, Liam, is full to the brim with sharpness and juice and health.

From the time David was born, I drove and he pushed the car, yet, look, he’s already there in the road ahead of me. He waves and grins and I stop and turn off the engine.

*  *  *

On the day I lose my job I send off a falsely casual email to David: “Just a quick note to let you know I’ve lost my job! Ha ha! I’m fine.”

He calls that evening. His soft Southern voice asks me how I’m holding up. I press the receiver to my ear to bring him closer.

“Well,” I say, “it’s not as though I didn’t see it coming.” I’d been a bookkeeper for a small company across the border in Washington State, where I lived before I moved to Vancouver.

“But you can’t yet work in Canada, can you?” he asks.

“Well, no.”

“And you’re not supposed to leave Canada until your papers come through, right?

“Right.”

“Hmmm. That’s a tough one,” he says. His voice is deep and slow. I yearn to be a child in this man’s home, to hear his voice read stories to me or explain away the hurt.

“I’ve been thinking about what I could do to help you with a transition,” he says. “I have an idea or two. Is now a good time to talk?”

His ideas are right to the point. He knows me so well. I sit down on the bed and let out a deep breath. Then he tells me a story about his son, the four-year-old red-headed dictator, and I laugh for the first time in a long while.

I hang up the phone. The sun has set while we talked. I haven’t turned on any lights. The tiled roof of the house across the alley fades from red to gray. A bird twitters in the grape arbor. A truck starts up at the intersection nearby. The house is quiet.

I was born with a hole where my heart should have been. In forty-two years I’ve managed to piece together a makeshift heart, with painful care, from scraps found or given to me, held together with awkward stitches. The ugly pieces flap around as I lurch through the world. Most of the pieces came from David, pieces of his own heart he excised and left on my dressing table at the end of the third act, with a note, or slipped into the pocket of my dressing gown, or mailed to a tiny hovel on a cold mountaintop where I pondered the essence of correctness über alles and ran low on granola.

I stare out the window at the aging dusk until all I see is a reflected line of light from under the bedroom door. I hear my husband in the kitchen now, the muffled thump of cabinet doors and the murmur of the radio as he starts to cook dinner. My stepson, Leo, clatters up the back stairs and flings open the kitchen door.

Here are my hands on my lap, curved together like new children in a tight womb, like the pale leaves of a book, like tissues folded together in moonlight. As I close my eyes I realize the mistake I’ve made.

Leo laughs. His father’s voice rumbles through the clatter of pans and the splash of water into the sink. I’m tired and I want to go home. My stitched heart of David pulls me off the bed toward the kitchen. Before I go I raise a hand up past my wet face and remove the crown I thought was mine.

About the Photo

Berlin, Germany, 2008

Children and blooms orient toward sources of light, even when they are a bit flashy and full of themselves and take all the credit.

David still calls me his “big sister.” I don’t hold the fondness in his voice against him. By now I’ve accepted the truth of who the role model for kindness is in our relationship.

I once had a crush on a wristwatch. I kept visiting it in the store until I got over it.1 —K. E.

As a late-bloomer, I’d reached college before I embarked on my love education journey—a novice in a misleading adult’s costume. Fumbles and mishaps abounded. Like standing in the middle of my crush’s darkened dorm room, nose pressed into one of his shirts, high on his scent, only to find out his roommate wasn’t asleep after all, but observing me with compassionate pity. The absent boy, he informed me, wouldn’t be returning that night. Oh. I slunk away, mortified by the implication of where he might be spending the night instead.

What sticks to me most about those years are the hearts my immaturity broke. Tentative steps taken in a new direction, toward union and safety, only to fall on the learning curve and mishandle another person’s offered heart.

I minced my cautious way to a first boyfriend, a funny, fiddle-playing man captivated by my stream-of-consciousness thought ramblings.

Shed him for his best friend, a gregarious community leader who took care of me during a sickness and invited me to share the hammock strung across his dorm room.

Shed him, in turn, for a calm and self-possessed man who kept me for a summer then gently set me aside to return to his previous relationship, which felt like turnabout’s fair play by then.

The ruin of love’s sorrow, the life-altering plummets, only dip us into a cold creek to provoke our sharp attention. But stay the course. Cross over. Climb on, even a little, or a little more.

The man with the hammock in his dorm room remains a great friend, forty years later, as does the calm man. We witnessed each other’s climbs. We voyaged onward to different love. Same people, still connected, different love.

Scree slopes of little moments compose the mountains of our relationships. We slide around, grabbing for footholds. We stretch our arms for balance, fall, and lift handfuls of history. Specifics accumulate to offer footholds.

The ugly dress she wore on the first date. The way he held the hurt bird. The clouds that day. The small bed. Your brother’s letter. The pool. The clock. The mud.

