For the Birds: Creativity, change, & The Resiliency Circle!
Let's hang out tomorrow! We gather @ 5:15pm PDT / 8:15pm EDT
Dear friends, creative peers, & readers old and new,
Please take one second to let me know your preferred reading schedule for this newsletter, as I work to align intentions + outcome + capacity:
Your input is enormously appreciated! Thank you <3
Now on to the good goods…
The fabrication of personhood
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the strange, complex work of unmasking—I’ll be writing more about this soon!—and I’d like to summarize quickly a much bigger idea I’ve been chewing on:
For those of us who are neurodivergent, and especially those of us who have been highly masked since a young age, authenticity is not always something we can reveal or uncover.
It is also something we must craft.
In other words: How do I go back to an earlier, truer version of me, when the course of my life forced me to bypass the full development of her?
In this way, authenticity can also be found in the act of making choices—and I don’t just mean making the “right,” authentic ones; I mean that practicing making choices is, in and of itself, an authentic practice, even when those choices turn out to be wrong or you change your mind.
I’ll be writing more about this, too.
But one consequence I want to share today is that I’m starting to think of my opinions and preferences a little differently, not so much as part of my genetic makeup, but instead as sunglasses that I keep trying on.
You know how you have to try on a pair of sunglasses a few times before you’re really sure about them? I feel this way about my knowing. (I started writing my way toward some of this back in April.) I really don’t experience intuition and gut-level knowing in the way these traits are commonly discussed. Furthermore—and in contrast to all the times people have tried to “reassure” me otherwise—I don’t see this as a flaw or failure of my personhood.
Knowing happens differently for me—slower, less knee-jerk. And it means that rather than anticipating clarity to swoop me off my feet, I usually have to move and fumble my way toward it by trying feelings and ideas on before I’m totally sure that they’re right.
“How has your creativity changed?”
Here’s one pair of sunglasses I’ve been wearing for the past few weeks:
I think maybe my creativity is one of the few things that hasn’t changed throughout my life.
Is this true? I’m not sure yet—there’s a gentle fog in my brain where clear skies might otherwise indicate a bold yes. But there’s also a mild, familiar feeling in my body when I consider the way writing has given me a consistent sense of personhood throughout my life: Yup—there I am. On the page. Spotted with ease, again and again.
In word and sentence and stanza, neither doubt nor confusion have ever been the dominating force.
So I’m toying with the idea that there’s some fundamental aspect of my creativity that hasn’t changed at all, while remaining curious about the other, more subtle ways that maybe it has. (Through growth, oscillation, or a shift in focus; or through those actions we forget to register as change because they feel so much like a deepening.)
I want to hear what *your* experience of your own evolving (or not) creativity has been! Let’s gather / chat / witness / reciprocate / and be together in a gentle, divergent-friendly, strengths-based way. Unlike most of the gatherings I host, this will be a conversational hour, and I’m looking forward to seeing what surprising or reassuring or fruitful directions we might move in.
I’ll be holding space tomorrow night, July 24th, at the usual time—5:15pm PDT / 8:15pm EDT. We’ll open with the question: “How has your creativity changed?” And we’ll go from there.
New to The Resiliency Circle? You can learn more about it here.