April 7, 2026 • 30 mins
What if the one thing you’re avoiding is the single thing that could get you unstuck?
In this episode, I admit that I’ve been feeling creatively stuck lately and wondering if I’ll ever get out of this rut.
The truth is I’ve been feeling frustrated, flat and under-inspired.
I haven’t been writing much of anything.
I was starting to wonder (after 6 years of struggling) if I was going to be behind this block forever. That’s when the insight for today’s episode came to me.
Maybe the way out is through the one thing you least want to do.
Which isn’t about doing something as much as it is about allowing what is to be what is.
Maybe your pain is a portal.
Host: Ally Fallon // @allyfallon // allisonfallon.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Really pick up the pieces of your life, pull them
back together with the word you write. All the beauty
and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun
when you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You got the words and said, don't you think it's
down to.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Let them out and write them down and cover what
it's all about and write, write your story. Write you
write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to start with a very honest admission that
I have been holding back for a while because I've
been a little bit afraid I think of how this
makes me look as a coach, as a writing coach.
I guess I don't know. I have thought about this
so many times. I've thought about sharing it, and it
(00:57):
just hasn't ever really felt like the right time. But
this week I was like, I think it's the right
time to share this. I have been turning this over
in my mind. I've been thinking about it NonStop, and
I have some things that I want to say, but
I will start with this honest admission, which is that
I have been a little stuck creatively for the last
couple of years, maybe even blocked. I might even use
that word. And I think one of the reasons that
(01:18):
I felt a little embarrassed to admit this is because
I also have committed my life. My life's work for
the last fifteen years or so has been working with
creative people to help them get on stock, help them
get on block, specifically working with writers to help them
finally finish the books that they've been working on for
so long or dreaming about for so long. And I
know about myself that I'm extremely effective as a coach,
(01:40):
that I can meet with a person and help them
untangle the ideas that seem too complicated. I can help
them make sense of something that feels extremely chaotic. I
can help them really drill down an idea from something
that seems very like ethereal or not clear enough and
help them find the clarity or they haven't been able
(02:00):
to see it. And yet, for whatever reason, I have
not been able to do this for myself. And recently
my husband was asking me, are you going to write
another book again? When are you going to write your
next book? And I was like, I don't even know
if I'm ever going to write another book again. And
he was like, wait, what what do you mean, You're
never going to write another book again? Like you're such
a gifted writer and you have so many amazing things
to say, And I just, for a moment in that setting,
(02:24):
felt like my clients so often say they feel, which
is just like I don't even know, Like I don't
know where, I don't know what the book would be about,
I don't know how. I have an idea, but I'm
not sure how to distill it. I'm not sure anyone
would be interested in it. And I could hear myself
saying the things that my clients so often say, and
I just didn't have the ability to. I think it's
(02:46):
different when you're helping someone else. It can sometimes be
hard to help yourself the way you help other people.
That's what I'm trying to say. It can sometimes and
maybe all the time, be very tricky to help yourself
in the way that you help other people, even if
you are very effective or gifted at what you do,
so sometimes doing it for yourself is just a whole
different ballgame. And this is one of the insights that
has come through so clearly for me. As I've been
(03:07):
thinking about this about like why am I blocked? Why
am I stuck? Why do I feel like I'm not
sure what the next step is to take? Or do
I want to write another book? Will I write another book?
One of the reasons I think I feel that way
is because you cannot create and survival mode. You just cannot.
And if you've been around here for a long time,
(03:27):
if you've been listening to my podcast, this has been
really just episode after episode of me processing what's been
going on in my life for the last several years,
you know, if you've been around a while, that I've
had a lot of challenges, a lot of loss, a
lot of failure, a lot of you know, just things
not exactly going my way the last couple of years.
And when I zoom out from the story, this story
(03:49):
really started in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I hate admitting that to myself because it's like, wow,
it's been six years. Six years ago, in March we
went into shutdown, and speaking of like global shutdown, like
we were living in la at the time. I don't
know where you were living, but where we were living
in Pasadena. The shutdown felt like this extremely dark, apocalyptic time,
(04:13):
and I know now from now that I'm living in Nashville,
and because I had lived in Nashville before. While I
was in Pasadena, I was watching my friends on Instagram
in Nashville, and I was still in text threads with people,
and I was still hearing what was going on in
their lives, and so I know people were living in
different reality than we were living in LA. This is
a big reason why we left LA. But in LA,
we were under mask mandates, indoors and outdoors. You know,
(04:36):
I was five months pregnant at the time. We didn't
know what this virus was going to do. We weren't
sure how this was going to unfold. We didn't know
how it affected pregnant women. We were hearing in the
media these really scary stories. There were definitely also very
scary things happening. I was hearing, you know, from friends
of mine who lived in LA that were they were
losing family members, they weren't able to go back for
(04:57):
their funerals. So it was just this very weird and
this is personal to me, But I also remember the
Friday before we went into lockdown, I was in the
middle of filming new videos for my online course that
was called prefer to Publish. That was the course that
existed before a book in six Months existed. So my
brother actually was the one who was filming the courses
(05:18):
for me. My brother is a videographer. He's very gifted.
He's the person who I hired when I wanted to
film these course videos and I wanted them to be
like ultra professional and amazing. For the first time ever,
I knew he was the person who I wanted to hire,
so I flew him down from Portland to la He
was staying with my husband and I we were filming
these course videos. I had multiple employees at the time.
There was a producer there setting everything up. There was
(05:40):
my brother, there was someone helping with the script. There
were people with set design. I had Annie who used
to work for me. She was in some of the
videos with me. Everybody was helping. It was like a
huge production all week Monday through Friday, and what ended
up happening is by Thursday, it sounded like, based on
what was happening in the media, it sounded like Trump
(06:03):
at the time was going to put travel restrictions in place,
and I was telling my brother, I'm like, the last
thing I want to happen is for you to get
stuck in LA and not be able to go back
to your family. You know, he had two little kids
at home at the time. His kids are a little
bit older now, but at the time I was like,
you've got babies at home and your wife is home
by herself. Like, let's get you on a flight tomorrow
(06:24):
early morning and get you back to Portland. So we're
cramming everything into Thursday, just rushing filming Wednesday and Thursday.
And the street that we lived on, there was a
house right down the road where a lot of movies
would be filmed, and there was a movie at that
time being filmed. And on Thursday evening I watched them
break down production from this movie, literally take the trailer
(06:47):
and everything and leave and go home. As if you know,
we knew that they were supposed to be in production
for weeks and weeks, and yet they were packing everything
up and going home. So they were kind of on
the same page that we were. Everyone was going like, wait,
what's happened? Like movie sets are shutting down? Are you
kidding me? And then somewhere in that week, and I
used to remember the exact timeline, but I don't anymore.