Over time, after enough falling, the futility of navigation by calculated steps gives way to surrender, to the slide of the ride. Shoes fill with rubble, arms twirl, the body relaxes and lets go. We make friends with the force of gravity. We abandon the straight line of foresight aimed at the mountain’s base of false safety and, instead, tip to find the sky.

We learn to trust our feet to carry us as we gaze up.

Despite love’s grief—the thwarted plans and hard knocks of surprise—I believe the underbelly of everything secretly delivers love. We can digest there, in the close quarters of love’s school.

Though frail, apart, scared, uncertain, when we claim the tippy swirl, the sliding dance, we fall and rise together, bound by natural forces.

About the Photo | Cloud Hug

Eugene, Oregon, 2024

I searched my photo files for an hour in vain, trying to find a picture of a slope I wanted to use for this article. Finally, I gave up and chose instead this picture of a sassy cloud against a bright blue sky. I figured I would tie the photo to the article here by saying something about trust and looking up. But as I stared at the photo a few minutes ago, I suddenly saw what I’d never seen before—the figure of a person on the left side of the cloud, mouth open, blue eye bright, offering (or asking for) a hug. Another of life’s weird but welcome perspective shifts.

A tale offered as a meditation, a touchstone for a feeling that leads to a being.

Imagine a society that values, above all, your willingness to be yourself. After much research and observation, this society has proven that the biggest boon to society as a whole comes when individuals get happy. So society pays you to realize your deepest dreams. And keeps paying you to dream again.

You go online and notice that your monthly payment from society has increased because of your breakthroughs last month in getting to know yourself. Nothing concretely measurable may come from your new comfort in your own skin, but society knows that you’re now even more of an asset to the collective and it wants to reward you.

When you came of age, you automatically began receiving a monthly payment from society that was enough to live on. As you’ve found your way, following clues about your interests and hints about your passions, weaving them into a life you truly love, your income has continued to go up. Incomes in this society never go down. Only up.

Today, you woke up with an idea that had you grabbing for paper, then you kept writing onto a second page as one idea led to another. While eating breakfast in the back garden, you alternated talking with your family, watching the bees, and musing on your new idea, which feels so exciting it makes your pulse race.

In your work room (which you don’t have any problem calling a work room, because in this society work is associated with joy), you get busy researching elements of your idea online, then you call your best friend to talk it over. Now your friend is excited, too, and as you talk the idea forms wings and changes shape into something even better. Synergy and multiplication and amplification begin to take hold.

More colleagues and friends and supporters are drawn into the discussion. Happy technicians get googly spiral eyes when told about the idea and immediately lapse into heated discussions packed with jargon. You leave them to do their thing, waving at them on your computer before closing the app, knowing they’ll turn up brilliant ways to help bring the idea into the world.

Meanwhile, you take a break, biking with your son to the farmer’s market. While talking with the wrinkled man at the mushroom stand about the weather, his obsession with rare fungal varies, and bees, he says something that makes you suddenly see your new project sideways. From this new perspective, you notice a major flaw. Intrigued by his way of looking at the world, you ask him what he’s doing this afternoon. Would he be willing to stop by your place for a conference call with some technicians? He laughs and shrugs. Sure. Why not?

You turn around and see that your son has run on to his current internship with the local theater costume designer—so keen to get started he forgot to say goodbye. The designer waves to you from the doorway of the theater and you exchange smiles in shared acknowledgment, remembering the excitement of your own early internships.

You continue on into town, making stops at the art store, the office supply store, and the bakery. On your way home, you notice a bunch of bikes in the driveway of your mom’s friend’s house and remember that she recently got back from a trip. You decide to drop off some fancy mushrooms from the farm stand as a welcome home gift.

You walk in the back door to find your mom’s friend and several others in earnest discussion. They’ve been trying to reach you and now here you are. They’ve got a favour to ask. Would you be willing to use your expertise to help someone they know who’s having a challenging time today? Of course you would. The person needs exactly the skills you have, and you’re known throughout the region to be the best at it. In fact, you’re free now.

After a couple of hours in quiet conversation with the friend who’s having a challenging time, including a slow walk through the woods at the edge of town, the problem is well on its way to being resolved, with lessons learned, and you’re both feeling satisfied and sated from the effort. You bicycle together to your mom’s friend’s house, heading around to the backyard, greeted by gentle smiles, hugs, and nods. Eventually, everyone settles at the big table under a spreading tree, noon sunlight flickering down through the leaves. Lunch is provided today by your mom and her friends, who’ve cooked up such a spectacular thank-you feast you may not need any dinner.

By the time you leave, your face hurts from laughing so much at the stories shared. The new friend you’ve helped manages a smile and squeezes your hand in gratitude, which makes your day. No money changes hands. Her more relaxed face, her straightened posture, your feeling of having used your skills to make a difference are all the payment you need, and society is already sending you that monthly income for just this reason.