(07:08):
Some are In that week, my husband got the call,
which I've talked about many times before, basically saying this
is not public information yet, but south By Southwest, which
is supposed to happen in I don't know, it was
a couple of months from then, is no longer happening.
It's being canceled. And so all of your partners that
you've been working with, because my husband works in marketing,
so he was in process of building these massive marketing
(07:32):
installations for different brands at south By Southwest and everyone
found out at the same time, and it was like,
sometime in the process of that week, we're filming these videos,
my husband's getting the call that south By Southwest is
no longer going to be happening, and you know, we're
kind of hearing whispers that Trump was going to shut
down domestic travel andle The whole environment during that week
(07:54):
was just like, like, what is going to happen? Everyone
was just holding their breath waiting to see, and everyone
was moving into I can't say everyone I was, and
the many people around me were moving into protection. And
the mode that your body goes into when you are
in protection is a different mode than the mode that
(08:17):
your body is in when you're in your creativity. I'm
not saying that you can't be living in the midst
of chaos or trauma and also be creative, because I'm
also going to say in this episode that I think
creativity is what heals us, and it's what calms our
nervous system, and it's what brings us back to a baseline,
and it's the very thing that we need and that
we crave during times of chaos. And some of the
most beautiful creativity can be born out of the most
(08:39):
chaotic times in the world. And Yet, if your body,
if your mind, if your soul, your spirit, your nervous
system is invite or flight, you cannot be creative. You
cannot make anything. And so when I look back, I
zoom out of this story and I look back at
that period of time, I have so much compassion for
myself as I say this, but I'm like, look at it,
(09:00):
look at me. In that time, I literally went into protect, protect, protect.
It was like, get my brother home as quick as possible,
get these videos filmed. I remember like Friday morning, we
drove him to the airport and then Friday we were
driving around returning all of the equipment because we'd rented
a bunch of equipment and Friday, I'm almost positive this
was Friday, but don't quote me on this Friday, which
(09:31):
was like March twelfth. I want to say, somewhere in there,
March eleventh or twelfth of twenty twenty, there's like this
insane rainstorm in Pasadena. And let me tell you, like,
it does not rain like this in Pasadena. I live
in Nashville now, and we get rainstorms where it will
dump buckets of rain. But in Pasadena, the whole time
I lived there, it happened like once. I think this
(09:53):
one time was the only time it happened so much
so that it's dumping buckets of rain, like people, the
streets aren't set up for it, homes aren't set up
for it for that amount of rain to come down
in that short amount of amount of time, and so
the streets were just kind of not flooding, but like
temporarily flooding. The streets just look like rivers of water
is flowing through the streets. And it was the most
(10:16):
bizarre I remember, because we were running around returning all
this rental equipment, and you know, trying to get back
home before this rain came, and we're driving through the
streets in thankfully in my husband's SUV, so you know,
we were high up enough off of the water, but
we're driving through the streets and it just looks like
this absolute apocalyptic flood is happening. And it was the weirdest,
(10:38):
weirdest feeling. And this is before the mask manits went
into place, and it was before the lockdown happened. Lockdown
I think happened on that Saturday, or maybe it was
the following Monday. But just like within a few days
we finished filming these videos for prepare to publish. My
brother goes home, I return all this rental equipment, this
rainstorm happens, and then we go into shit down, and
(11:00):
I can also remember I'm again five months pregnant. I
remember driving across Pasadena to my office space where I
would meet with my team on a daily basis to
do our work, and grabbing everything we would need because
we knew we wouldn't be allowed to come back to
the office space without masks for a very long time.
We weren't sure how long that was going to be.
(11:20):
And a few months ago I was listening to old
files that I had saved from my podcast. I used
to have a podcast called Find Your Voice. I was
listening to old files from that podcast and hearing a
cut part of a podcast that never got aired. It
was like a conversation with a woman before my interview
with her had started. It was being recorded, but we
(11:41):
hadn't gotten to the published part of the interview yet,
and we were talking about this pandemic and the shutdown,
and we were just like, gosh, I know I heard
somewhere that like, this thing could last six weeks. Can
you imagine if it would last six weeks? And I
was just reminded, like how much uncertainty was happening at
that time, and how normal it would be for my
(12:03):
body to go into that protection mode, to go into
fight or flight, to shut down my creativity, to shut
down everything that my system considered unnecessary in order to
just survive and get through what I thought was going
to be. I mean, at the most, like six weeks.
I was shocked thinking it could be that long. And
(12:23):
then here we are six years later, and obviously we're
not still in a global shutdown, but we lived in
that shutdown all the way through my pregnancy. I gave
birth in July in LA and was still forced to
wear a mask during labor and delivery. You know, my
husband was not allowed to come up to the delivery
room with me when I was giving birth for like,
(12:44):
I think three and a half hours. They finally did
let him come up after he quote unquote passed a
health inspection, but the health inspection was non existent. And
when I look back on that time, I'm just like,
no freaking wonder. I was so overwhelmed. There was so
much unknown, there was so much chaos. I didn't know
how to make sense of it. Our bodies naturally go
(13:05):
into fight or flight. They naturally shift into a different
mode when you're living in that much uncertainty, when you're
living in that much fear, when you don't know what's
going to come next, you don't know what's going to
be required of you to survive, and you're just scanning
the environment for threats. And when I think back, I'm like,
I went into that mode in March of twenty twenty.
(13:27):
I gave birth in July of twenty twenty, which, speaking
of like the most vulnerable time of your life, speaking
of scanning for threats, you know, people talk about postpartum depression.
I didn't really do the postpartum depression thing nearly as
much as postpartum anxiety. My anxiety was so heightened after
Nella was born, because I mean that's a whole other
story and a whole other podcast. But I was supposed
(13:49):
to give birth at a birth center. You know, my
body freaked out at the last minute. As soon as
I went into labor, my heart, my blood pressure, sorry, skyrocketed.
I was sent to the hospital to deliver. Matt wasn't
allowed to come in with me. So event after event
after event after event in my life in twenty twenty
(14:09):
and then into twenty twenty one just kept throwing me
for a loop, just kept sending me on my heels,
just kept you know, putting me into that physical mode
where I felt like I needed to protect myself and
to prevent myself from being harmed. And then, of course
the next step in the story is that we moved
to Nashville, and we moved to Nashville. Really, the number
one reason we moved to Nashville is just we knew
(14:30):
we needed to get out of LA. It was September
in LA and the fires started happening in the hills,
which happens every year, by the way, and we had
been through this before, but this year when the fires started,
they were worse than they had been in years past,
and now they've become even worse in most recent years.
But we also had a newborn and so not only
(14:51):
were the fires happening in the hills, we weren't really
concerned about the fires making it to us, but the
air quality was so bad the smoke and Pasadena was
so bad that they were recommend even healthy people weren't
like out walking or jogging. And here we were. We
had a two month old baby, and so you know,
Matt and I were trying to figure out what to do.
And then there was a day where we lived in
this old home. It was a beautiful old craftsman but
(15:13):
it was over one hundred years old. It had been
built in the early nineteen hundreds, and smoke started to
seep in through the cracks in the windows, like where
the windows had been installed over the years, there had
been like a just like a tiny little opening around
the windows, and smoke started to seep in through the windows.
And so my husband went to the hardware store. He
(15:33):
comes home. He's like taping these plastic bags over our
windows to keep the smoke from coming in with painter's tape.
And I'm like, now we can't even see out the windows,
like I am living in a prison, in my own
personal postpartum hell. Like, get me out of here. I
do not want to be here anymore. So we made
the decision to just get in the car and start
driving east. And we made it to like Yellowstone National
(15:57):
Park and I want to say Zion and we were
just getting out in fresh air and walking, and then
started driving toward Nashville. I had so many friends that
lived in Nashville. All my friends were like, come stay
with us, Like, you know, come live at our house,
Like stay as long as you want, bring your dog,
bring the baby, like come let us meet your daughter.
And we had been so isolated at this point for
so long, like we didn't even We had been living
(16:20):
in utter isolation where we had not seen another soul
other than just each other and our baby. And then
Matt's mom who had flown to la and quarantined for
ten days so that she could come and be with us.
That was like the level of isolation that we were
living under. And so we were driving to Nashville and
everyone's like, oh, yeah, we're We've like potted up. There's like,
you know, a couple of families and we hang out
(16:41):
together and we do workouts and we get together for
dinner and whatever. And so arriving in Nashville was like
this breath of fresh air. It was like my system
could could just let down again, and it felt so
good to be there. And you know, we were in
utter transition at the time, like Matt wasn't working, I
want to say, and I was working. I was selling
(17:01):
prepared to publish at the time. That was the course
online course that I had available, so we were living
off of that. And we're just like driving around East
Nashville one day and see this house, the house that
I'm currently sitting in, and we were like, hm, this
house has been sitting on the market for a while.
I wonder what would happen if we just sent an offer,
And sure enough we were able to buy this house.
And that's how we ended up moving to Nashville. It
(17:22):
was like such an afterthought, such an easy thing. The
door just flew wide open, and leaving La felt like
such a ah, we can finally let our systems down again,
I can finally rest. So then we're in Nashville. I
get pregnant with Charlie. Almost immediately after we got to Nashville.
I get pregnant with Charlie. And I don't need to
go through the whole story again, but essentially you can
(17:43):
see what I'm saying that it's just been thing after thing,
even getting pregnant with Charlie, which is like one of
the greatest blessings of my entire life, like top five,
top five blessings of my whole existence on planet Earth
is having Charlie. And yet adding another child to our
family system was extremely justsregulating at the time, and there
(18:04):
were moments where I was just like, I don't know
if I'm going to be able to do this or
how I'll be able to do this. And so fast
forward to now we're in twenty twenty six, and I
would like to say that I have come out of
cerebel mode, but I don't really believe I have. It
feels like it's been like blow after blow after blow
after blow, and I've had to ask myself like what,
(18:27):
I don't know, like how long can you live like this?
Or is there a way. This is the question, is
there a way to have chaos happening around you? There
has to be a way to have chaos happening around
you and to come back to yourself and back to
your purpose and back to your creativity. And I really
(18:47):
believe that creativity is the answer. And I think that
one of the reasons that I have felt so blocked is,
like I mentioned, I've been in surrebl mode for all
these years. But another reason I've felt so blocked is
because I really haven't allowed myself to create. I have
blocked myself. And this is true for so many of
my clients that I've worked with over the years too,
and other writers. I think we block ourselves because when
(19:11):
we're in that space of survival, it feels like a
feather could knock me over. Like if a feather blows
my way, it is going to completely just like send
me over the edge of this cliff, like hurtling over
the edge of the cliff. And there might be some
truth to that, And yet so I think we block
ourselves because we feel that this feather, you know, just
(19:33):
the simplest, little lightest touch could knock us over the cliff.
And so we think, like I it's not the time
for me to put myself out there or to open
my heart or to express myself or to make myself known,
or to say what I really think, or to just
sob and be witnessed in my grief, or to yeah,
(19:54):
just like open myself to be seen, to be heard,
to be understood. Like we protect. We're in protect mode,
so we protect instead of opening. And this is not
a brand new thing that I'm saying, but I do
think it clicked for me in a different way this
week where I was just like, maybe the thing that
I think is protecting myself is actually the thing that's
(20:15):
keeping me stuck. It's actually the thing that's driving me
deeper into this survival mode, into this fight or flight,
feeling like the slightest thing could knock me over. What
if I just let it knock me over? What if
being knocked over is not the tragedy that I think
it is. You know, I do think we have a
(20:40):
human instinct to physically survive. Like there's this unknown virus
circulating around and we don't know how it responds. We
don't know if it kills pregnant people. We don't know
if it kills babies. We don't know if you know,
young people survive or old people survive, like we just
there was so much in the beginning that we didn't know.
And I can look back at the story and look
at all these plot points and think like, yeah, there
(21:02):
was so much uncertainty. Hear. Then we moved to Nashville.
I wasn't sure how that was going to go. Then
I'm pregnant with Charlie and it's like unknown again. And
then I was so exhausted. Matt went back to work
and I'm home alone by myself with these two kids,
and I'm like, oh, I have so much grace and
compassion for myself, no wonder. I had zero bandwidth, zero
bandwidth to create literally anything, and somehow yet still out
(21:25):
of that, I released write your Story, and I've you know,
been recording this podcast. I'm like, Wow, human beings are amazing,
Like it's amazing what we go through and that we
still are able to keep showing up every day and
keep doing the beautiful things that we do. And yet
I can understand why I avoided doing the things that
I perceived as dangerous, things like sharing about what I
(21:47):
was going through on Instagram. Talking about how I also
felt blocked, talking about how I don't know if I'll
ever write another book again, talking about you know what's
breaking my freaking heart right now, talking about what's going
on in the world, sharing my political beliefs, sharing you know,
how I'm processing, like all the chaos and turmoil. I
can see why I shut that part down because I
(22:09):
thought that that would somehow keep me safer. And yet
I believe that it's actually through expressing those things that
we are able to move through the chaos, move through
the trauma, to find our own clarity so that we
can survive. And this is what I was saying earlier.