As you head home, you bike past little studio-stores where passionate afficionados offer their creations and inventions, their crafts and books and engineered thingamajigs you never would have conceived of but which neatly solve issues you hadn’t imagined solutions could exist for. You pass familiar houses and gardens and playgrounds for all ages. You don’t see any billboards or ads, because there aren’t any, but every now and then you see a poster put up by society in a discrete frame low down on the side of a building or at a bus stop, showing the face of someone who looks both totally normal and really happy. The poster consists of only that face and three words of text: What is me? Society wants to remind you to ask yourself this question. Society depends on you being as “me” as you can be.

The faces on the posters change every week and they’re never anyone you know. Sometimes the face is pale, sometimes brown, or older, younger, hairy, scarred, and everything else. But every face is absolutely beautiful.

What is me? you wonder as you ride along, steering your bike into gentle swerves. Who am I when I’m most myself?

Flickering patterns of shadow and sunlight play across your bare arms. Birds chatter and sing. That excellent lunch feeds nourishment through your body. You feel strong and secure and ready for whatever comes next. As you catch the first glimpse of home through the trees, you stand up to pedal faster, to get back to your work room sooner, because you suddenly have a great idea...

About the Photo | Cafe Courtyard

Basel, Switzerland, 2011

During a late-September visit across the border to Switzerland from where I lived in southwestern Germany, my day-tripping friend and I nosed around Basel’s byways and courtyards, eager for visual and culinary finds. As we wandered, we kept clear of busy bike lanes and made a point to stop in at a big bookstore with a substantial English-language section.

The couryard in this photo was not an unusual find. In other European cities I was more familiar with (Freiburg and Berlin), and in small towns I visited in France and Germany, I discovered many a cobblestoned courtyard loaded with trees, bicycles, cafes, and a fountain. I haven’t lived in Europe since 2014, but I still miss and revere those courtyards for their flavor of small-community relaxation and how they naturally prioritized pedestrian and bicycle transportation.

Let’s meet there. :)

In an early memory, I’m stretched out on a couch in my aunt’s living room with my head on my cousin Yvonne’s lap. I’m seven or eight years old, gazing up with adoration at beautiful Yvonne, thirteen years older and possessed of that magic something some people possess. People tended to moon over her and follow her around. Quiet, aloof, and observant, Yvonne and her allure were courted or copied.

Thirteen years is a pretty big age gap. Yvonne and I weren’t buddies, not at first, not for many years. Besides the age gap, a fundamental difference in our magnetism separated us. I tended toward invisibility as a survival mechanism, and my challenges felt opposite from Yvonne’s, yet our burdens dovetailed. We both grappled with the need to fend off unwanted attention, me to forestall being teased, Yvonne to keep admirers at bay.

Years passed. At family gatherings, during visits with kin hither and yon, at weddings and on holidays, Yvonne and I grew up and grew older. My interests took me on left turns away from standard family opinions. I found even less to say as I felt the gaps grow between my true self I was discovering and the expectations of the Deep South culture my family arose from. I definitely felt like a weirdo in their midst.

And then I noticed a trend in the flow of extended family dynamics, like a sudden awareness of patterns made by a school of fish. When I exhaled, for example, at a disagreeable comment from an uncle, Yvonne caught my attention and rolled her eyes. Or if I slid out of a room in the midst of a political discussion and walked around the side of the house to stare out at the lake, I found Yvonne already there, settled in with a sketchbook and a glass of iced tea.

The relief of not being alone in my weirdness made me adore Yvonne more. We talked, there by ourselves outside the church as wedding guests mingled, or on the far side of the reunion picnic, at the table nearest the woods. My mom and my brother often joined us in our unobtrusive detachment from the family mainstream.

Decades passed. Then more decades, until my mom, by then one of Yvonne’s best friends, passed away and, in a moment of revelation, Yvonne and I became equals in my mind, as if the passage of time and the weathering of all those incidents of being the odd ones out had gifted us to each other at my mother’s passing. The accumulation of small risks over time resulted in one of the best and deepest friendships of my life.

As with me and Yvonne, sometimes the exposure of peculiarities is worth it. Sometimes a calculated risk to show my atypical self to someone, when I feel safe enough, when I can resist the temptation to bend under the pressure of expectations to conform, leads to the reward of a genuine bond. Maybe the process takes a while—for trust and shared experiences to pile up, for interactions across a wide perspective of time to become visible as a trend. The risks of exposure accrue as investments that pay off in intimacy and the satisfaction of knowing someone and being known behind the masks and survival mechanisms.

I do a little wordplay in my mind when I think of how often I’ve felt like the odd one out but then connected with Yvonne and other fellow weirdos to the point of friendship: The odd won out. I try to remember that oddness doesn’t always exclude, no matter how alone we feel about a trait, an affinity, a preference, a physical characteristic, a history, or anything else. Whatever is unique about us helps us identify each other, narrow the distance between us, and recognize the secret handshake that welcomes fellowship.

Whatever is weird about you is attractive to your truest comrades.

Whatever is weird about you is beautiful, necessary, and perfect.

When you feel like the odd one out, you are more likely to be a beacon to someone else at the edge. You are making a safe space for odd to win out.

About the Photo | Reflecting Pool

Freiburg, Germany, 2013

To access greater quietude when I lived at the edge of the city in Freiburg, I took daily walks along the foothills of the Black Forest, often exploring the large cemetery at the farthest reach of my walking route, where this photo was taken. Lots to find there, and rarely anyone else to watch me as I played with my camera, lost in thought, using photographs to get to know myself, discovering who I might be out in the wild, freed from observation in an outdoor environment rich with possibilities and reminders of life’s impermanence. My priorities seemed to clarify in those times, as I wandered and pondered and settled into peace.

When I lived in Vancouver in the early 2000s, I started a part-time bookkeeping business, slowly gathering a few clients by word of mouth. Since I wasn’t formally trained as a bookkeeper, and was only doing bookkeeping as a minimal-energy-drain income source so I could mostly focus on my creative life, I chose my clients carefully. I did the bookkeeping on location, so a good fit seemed especially important.

One spring day, I nervously zipped up a business casual jacket that made me feel like I was trying too hard and got on a bus to go meet a potential new client—the co-owner of a local interior design firm transitioning into a lifestyle brand (you might recognize the name of one of the co-owners, who rose to wider fame a few years later). The co-owner led me through the studio space and upstairs to the office. Her classic beauty and obvious stylishness put me in a sudden panic I tried hard to keep hidden. The studio’s spare, white décor clashed with my red jacket and the bouquet of colorful tulips I’d brought as a gift. I felt intimidated, underqualified, out of place, and very awkward.

Somehow I made it through the initial conversational exchange and we settled in side by side at a desktop computer so I could take a look at the bookkeeping situation. She shared about what they needed help with. The bookkeeping talk was familiar to me and unsurprising, and I started to feel less tense.

I relaxed enough to notice the rise in her anxiety as we talked about the company’s money tracking. I got curious. She seemed… unsettled. I wanted to help her feel better. My intuition, high sensitivity, and empathic abilities surged forward, obliterating any feelings of intimidation.

“What’s the hardest part for you about the bookkeeping—about the money tracking?” I asked.

Her breathing sped up. “Oh, I don’t know. I just… I guess I don’t really get it.”

“Hmm,” I said. I asked her more questions, which she haltingly answered, until I began to sense a diagnosis. She had stories around being a creative person who couldn’t understand the process of bookkeeping.

“Our previous bookkeeper always told me I wasn’t doing it right,” she confessed. “I tried, though. I really did try.”

I looked her in the eye and said in a gentle voice, “You know, there are a lot of ways—an infinite number of ways—to do bookkeeping ‘right.’ How about if we figure out your way?”

She held her breath for a long moment then burst into tears, her relief lighting up the room.

On and off for more than thirty years, I’ve talked with bookkeeping clients about their money. I also talk with friends and family about money. I rarely meet anyone who fully has their money shit together, despite how things seem from the outside.

How we deal with our money is so personal. Getting real about what’s going on with our money can be terrifying. To reduce our fears, we tell ourselves stories about our money and our financial situations. There is nothing wrong with that. We’re only trying to help ourselves deal with discomfort and not knowing what to do. But what happens when we don’t know we’re telling ourselves stories?

Secrecy, shame, and avoidance often thread through our protective money stances. I’ve witnessed that in others and also know it from my own experiences of navigating problematic money issues and struggling to become more conscious. I have met a few people who, from what I could tell, grew up with a healthy handle on money. I learned a lot from them, and from the journeys of bookkeeping clients as they allowed me to witness the process of unwinding their money stories.

The core of what I’ve learned so far is that for right-brain creatives simply looking directly at what’s going on with their money starts a journey of reclamation—and not only a reclamation of money and more sovereignty around money. When we dare to know the facts about our money life, personal growth follows. We level up to embody a truer, kinder, healthier self.

This happens, in part, because tracking money involves examining facts, and those facts may contradict the stories we tell ourselves—about the state of our finances, about who we are, about our actual priorities, about a lot of things. This can be hard. But it’s understandably hard, considering the underlying histories, experiences, misinformation, and wounds often going on.

All of that makes taking a look at what-is a powerful and positively impactful starting point for developing a healthy money life. I’m not saying this as a theory, but as a conclusion from working with people and their money over extended timelines.