It's like, you know, it's not true that you can't
(22:31):
create inside of chaos. If that were true, we wouldn't
have beautiful works like man Sarch for Meeting by Victor Frankel,
you know, or Corey ten Boom or and Frank or
any of these people who were living in absolute, utter,
despair and chaos under the most insane circumstances. And we're
still able to create something really beautiful. And when I
open my own Instagram app right now, I see people
(22:52):
who are creating spectacularly beautiful things that bring life and
our gift to me, like poems and you know, quote
and books and resources and podcasts and like I benefit
every day from the creativity of other people who are
living through this same time. By the way that I
am like, it's not like I believe that my life
is somehow worse than theirs. We are all living through
(23:14):
this collective time of chaos. So what a beautiful thing
that I get to like that it becomes breath to me.
When you do something creative, it becomes breath to me.
Why can't I also assume that when I do something creative,
it becomes breath to you. And I think this is
part of what we have to do if we want
to get ourselves unblocked, is to remind ourselves that creativity
(23:38):
is not an ancillary thing that we do on the
side when everything else is taken care of. Creativity is
not optional. Creativity is not a luxury. Creativity is the
very breath that you breathe. It is absolutely a necessity,
the same way that food and water and relationships are
a necessity. Creativity is how you take the chaos of
(23:59):
yours world and make sense of it. And meaning is
not a luxury. Meaning is an absolute necessity to the
human spirit. Without meaning, you will combust. Without meaning, you
will I mean, I'll say this with a trigger warning
for suicide. Without meaning, you lose the will to live.
(24:23):
And there are a lot of reasons why suicide takes
place that are related to mental health, but in general,
whether there's a suicide attached to it or not, the
reason that someone would lose the will to live, like
the reason someone becomes so deeply depressed that they don't
want to get out of bed or is because they
cannot make sense of the pain, they cannot make sense
(24:45):
of the chaos around them. So you know, there are limitations.
Like one of the things I think that has been
getting in my own way, or one of the ways
I've been getting in my own way is I'm just
like realizing that the meaning that I used to make
of my story doesn't fit anymore, like the structures that
I used to lean on, like, let's say, Evangelical Christianity
(25:08):
for one of them, I've talked openly about here, at
least on the podcast, about deconstructing the faith of my upbringing.
So it's like, oh, okay, well, if that meaning doesn't
fit anymore, then maybe no meaning fits. Maybe there's maybe
nothing matters, maybe there's no context that's going to help
(25:29):
me see or understand my life. But I think it's
a mistake to believe that. I think that we're constantly
reconstructing our meaning, and that the only place you can
construct meaning from is right here, right now. This is
the only place that you can make meaning from. And
before we even make meaning, I also believe that we
need to be a witness to our own lives. To me,
(25:52):
this is what writing is really about. It does force us,
or it invites us to create meaning from the chaos.
Before it can even do that, we are required to
be a witness to our own existence. And I think
that's something that, especially when we're in survival mode, we
fail to do because we really don't want to see
(26:13):
what's in front of us. It feels like it's the Boogeyman,
and whether or not it is dangerous or scary or not,
our system feels that way and registers it that way,
and so we just go, no thanks, I don't really
want to look at what's there, and so we push
it away. And yet maybe again, maybe this is the
theme of today's episode. The very thing that you think
(26:35):
is scary is the thing that will heal you, the
very thing that you think is too much for you.
Maybe that's the thing that will set you free. And
I'm experiencing this in real time right now, and I
think it's why I feel ready to talk about it,
because I've started just doing the very thing that scares me,
just finally, finally deciding that that feather that I think
(26:55):
can knock me over the cliff, like, let it knock
me over the cliff? What else do I have to
lose at this point? And maybe sometimes we have to
get to the place where we don't know what else
we could possibly lose before we're willing to take the risk.
But it's like, yeah, there is more for me to lose.
But in a certain way, I feel that I'm at
the rock bottom. I've already lost so much. It's like, well, okay,
(27:17):
go for it. What else are you going to take
from me? You know? And in a certain way, we
find ourselves in that moment. We find ourselves in the
moment when we think we've lost everything we wanted, This
is when we find what we actually wanted. And I
think there's just something really powerful to be said for
that and my invitation to you would be maybe the
thing that you've been avoiding because you're afraid is the
(27:40):
very portal to everything you've wanted. And I know that's vague,
but like, think about it through the lens of creativity.
Maybe you're staring at this block. You know, you're calling
it a block, and maybe what it really is is
you your unwillingness to do the one thing that you've
(28:01):
been asked to do. It's like, I'll do anything. And
I actually I had this revelation a few weeks ago
where I was just like, tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. God, Universe, whoever guides, whoever I'm talking to, like,
tell me what to do. I will do anything to
get out of this despair that I'm in. And I
felt like this voice, this energy, this essence said back
(28:24):
to me, Yeah, you'll do anything, accept surrender, You'll do
anything except to accept this place that you were in.
And I was like, oh, yeah, that's true. That's the
one thing that I've refused to do is to just
go It is what it is. This is my life
(28:44):
and this is the reality of my existence. Is what's
right in front of me right now, and I have
been unwilling to do that, and then the minute that
I became willing to surrender, then it's like then things
started to move. But you don't surrender so that things
start to move. You don't do the thing that you've
been asked to do so that things will move. You
do it almost as an act unto itself. It's like
(29:06):
it's a softening. There's a softening that is required in
order to do that thing that you've been refusing to do.
There's a softening that is required that will open you
to feel more of what you've been feeling, more pain,
more loss, more to spare, more grief, more anger, more frustration.
It is what you've been avoiding, and it is also
(29:27):
the very thing that will free you. And that's I
think the message of this episode for me. I'm doing
this for me. I'm going to record a part to
this episode because there's more that I have to say
about this. But this feels like a complete thing in itself,
and so I want to talk a little bit more
about it next week, so I will record a part
two to this episode. But the invitation for this episode
(29:48):
is first to identify for yourself, what's the thing that
you have been asked to do, or that you've been
invited to do that you are refusing to do, but
that somewhere deep down inside of you, you know that
you're meant to do this. You know that this is
the thing that will free you. And you might need
a tiptoe around this for a while, you might need
to sit in stubbornness and say like, hell no for
(30:09):
a while. I definitely have done my fair share of that.
But what's the one thing. It's like, give me a
list of one hundred other things, and I will do
any of them, but don't make me do this one thing.
What is that one thing for you? And what might
take place if you were willing to finally do that
one thing. That's my question for you, just something to ponder.