If you’re highly sensitive, if you’re a right-brain creative person, and you’ve struggled with money—with having money, managing money, feeling lost about money, or anything else disconcerting—I want you to know that you are not defective or wrong or bad in any way. Most likely, you’ve been trying to deal with money for a long time from inside a structure of relating that was not designed for you-as-you-are. You are not bad at money. I propose that you are actually fabulous at money. Truly. All that’s been missing is a framework that includes, rather than excludes, you as you are.

In my experience of supporting highly sensitive creative people to engage with their money, a really remarkable thing happens. When they slow way down, taking smaller and smaller steps until they find their own actual pace of being able to be present with the facts about their money, and when they notice the stories those facts bring to the surface, they connect with an inner knowing of what to do. They activate the part of themselves that knows how to handle their money in a way that’s healthy and right for them. I’ve seen this happen over and over with tender-hearted fearful people, with artistic angry people, with unconventional neurodiverse people, with wounded brave people. They emerge from beneath the overlaid restrictions to unite with their true and unique money powers—and light up the room.

About the Photo | Our Money Tree

Eugene, Oregon, 2024

I took this photo in mid-September, around 7 in the evening, probably on my way to or from the grocery store.

In my imagination, folding lawn chairs cluster at the base of this tree. A warm breeze lifts our hair and the edges of our clothing. We loll and chat and allow silence when silence comes. We’re here to remember how it feels to not fake ourselves in company. When the sun sets, we remain. Dusk then darkness pull our talk into the choppy waters of money and fears, into memories of treasures and distances traveled. Scars compared. Pain heard and acknowledged. Night birds join the conversation from above. We listen until no one has anything left to say. The end arrives in a chorus of sighs.

After living alone on in Western Oregon for six years, including during the Pandemic, I accepted a friend’s offer to share his apartment in Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, DC, and moved (again). To lighten my load, I jettisoned eighty percent of my belongings while still in Oregon. Shedding that weight felt fabulous. I perked up and my attention sharpened.

In one of life’s odd twists, about six months after I’d moved in with my friend in Maryland, he was offered an amazing executive-level job, a position crafted to entice him specifically. But accepting the job would require him to move to Kansas City, Missouri.

When my friend received the job offer and told me about it, I stared at him across the living room in shock, flummoxed by the Universe’s plans for me. I’d only just relocated across the continent. As much as I loved the DC area, the cost of living there on my own and the prospect of doing so without yet having more of a local community daunted me.

“But I only got here six months ago,” I said, struggling to adjust.

“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But, Grace, this job.”

I sighed and smiled. I was thrilled for him, of course.

“If I take the job, will you come with me?” he asked. “Then I’d have the comfort of someone familiar being there with me in a new place.”

What the heck, I thought, I can work from anywhere. Why not have another adventure?

And so we made the arrangements. On the day of the move, the truck arrived and out went boxes and furniture and bits and bobs, except for our suitcases and the tricky items my friend and I would take in his car for the three-day drive west from Maryland to Missouri.

Oh, and except for all the stuff that didn’t fit into the moving truck. Surprise!

“So, the truck is full,” the lead mover announced to us in the not-empty-enough apartment. “And I’ve got to hit the road if I’m going to get to your new place on time.” He offered a few suggestions for dealing with the remaining stuff, then left.

At first, my friend and I couldn’t process the wrinkle. We were so tired from packing and making arrangements. The apartment keys were due to be handed over at the office within the hour, and we had our own road trip to begin. We forced ourselves to lurch into action. Working fast, we rented a storage unit, hired a couple of local task-helpers with a van, and stashed the remaining items from the apartment in storage, relegating that problem to another day.

Due to the mix-up (discovered way too late) about the size of the moving truck, the stuff we left in Maryland was a random selection of belongings. Our lives in the new apartment in Missouri thus began with bittersweet humor. Both of my work tables remained in Maryland, as did my friend’s desk, so I’ve been working at a coffee table in my bedroom while my friend works at the dining table. Luckily, my mattress and every bit of my bed frame made it to the new place… except the four legs of the bed frame, without which it can’t be assembled, so I’ve been sleeping on the mattress on the floor. It’s all been very frustrating and annoying. In early January I’ll fly back to Maryland to close out the storage unit by any means necessary. In the meantime, we make do, buy new, and—because we’re both inclined this way—try to understand on a metaphysical level why it happened.

I’m a believer in Life’s benevolent nudges, even when events seem negative at first. After we arrived in Missouri, all I felt about The Too-Small Moving Truck Ordeal was anger—a little-kid anger, like in childhood when circumstances kept me up way past my bedtime and I yearned to go to bed but couldn’t. Those feelings. Disempowered, angry, cranky, and bereft.

Finally, after a couple of months of processing my feelings in Missouri, I accepted the situation and got practical. One day, as I studied the single photo we’d taken of the Maryland storage unit’s contents, attempting to assess and make plans about what to give away or donate and what I would mail to Missouri, I realized five of ten banker’s boxes of journals going back to my teen years were still in Maryland. Yikes. How much would it cost to mail those heavy boxes to Missouri?

For the first time, I really considered why I’d held onto those journals for so long. I never delved into them, though I did sometimes pile the boxes neatly, cover them with a lovely piece of fabric, and call it a credenza. Did I imagine that after I became a famous author (cough), my journals would be worth something to… uh, someone? Probably not. Did I want my nephew or my bonus son or any of my close friends to have to deal with those boxes after I died, or to read my journals? No, I did not.

If The Too-Small Moving Truck Ordeal hadn’t happened and forced my hand, I seriously doubt I would ever have dealt with those boxes of journals, the task too daunting to even contemplate. In my bedroom closet in Missouri, I tentatively cracked open one of the five journal boxes that did the trip and took a cautious look inside. What if I actually managed to jettison this stuff? Then maybe I could do the same with the five boxes in storage, and I wouldn’t have to pay to ship them halfway across the country, or haul them with me when I moved again (which I surely would), only to never do anything with them. I plucked out a spiral notebook journal at random, found my trusty copy of Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and settled into my comfy chair.

A refresher browse through Kondo’s book delivered the guidance I needed:

During the selection process, if you come across something that does not spark joy but that you just can’t bring yourself to throw away, stop a moment and ask yourself, “Am I having trouble getting rid of this because of an attachment to the past or because of a fear for the future?” Ask this for every one of these items. As you do so, you’ll begin to see a pattern in your ownership of things… It is important to understand your ownership pattern because it is an expression of the values that guide your life. The question of what you want to own is actually the question of how you want to live your life.1 —Marie Kondo

And this:

Every object has a different role to play… When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life. You’ll be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role. By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and your life, in order.2 —Marie Kondo

With those enticing principles in mind, I picked up the journal, leafed through, and remembered. The experience wasn’t pleasant. But I picked up another journal. How had I lived my life? How did I want to live my life?

As I looked through each journal, I somehow managed to be more curious than fearful. The simple but not easy task allowed/forced me to confront a lot of previously unprocessed times in my life, to sit quietly with them, to wait in discomfort and sorrow and acceptance for the upwelling feelings and thoughts to pass—and then to let them go. Emotions rose and ebbed, mostly leaving a pebbled beach of relief at the prospect of being done with the journals. I also connected with pride that I’d so long ago discovered journaling as a tool for decompressing, for decontaminating my perspectives.

I held and skimmed the journals and witnessed how they’d helped me again and again to move through tough times and learn from them. Almost without exception, I chose to discard the physical representations of those journeys. The pile of discarded journals grew.

Every few days during this process, which is ongoing, I take another bag down to the mailroom in the apartment complex where I live and feed journal pages into the shred-box there. With a surge of pure joy and release, I stuff my old writings into the slot, as if I’m a dentist scraping off hardened plaque, freeing my smile for more brilliant use in the current day. The why of it all, it seems to me, of the moving truck and the storage unit and the frustration, is this freedom of letting go of the past for real, moving through the past consciously, to offer thanks, to grieve and say goodbye, to free more energy for here and now.

In the processing of three of the ten banker’s boxes so far, I’ve discovered a few treasures to keep—not many, no more than what fits in a single file folder. As a collection, these kept items could be titled I Am and Always Have Been Me. Amid the kerfuffle of drama spewed hurriedly into endless notebooks, I’ve found tidbits so confirming of my consistent essence over my lifetime that I quiet with recognition and settle when I come across them, feeling both reassured and illuminated. A few examples:

Poetry is talking to myself
in riddles
I know the answers to

If I hadn’t found that in my own journal, I would have assumed my mother, the poet, had written it. The everlasting presence of poetry in my life started early. Finding this little ditty warmed my heart.

I come first—before trees or anything else in my cosmos / sphere of influence.

I had to laugh at that one. Trees are, of course, included in my circle of friends and family, so they would naturally be taken into consideration when I practiced holding boundaries.

And this, from when I was fifteen, written on a 1970s-era notepad:

If I can get used to not “giving up” part of me by seeking approval, then I may surely find some interesting things that were once hidden.3

I’ll leave you with this idea, inspired by a line I found written on a tiny pink sticky note:

No amount of journaling can turn you into someone you don’t want to be.

About the Photo | Monkey Puzzle Snow

Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2008

Monkey puzzle trees on a snowy day in a color photograph insist on essentials. Black and white and gray-green. Spare monochrome without distraction. Wire frames beyond color and busy movement. The truth of the matter, easier to see, whether we want to or not.