I'll come back to this topic next week. Thank you
(30:32):
for listening, thank you for being a witness to my life.
I'm grateful for you, and I will see you back
here next week on The Writer Story Podcast.
Hi, and welcome to you to write your story pipecast.
Good job.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Really pick up the pieces of your life, pull them
back together with the word you write. All the beauty
and peace and the magic that you'll start too fun
when you write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
You got the words and said, don't you think it's
down to.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Let them out and write them down and cover what
it's all about and write, write your story. Write you
write your story.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hi, and welcome back to the Write your Story Podcast.
I'm Ali Fallon. I'm your host, and on today's episode,
I want to start with a very honest admission that
I have been holding back for a while because I've
been a little bit afraid I think of how this
makes me look as a coach, as a writing coach.
I guess I don't know. I have thought about this
so many times. I've thought about sharing it, and it
(00:57):
just hasn't ever really felt like the right time. But
this week I was like, I think it's the right
time to share this. I have been turning this over
in my mind. I've been thinking about it NonStop, and
I have some things that I want to say, but
I will start with this honest admission, which is that
I have been a little stuck creatively for the last
couple of years, maybe even blocked. I might even use
that word. And I think one of the reasons that
(01:18):
I felt a little embarrassed to admit this is because
I also have committed my life. My life's work for
the last fifteen years or so has been working with
creative people to help them get on stock, help them
get on block, specifically working with writers to help them
finally finish the books that they've been working on for
so long or dreaming about for so long. And I
know about myself that I'm extremely effective as a coach,
(01:40):
that I can meet with a person and help them
untangle the ideas that seem too complicated. I can help
them make sense of something that feels extremely chaotic. I
can help them really drill down an idea from something
that seems very like ethereal or not clear enough and
help them find the clarity or they haven't been able
(02:00):
to see it. And yet, for whatever reason, I have
not been able to do this for myself. And recently
my husband was asking me, are you going to write
another book again? When are you going to write your
next book? And I was like, I don't even know
if I'm ever going to write another book again. And
he was like, wait, what what do you mean, You're
never going to write another book again? Like you're such
a gifted writer and you have so many amazing things
to say, And I just, for a moment in that setting,
(02:24):
felt like my clients so often say they feel, which
is just like I don't even know, Like I don't
know where, I don't know what the book would be about,
I don't know how. I have an idea, but I'm
not sure how to distill it. I'm not sure anyone
would be interested in it. And I could hear myself
saying the things that my clients so often say, and
I just didn't have the ability to. I think it's
(02:46):
different when you're helping someone else. It can sometimes be
hard to help yourself the way you help other people.
That's what I'm trying to say. It can sometimes and
maybe all the time, be very tricky to help yourself
in the way that you help other people, even if
you are very effective or gifted at what you do,
so sometimes doing it for yourself is just a whole
different ballgame. And this is one of the insights that
has come through so clearly for me. As I've been
(03:07):
thinking about this about like why am I blocked? Why
am I stuck? Why do I feel like I'm not
sure what the next step is to take? Or do
I want to write another book? Will I write another book?
One of the reasons I think I feel that way
is because you cannot create and survival mode. You just cannot.
And if you've been around here for a long time,
(03:27):
if you've been listening to my podcast, this has been
really just episode after episode of me processing what's been
going on in my life for the last several years,
you know, if you've been around a while, that I've
had a lot of challenges, a lot of loss, a
lot of failure, a lot of you know, just things
not exactly going my way the last couple of years.
And when I zoom out from the story, this story
(03:49):
really started in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
I hate admitting that to myself because it's like, wow,
it's been six years. Six years ago, in March we
went into shutdown, and speaking of like global shutdown, like
we were living in la at the time. I don't
know where you were living, but where we were living
in Pasadena. The shutdown felt like this extremely dark, apocalyptic time,
(04:13):
and I know now from now that I'm living in Nashville,
and because I had lived in Nashville before. While I
was in Pasadena, I was watching my friends on Instagram
in Nashville, and I was still in text threads with people,
and I was still hearing what was going on in
their lives, and so I know people were living in
different reality than we were living in LA. This is
a big reason why we left LA. But in LA,
we were under mask mandates, indoors and outdoors. You know,
(04:36):
I was five months pregnant at the time. We didn't
know what this virus was going to do. We weren't
sure how this was going to unfold. We didn't know
how it affected pregnant women. We were hearing in the
media these really scary stories. There were definitely also very
scary things happening. I was hearing, you know, from friends
of mine who lived in LA that were they were
losing family members, they weren't able to go back for
(04:57):
their funerals. So it was just this very weird and
this is personal to me, But I also remember the
Friday before we went into lockdown, I was in the
middle of filming new videos for my online course that
was called prefer to Publish. That was the course that
existed before a book in six Months existed. So my
brother actually was the one who was filming the courses
(05:18):
for me. My brother is a videographer. He's very gifted.
He's the person who I hired when I wanted to
film these course videos and I wanted them to be
like ultra professional and amazing. For the first time ever,
I knew he was the person who I wanted to hire,
so I flew him down from Portland to la He
was staying with my husband and I we were filming
these course videos. I had multiple employees at the time.
There was a producer there setting everything up. There was
(05:40):
my brother, there was someone helping with the script. There
were people with set design. I had Annie who used
to work for me. She was in some of the
videos with me. Everybody was helping. It was like a
huge production all week Monday through Friday, and what ended
up happening is by Thursday, it sounded like, based on
what was happening in the media, it sounded like Trump
(06:03):
at the time was going to put travel restrictions in place,
and I was telling my brother, I'm like, the last
thing I want to happen is for you to get
stuck in LA and not be able to go back
to your family. You know, he had two little kids
at home at the time. His kids are a little
bit older now, but at the time I was like,
you've got babies at home and your wife is home
by herself. Like, let's get you on a flight tomorrow
(06:24):
early morning and get you back to Portland. So we're
cramming everything into Thursday, just rushing filming Wednesday and Thursday.
And the street that we lived on, there was a
house right down the road where a lot of movies
would be filmed, and there was a movie at that
time being filmed. And on Thursday evening I watched them
break down production from this movie, literally take the trailer
(06:47):
and everything and leave and go home. As if you know,
we knew that they were supposed to be in production
for weeks and weeks, and yet they were packing everything
up and going home. So they were kind of on
the same page that we were. Everyone was going like, wait,
what's happened? Like movie sets are shutting down? Are you
kidding me? And then somewhere in that week, and I
used to remember the exact timeline, but I don't anymore.
(07:08):
Some are In that week, my husband got the call,
which I've talked about many times before, basically saying this
is not public information yet, but south By Southwest, which
is supposed to happen in I don't know, it was
a couple of months from then, is no longer happening.
It's being canceled. And so all of your partners that
you've been working with, because my husband works in marketing,
so he was in process of building these massive marketing
(07:32):
installations for different brands at south By Southwest and everyone
found out at the same time, and it was like,
sometime in the process of that week, we're filming these videos,
my husband's getting the call that south By Southwest is
no longer going to be happening, and you know, we're
kind of hearing whispers that Trump was going to shut
down domestic travel andle The whole environment during that week
(07:54):
was just like, like, what is going to happen? Everyone
was just holding their breath waiting to see, and everyone
was moving into I can't say everyone I was, and
the many people around me were moving into protection. And
the mode that your body goes into when you are
in protection is a different mode than the mode that
(08:17):
your body is in when you're in your creativity. I'm
not saying that you can't be living in the midst
of chaos or trauma and also be creative, because I'm
also going to say in this episode that I think
creativity is what heals us, and it's what calms our
nervous system, and it's what brings us back to a baseline,
and it's the very thing that we need and that
we crave during times of chaos. And some of the
most beautiful creativity can be born out of the most
(08:39):
chaotic times in the world. And Yet, if your body,
if your mind, if your soul, your spirit, your nervous
system is invite or flight, you cannot be creative. You
cannot make anything. And so when I look back, I
zoom out of this story and I look back at
that period of time, I have so much compassion for
myself as I say this, but I'm like, look at it,
(09:00):
look at me. In that time, I literally went into protect, protect, protect.
It was like, get my brother home as quick as possible,
get these videos filmed. I remember like Friday morning, we
drove him to the airport and then Friday we were
driving around returning all of the equipment because we'd rented
a bunch of equipment and Friday, I'm almost positive this
was Friday, but don't quote me on this Friday, which
(09:31):
was like March twelfth. I want to say, somewhere in there,
March eleventh or twelfth of twenty twenty, there's like this
insane rainstorm in Pasadena. And let me tell you, like,
it does not rain like this in Pasadena. I live
in Nashville now, and we get rainstorms where it will
dump buckets of rain. But in Pasadena, the whole time
I lived there, it happened like once. I think this
(09:53):
one time was the only time it happened so much
so that it's dumping buckets of rain, like people, the
streets aren't set up for it, homes aren't set up
for it for that amount of rain to come down
in that short amount of amount of time, and so
the streets were just kind of not flooding, but like
temporarily flooding. The streets just look like rivers of water
is flowing through the streets. And it was the most
(10:16):
bizarre I remember, because we were running around returning all
this rental equipment, and you know, trying to get back
home before this rain came, and we're driving through the
streets in thankfully in my husband's SUV, so you know,
we were high up enough off of the water, but
we're driving through the streets and it just looks like
this absolute apocalyptic flood is happening. And it was the weirdest,
(10:38):
weirdest feeling. And this is before the mask manits went
into place, and it was before the lockdown happened. Lockdown
I think happened on that Saturday, or maybe it was
the following Monday. But just like within a few days
we finished filming these videos for prepare to publish. My
brother goes home, I return all this rental equipment, this
rainstorm happens, and then we go into shit down, and
(11:00):
I can also remember I'm again five months pregnant. I
remember driving across Pasadena to my office space where I
would meet with my team on a daily basis to
do our work, and grabbing everything we would need because
we knew we wouldn't be allowed to come back to
the office space without masks for a very long time.
We weren't sure how long that was going to be.
(11:20):
And a few months ago I was listening to old
files that I had saved from my podcast. I used
to have a podcast called Find Your Voice. I was
listening to old files from that podcast and hearing a
cut part of a podcast that never got aired. It
was like a conversation with a woman before my interview
with her had started. It was being recorded, but we
(11:41):
hadn't gotten to the published part of the interview yet,
and we were talking about this pandemic and the shutdown,
and we were just like, gosh, I know I heard
somewhere that like, this thing could last six weeks. Can
you imagine if it would last six weeks? And I
was just reminded, like how much uncertainty was happening at
that time, and how normal it would be for my
(12:03):
body to go into that protection mode, to go into
fight or flight, to shut down my creativity, to shut
down everything that my system considered unnecessary in order to
just survive and get through what I thought was going
to be. I mean, at the most, like six weeks.
I was shocked thinking it could be that long. And
(12:23):
then here we are six years later, and obviously we're
not still in a global shutdown, but we lived in
that shutdown all the way through my pregnancy. I gave
birth in July in LA and was still forced to
wear a mask during labor and delivery. You know, my
husband was not allowed to come up to the delivery
room with me when I was giving birth for like,
(12:44):
I think three and a half hours. They finally did
let him come up after he quote unquote passed a
health inspection, but the health inspection was non existent. And
when I look back on that time, I'm just like,
no freaking wonder. I was so overwhelmed. There was so
much unknown, there was so much chaos. I didn't know
how to make sense of it. Our bodies naturally go
(13:05):
into fight or flight. They naturally shift into a different
mode when you're living in that much uncertainty, when you're
living in that much fear, when you don't know what's
going to come next, you don't know what's going to
be required of you to survive, and you're just scanning
the environment for threats. And when I think back, I'm like,
I went into that mode in March of twenty twenty.
(13:27):
I gave birth in July of twenty twenty, which, speaking
of like the most vulnerable time of your life, speaking
of scanning for threats, you know, people talk about postpartum depression.
I didn't really do the postpartum depression thing nearly as
much as postpartum anxiety. My anxiety was so heightened after
Nella was born, because I mean that's a whole other
story and a whole other podcast. But I was supposed
(13:49):
to give birth at a birth center. You know, my
body freaked out at the last minute. As soon as
I went into labor, my heart, my blood pressure, sorry, skyrocketed.
I was sent to the hospital to deliver. Matt wasn't
allowed to come in with me. So event after event
after event after event in my life in twenty twenty
(14:09):
and then into twenty twenty one just kept throwing me
for a loop, just kept sending me on my heels,
just kept you know, putting me into that physical mode
where I felt like I needed to protect myself and
to prevent myself from being harmed. And then, of course
the next step in the story is that we moved
to Nashville, and we moved to Nashville. Really, the number
one reason we moved to Nashville is just we knew
(14:30):
we needed to get out of LA. It was September
in LA and the fires started happening in the hills,
which happens every year, by the way, and we had
been through this before, but this year when the fires started,
they were worse than they had been in years past,
and now they've become even worse in most recent years.