The past existed, crawls into the present with us if we held on, a burden of weight, an energy sink. A shake of the tree to bring down the cold. Wake up.

3

Whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction, creation begins when an idea intrigues us enough to pursue and explore. In this article, I offer examples of multimedia assists that can be used to enrich and spur the writing process from first idea to finished project.

The specific ways we explore creative ideas depends on our neurobiology, cognitive styles, and other factors on a wide-ranging spectrum. Some brains (like mine) tend toward visualization of some type. Some brains tend toward multisensory imagination, synaesthesia, abstract concepts, and/or a host of other ways of processing. Whatever your particular brain does is wonderful. I wholeheartedly support your brain for being itself.

The more a multimedia assist jives with your particular brain’s creative process, the more potentially fun and rewarding the writing process may be—so even if the examples below don’t specifically work for you, perhaps they’ll prompt you to experiment with and discover methods that do work for you.

It wouldn’t at all surprise me to learn that you already use multiple types of creativity during your writing process. You’re welcome to share about them in the comments section at the end of the article and thus add more examples for other readers to discover.

All of the examples below can potentially assist any type of fiction or nonfiction writing.

1. Collage Grid Impressions

The word imagination originated in the verb imaginari, meaning to picture to oneself. Imagery1 can be a shortcut to imagination and intuition when noodling over the writing of an essay, an article topic, a self-help book, a poem, a fictional character, a real or invented setting, or any other writing project.

When I reach into the ether for information about aspects of a novel I’m writing, I often enlist collage grids to collect and collate impressions. Invariably, revelations ensue.

For example, during the earliest stages of receiving the idea for a romance novel (one of a few novels now waiting patiently in line for me to finish them) about two unlikely characters—an elegant, world-traveling introvert and a messy, rebellious homebody extrovert—I turned off my rational brain and turned on my intuition by flipping through magazines and cutting out whatever images evoked each of those characters. As an aid, I made a viewfinder by cutting a one-inch square out of a piece of cardboard and used the resulting little window to visually inquire. I played around, trying different options to tease associations of image and imagination, rejecting and accepting based on feelings of yes or no or maybe. The resulting batch of tiny visual impressions taught me yet more when I considered them as a collection. For each character, I arranged sixteen of their one-inch-square images into a grid. The results delivered new and deeper information about the characters and helped me align the nascent story into something more tangible.

(You may be able to click on the images in this article to enlarge them.)

Placed side by side, these character grids tell a story of two people in a relationship. The juxtaposition allows me to imagine interactions between the characters and gives me insights about their journey together.

Next, I gathered image squares for a collage grid to depict the feeling of the story as a whole—a compilation of the characters, their struggles, their potential, the settings, and representations of the thematic throughlines of their story.

Whenever I see these three collage grids, the story instantly comes to life in my mind, eager to be expressed into words and moved along toward completion.

2. Setting or Location Maps

Partway through writing The Infinite Onion, I realized I couldn’t keep the relative spatial details of the story’s setting straight in my mind. I kept getting frustrated about having to interrupt my writing to search back through what I’d already written because I’d lost my bearings in my own invented landscape.

The relevant story aspects of the wooded acres on Vashon Island, Washington, where The Infinite Onion takes place evolved as I told myself the story, which takes place outdoors on trails through dense woods around the home of one of the main characters. When I began dabbling to sketch a map, I included actual landmarks, such as the island’s contours and some of the paved roads, along with purely story-informed features. As the map iterated, through lots of erasing and revising with a pencil, and become more accurate to the world of the story, I increasingly relied on it to supply a click of rightness when each new element connected with the setting as a whole.

Here’s the map:

Maps—whether homemade or already existing—are tools for interpretation, lenses directing focus to specific conceptual perspectives. In nonfiction writing projects, a map might clarify a setting or journey in a memoir, travelogue, or for a historical setting, to name just a few examples. If you’re attracted to the notion of playing with maps in some way during your writing process, you intuition will likely be eager to get busy. (See this footnote2 for two books on creative map-making.)

3. Setting Floorplans

Was there a house or a building—maybe a church or school or office building—central to your childhood or to a period in your life related to your memoir writing project? Does a character you’re discovering as you write your novel live or work in a setting you’d like to get to know better? Creating a building’s floorplan can bring to mind all sorts of additional aspects of the interior space of a setting. What’s the view from the couch? Is there a secret space between the two bedrooms? What happened at the back door?

With all of the door-slamming and rude behavior going on in The Infinite Onion when the secretive main character hiding in his house deep in the woods pissed off the other main character who was homeless, I really needed to know more about the layout of that house. At first, my online searches for suggestions about how to create a floorplan led me to options more costly or involved than I needed. Finally, in a forum, I found a great solution in someone’s suggestion to use an Excel spreadsheet. Yes.

The floorplan I created in Excel is below. I love the spare lines and simplicity of this result. Suddenly, when the floorplan allowed me to more accurately visualize the interior spaces, the home became a cohesive whole and I could inhabit the house along with the characters, observe their movements, and understand more about them.

4. Source Photo Collections

Using the same principle as with the collage grids, gathering related images into a collection can provide further clues and insights. Curating pieces that describe elements in your writing project—that intrigue and attract you, even if you don’t know exactly why—and observing your reactions to the resulting synthesis, opens a portal for intuition to become conscious.

You can use hunt-and-gather tools—like Pinterest or a pair of scissors and shoebox at your desk—to build private image collections that evolve as fluid collaborators to assist as you move through your writing project.

Some collections may be a resource for multiple projects. After my mom passed away, I found thirty or so little black-and-white school photos in her belongings. She’d been a grade school teacher off and on and had probably saved the photos from a teaching position early in her career, since the photos are obviously from a bygone era.

I love studying the faces of these children, wondering who they were, feeling their personalities in the ways they approached the camera on school photo day. When I want to get a feel for a character I’m writing, or touch the memory of how it felt to be a child, I’ll pull out this deck and deal the photos out across a table, finding clues for my writing project in cautious eyes or cowlicks or bowties or half-grins, and the intuitive nudges that arise.

During the writing of The Infinite Onion, I dug into my archives of photos I’d taken during years of living on different islands in the Pacific Northwest, including an island off the coast of British Columbia. The photos reconstituted my memories in full sensory detail, reminding me how those environments felt and looked so I could write about them more easily. You can see some of them here: “The Power of Nature to Transform.”

Here’s another example, of some of the visual references I used as discovery tools when I was writing Everyday History: “A Town Taught Me How to Write a Novel.”

I’ve also sometimes printed images culled from online sources and pasted them into little blank books (not stressing about the copyright issue of printing other people’s images, since I’m not sharing them, only privately using them), to flip through for inspiration as I write. Creating those collections really helps, because I end up coming across thematic imagery that doesn’t literally mirror aspects of my story, but symbolically clarified concepts and throughlines in the story that I hadn’t really grasped before.

5. Designed Graphics

If you enjoy playing around with design using visual design programs like Adobe Photoshop or the online tool Canva, consider concocting graphic designs tailored to your writing project, for your private use only or (if copyright considerations permit) to share with your readers.

For example, the two main characters of the novel I’m currently writing live in a very repressed society reliant on formal niceties to keep the discomfort of self-examination at bay. In that atmosphere, the likeliness of these two characters becoming friends is very low. Over a span of years while writing this novel, I came across images3 of each of the main characters in two separate magazine articles, and later used Canva to create a graphic depiction of their personalities that showed the stark juxtaposition of their lives and lifestyles.

6. Cross-Pollinate Your Media Loves

I bring my love of photography, collage, and visual art in general into my writing process, along with music. A lot of the authors I know listen to music as they write. So far, my pattern when I write novels is to choose an album, a musical group, or a playlist I’ve tailored to the story and listen to only that during my writing sessions for the entire writing process, from the early idea phase to the final draft. This musical accompaniment affects my writing strongly enough that I’ve taken to expressing my gratitude on my novel’s Acknowledgments pages. For example:

I’m convinced Everyday History would be a different novel if not for James Morrison’s album The Awakening, which I listened to every day for hours as I wrote. The flavor of that music and those songs made its way into the bones of this story.

What creative media are you drawn to besides writing? How might you explore aspects of your writing process through those other media, if you’re not doing so already? If you love cooking or painting or weaving or dance or guitar-playing or whatever it is, cross-pollinating that love with your writing process may thrill your intuition and spur synergistic creativity.

When I was almost finished writing this post, I found an article on this topic written by the novelist Jennifer Crusie. She tells the story of how she and her author companions explored collage and assemblage in the service of gaining insight into their fiction writing projects. The article includes instructions, along with examples of the authors’ experiences and successes in using multimedia cross-pollination. Crusie shares this about her own experience:

The more I glued images to my collage, and the more it emerged as an entity instead of as a collection of pictures and objects, the more excited I became about the book. My collage was no artwork, but it had all the color and energy and weirdness of the book I wanted to write. I could look into it and see the book moving, breathing, hear the characters talking to me. The book was right there, waiting for me.4 —Jennifer Crusie

About the Photo | Summer Path

Gabriola Island, BC, Canada, 2010

The summer daydreaminess of the photo at the top of the article matches the mood suffusing the setting in The Infinite Onion, where the natural setting of Vashon Island (another Pacific Northwest island) features enough and influences the story enough to almost be considered a third main character.