But we also had a newborn and so not only
(14:51):
were the fires happening in the hills, we weren't really
concerned about the fires making it to us, but the
air quality was so bad the smoke and Pasadena was
so bad that they were recommend even healthy people weren't
like out walking or jogging. And here we were. We
had a two month old baby, and so you know,
Matt and I were trying to figure out what to do.
And then there was a day where we lived in
this old home. It was a beautiful old craftsman but
(15:13):
it was over one hundred years old. It had been
built in the early nineteen hundreds, and smoke started to
seep in through the cracks in the windows, like where
the windows had been installed over the years, there had
been like a just like a tiny little opening around
the windows, and smoke started to seep in through the windows.
And so my husband went to the hardware store. He
(15:33):
comes home. He's like taping these plastic bags over our
windows to keep the smoke from coming in with painter's tape.
And I'm like, now we can't even see out the windows,
like I am living in a prison, in my own
personal postpartum hell. Like, get me out of here. I
do not want to be here anymore. So we made
the decision to just get in the car and start
driving east. And we made it to like Yellowstone National
(15:57):
Park and I want to say Zion and we were
just getting out in fresh air and walking, and then
started driving toward Nashville. I had so many friends that
lived in Nashville. All my friends were like, come stay
with us, Like, you know, come live at our house,
Like stay as long as you want, bring your dog,
bring the baby, like come let us meet your daughter.
And we had been so isolated at this point for
so long, like we didn't even We had been living
(16:20):
in utter isolation where we had not seen another soul
other than just each other and our baby. And then
Matt's mom who had flown to la and quarantined for
ten days so that she could come and be with us.
That was like the level of isolation that we were
living under. And so we were driving to Nashville and
everyone's like, oh, yeah, we're We've like potted up. There's like,
you know, a couple of families and we hang out
(16:41):
together and we do workouts and we get together for
dinner and whatever. And so arriving in Nashville was like
this breath of fresh air. It was like my system
could could just let down again, and it felt so
good to be there. And you know, we were in
utter transition at the time, like Matt wasn't working, I
want to say, and I was working. I was selling
(17:01):
prepared to publish at the time. That was the course
online course that I had available, so we were living
off of that. And we're just like driving around East
Nashville one day and see this house, the house that
I'm currently sitting in, and we were like, hm, this
house has been sitting on the market for a while.
I wonder what would happen if we just sent an offer,
And sure enough we were able to buy this house.
And that's how we ended up moving to Nashville. It
(17:22):
was like such an afterthought, such an easy thing. The
door just flew wide open, and leaving La felt like
such a ah, we can finally let our systems down again,
I can finally rest. So then we're in Nashville. I
get pregnant with Charlie. Almost immediately after we got to Nashville.
I get pregnant with Charlie. And I don't need to
go through the whole story again, but essentially you can
(17:43):
see what I'm saying that it's just been thing after thing,
even getting pregnant with Charlie, which is like one of
the greatest blessings of my entire life, like top five,
top five blessings of my whole existence on planet Earth
is having Charlie. And yet adding another child to our
family system was extremely justsregulating at the time, and there
(18:04):
were moments where I was just like, I don't know
if I'm going to be able to do this or
how I'll be able to do this. And so fast
forward to now we're in twenty twenty six, and I
would like to say that I have come out of
cerebel mode, but I don't really believe I have. It
feels like it's been like blow after blow after blow
after blow, and I've had to ask myself like what,
(18:27):
I don't know, like how long can you live like this?
Or is there a way. This is the question, is
there a way to have chaos happening around you? There
has to be a way to have chaos happening around
you and to come back to yourself and back to
your purpose and back to your creativity. And I really
(18:47):
believe that creativity is the answer. And I think that
one of the reasons that I have felt so blocked is,
like I mentioned, I've been in surrebl mode for all
these years. But another reason I've felt so blocked is
because I really haven't allowed myself to create. I have
blocked myself. And this is true for so many of
my clients that I've worked with over the years too,
and other writers. I think we block ourselves because when
(19:11):
we're in that space of survival, it feels like a
feather could knock me over. Like if a feather blows
my way, it is going to completely just like send
me over the edge of this cliff, like hurtling over
the edge of the cliff. And there might be some
truth to that, And yet so I think we block
ourselves because we feel that this feather, you know, just
(19:33):
the simplest, little lightest touch could knock us over the cliff.
And so we think, like I it's not the time
for me to put myself out there or to open
my heart or to express myself or to make myself known,
or to say what I really think, or to just
sob and be witnessed in my grief, or to yeah,
(19:54):
just like open myself to be seen, to be heard,
to be understood. Like we protect. We're in protect mode,
so we protect instead of opening. And this is not
a brand new thing that I'm saying, but I do
think it clicked for me in a different way this
week where I was just like, maybe the thing that
I think is protecting myself is actually the thing that's
(20:15):
keeping me stuck. It's actually the thing that's driving me
deeper into this survival mode, into this fight or flight,
feeling like the slightest thing could knock me over. What
if I just let it knock me over? What if
being knocked over is not the tragedy that I think
it is. You know, I do think we have a
(20:40):
human instinct to physically survive. Like there's this unknown virus
circulating around and we don't know how it responds. We
don't know if it kills pregnant people. We don't know
if it kills babies. We don't know if you know,
young people survive or old people survive, like we just
there was so much in the beginning that we didn't know.
And I can look back at the story and look
at all these plot points and think like, yeah, there
(21:02):
was so much uncertainty. Hear. Then we moved to Nashville.
I wasn't sure how that was going to go. Then
I'm pregnant with Charlie and it's like unknown again. And
then I was so exhausted. Matt went back to work
and I'm home alone by myself with these two kids,
and I'm like, oh, I have so much grace and
compassion for myself, no wonder. I had zero bandwidth, zero
bandwidth to create literally anything, and somehow yet still out
(21:25):
of that, I released write your Story, and I've you know,
been recording this podcast. I'm like, Wow, human beings are amazing,
Like it's amazing what we go through and that we
still are able to keep showing up every day and
keep doing the beautiful things that we do. And yet
I can understand why I avoided doing the things that
I perceived as dangerous, things like sharing about what I
(21:47):
was going through on Instagram. Talking about how I also
felt blocked, talking about how I don't know if I'll
ever write another book again, talking about you know what's
breaking my freaking heart right now, talking about what's going
on in the world, sharing my political beliefs, sharing you know,
how I'm processing, like all the chaos and turmoil. I
can see why I shut that part down because I
(22:09):
thought that that would somehow keep me safer. And yet
I believe that it's actually through expressing those things that
we are able to move through the chaos, move through
the trauma, to find our own clarity so that we
can survive. And this is what I was saying earlier.
It's like, you know, it's not true that you can't
(22:31):
create inside of chaos. If that were true, we wouldn't
have beautiful works like man Sarch for Meeting by Victor Frankel,
you know, or Corey ten Boom or and Frank or
any of these people who were living in absolute, utter,
despair and chaos under the most insane circumstances. And we're
still able to create something really beautiful. And when I
open my own Instagram app right now, I see people
(22:52):
who are creating spectacularly beautiful things that bring life and
our gift to me, like poems and you know, quote
and books and resources and podcasts and like I benefit
every day from the creativity of other people who are
living through this same time. By the way that I
am like, it's not like I believe that my life
is somehow worse than theirs. We are all living through
(23:14):
this collective time of chaos. So what a beautiful thing
that I get to like that it becomes breath to me.
When you do something creative, it becomes breath to me.
Why can't I also assume that when I do something creative,
it becomes breath to you. And I think this is
part of what we have to do if we want
to get ourselves unblocked, is to remind ourselves that creativity
(23:38):
is not an ancillary thing that we do on the
side when everything else is taken care of. Creativity is
not optional. Creativity is not a luxury. Creativity is the
very breath that you breathe. It is absolutely a necessity,
the same way that food and water and relationships are
a necessity. Creativity is how you take the chaos of
(23:59):
yours world and make sense of it. And meaning is
not a luxury. Meaning is an absolute necessity to the
human spirit. Without meaning, you will combust. Without meaning, you
will I mean, I'll say this with a trigger warning
for suicide. Without meaning, you lose the will to live.
(24:23):
And there are a lot of reasons why suicide takes
place that are related to mental health, but in general,
whether there's a suicide attached to it or not, the
reason that someone would lose the will to live, like
the reason someone becomes so deeply depressed that they don't
want to get out of bed or is because they
cannot make sense of the pain, they cannot make sense
(24:45):
of the chaos around them. So you know, there are limitations.
Like one of the things I think that has been
getting in my own way, or one of the ways
I've been getting in my own way is I'm just
like realizing that the meaning that I used to make
of my story doesn't fit anymore, like the structures that
I used to lean on, like, let's say, Evangelical Christianity
(25:08):
for one of them, I've talked openly about here, at
least on the podcast, about deconstructing the faith of my upbringing.
So it's like, oh, okay, well, if that meaning doesn't
fit anymore, then maybe no meaning fits. Maybe there's maybe
nothing matters, maybe there's no context that's going to help
(25:29):
me see or understand my life. But I think it's
a mistake to believe that. I think that we're constantly
reconstructing our meaning, and that the only place you can
construct meaning from is right here, right now. This is
the only place that you can make meaning from. And
before we even make meaning, I also believe that we
need to be a witness to our own lives. To me,
(25:52):
this is what writing is really about. It does force us,
or it invites us to create meaning from the chaos.
Before it can even do that, we are required to
be a witness to our own existence. And I think
that's something that, especially when we're in survival mode, we
fail to do because we really don't want to see
(26:13):
what's in front of us. It feels like it's the Boogeyman,
and whether or not it is dangerous or scary or not,
our system feels that way and registers it that way,
and so we just go, no thanks, I don't really
want to look at what's there, and so we push
it away. And yet maybe again, maybe this is the
theme of today's episode. The very thing that you think
(26:35):
is scary is the thing that will heal you, the
very thing that you think is too much for you.
Maybe that's the thing that will set you free. And
I'm experiencing this in real time right now, and I
think it's why I feel ready to talk about it,
because I've started just doing the very thing that scares me,
just finally, finally deciding that that feather that I think
(26:55):
can knock me over the cliff, like, let it knock
me over the cliff? What else do I have to
lose at this point? And maybe sometimes we have to
get to the place where we don't know what else
we could possibly lose before we're willing to take the risk.
But it's like, yeah, there is more for me to lose.
But in a certain way, I feel that I'm at
the rock bottom. I've already lost so much. It's like, well, okay,
(27:17):
go for it. What else are you going to take
from me? You know? And in a certain way, we
find ourselves in that moment. We find ourselves in the
moment when we think we've lost everything we wanted, This
is when we find what we actually wanted. And I
think there's just something really powerful to be said for
that and my invitation to you would be maybe the
thing that you've been avoiding because you're afraid is the
(27:40):
very portal to everything you've wanted. And I know that's vague,
but like, think about it through the lens of creativity.
Maybe you're staring at this block. You know, you're calling
it a block, and maybe what it really is is
you your unwillingness to do the one thing that you've
(28:01):
been asked to do. It's like, I'll do anything. And
I actually I had this revelation a few weeks ago
where I was just like, tell me what to do.
I'll do anything. God, Universe, whoever guides, whoever I'm talking to, like,
tell me what to do. I will do anything to
get out of this despair that I'm in. And I
felt like this voice, this energy, this essence said back
(28:24):
to me, Yeah, you'll do anything, accept surrender, You'll do
anything except to accept this place that you were in.
And I was like, oh, yeah, that's true. That's the
one thing that I've refused to do is to just
go It is what it is. This is my life
(28:44):
and this is the reality of my existence. Is what's
right in front of me right now, and I have
been unwilling to do that, and then the minute that
I became willing to surrender, then it's like then things
started to move. But you don't surrender so that things
start to move. You don't do the thing that you've
been asked to do so that things will move. You
do it almost as an act unto itself. It's like
(29:06):
it's a softening. There's a softening that is required in
order to do that thing that you've been refusing to do.
There's a softening that is required that will open you
to feel more of what you've been feeling, more pain,
more loss, more to spare, more grief, more anger, more frustration.
It is what you've been avoiding, and it is also
(29:27):
the very thing that will free you. And that's I
think the message of this episode for me. I'm doing
this for me. I'm going to record a part to
this episode because there's more that I have to say
about this. But this feels like a complete thing in itself,
and so I want to talk a little bit more
about it next week, so I will record a part
two to this episode. But the invitation for this episode
(29:48):
is first to identify for yourself, what's the thing that
you have been asked to do, or that you've been
invited to do that you are refusing to do, but
that somewhere deep down inside of you, you know that
you're meant to do this. You know that this is
the thing that will free you. And you might need
a tiptoe around this for a while, you might need
to sit in stubbornness and say like, hell no for
(30:09):
a while. I definitely have done my fair share of that.
But what's the one thing. It's like, give me a
list of one hundred other things, and I will do
any of them, but don't make me do this one thing.
What is that one thing for you? And what might
take place if you were willing to finally do that
one thing. That's my question for you, just something to ponder.
I'll come back to this topic next week. Thank you
(30:32):
for listening, thank you for being a witness to my life.
I'm grateful for you, and I will see you back
here next week on The Writer Story Podcast.
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