For the Birds: The Resiliency Circle & year-long creative nourishment
Plus a personal essay on being highly nervous but highly motivated
Thanks for reading For the Birds! These letters are born of my own artistic vision, but they carry the hope of encouraging you in yours. Paid readers gain access to The Resiliency Circle & receive nourishment all month long: prompts, stories, and tools to support you in bringing creativity to the surface of your days, always with sustainability + enchantment in mind.
Today’s free letter is in three parts:
a personal essay about the complex intersections of creative living + nervous system dys/regulation.
early 2024 dates & details for The Resiliency Circle
an invitation for reader requests!
This letter is part confession and part announcement, the whole thing bordered with nervous invitation.
Don’t confess to your struggles! some inner-critic part of me is bellowing in the background. She is wearing a business suit. It looks terrible on her.
I continue to try and be her friend.
Last month, I hosted my final gathering of the 2023 Creative Resiliency Circle (CRC), the free & virtual space I dreamt up quickly one year ago. At its core, it was an experiment: a way for me to practice facilitating things on my own while continuing to investigate this tender intersection of “resilience” and “creativity.” I thought others might benefit from being in the lab with me, so to say, while I worked—that I could turn toward the direction of service and inspiration.
I think it worked! One person said this:
“You create a unique space that is both safe and cozy, and also ask thought provoking questions I never would have asked myself. Every time after the [CRC] I feel some piece of the way I view the world around me has fundamentally changed in an unexpected and invigorating way.”
And another person said this:
“Thank you so much for these gatherings and your thoughtful tending of the creative spark. Both times, I entered the meeting stressed and world-weary and emerged refreshed and uplifted.”
More than providing validation, these testimonials help me understand that something about my internal life is lining up with something in the external, shared space where others live, too. This is not exactly the default way I experience moving through the world! So this kind of feedback—and the gift of reciprocity—is really such a good, helpful thing for my brain.
Oh…but the nerves! And here’s where I shift into confessional mode: For those of you who attended, I led you through a series of thinking exercises and writing prompts designed to soften and broaden the door to celebration, to make entry a little more possible. I wanted to find all the ways into that merry room, to close a year of gathering together by ushering and being ushered toward joy.
And I did get there—a little, I mean a tiny bit. OK, nope. I did not get there. Did I look like I did?
(The eternal dilemma: Do I look how I feel?)
I knew I was plugged into my creative channel, and I could feel the energy of the room moving in the general direction in which I had intended it to. But “celebration” was nowhere in my body.
Am I a fraud? A cheat? A hypocrite? Asking for a friend.
After the call ended, my sweet partner offered to celebrate my accomplishments by getting us dinner. But standing in the middle of the food carts at the west end of town, twinkle lights criss-crossing overhead, I felt completely affectless. I wasn’t proud, and I wasn’t celebrating, and I didn’t even feel relief. I tried to order an Indian curry—a red, velvety looking thing—but the sauce had cashews in it, and when the very nice man behind the counter told me this I almost started crying. I just wanted what I wanted, or maybe I didn’t want to be allergic to anything anymore, or maybe I wasn’t hungry, my body still coming down from the fight/flight response that inevitably drops into freeze during the hour or so before I facilitate anything. I’m talking about the internal experience I moved through, like clockwork, every single month last year—sometimes two or three or four times a month, if I had other workshops going on, too.
When I get nervous—this has been true for as long as I can remember—I lose my appetite. It’s not cute, friends. It. is. not. cute. Do not talk to me about my size as if it is a blessing and nothing more, as if I can’t also fit a history of disordered eating and somatic disempowerment into these skinny jeans. When I get nervous, I lose my stomach. My body, quite literally, prepares to function on as little as possible, shutting off certain parts of me and ramping up others (like my thinking and my digestion, respectively), as if my life were on the line. And my stomach gets…weird; let’s just leave it at that.
This is why those glittery messages about “belief work” aren’t effective for many of us. The problem isn’t happening at the level of belief. We are not self-sabotaging ourselves. We don’t need better affirmations. What’s happening is happening at the level of the body. I can’t think or talk or, sigh, even write my way out of that place when I’m there. The most I can do is pretend I live on the page, pretend the page is my body, pretend my voice is the written one, and find comfort pretending that’s enough of a life.
I pretended this for many, many years.
Cut to the present. Here I am, curious about real-life living, increasingly devoted to tending all the parts of me that don’t or can’t get written down. I have a small but mighty circle of people—coaches, mentors, friends1—contributing to this other way of being in the world. And I have the growing awareness that on the page and off the page may be helpful distinctions, especially for us writers, but that they aren’t (mustn’t be!) hierarchical ones.
And now I’m announcing another year of teaching, hosting workshops, and holding group spaces. Which means I’m inviting all of you to consider trusting me (and for the OG attendees, to continue trusting me) enough to join. Which means I probably shouldn’t be talking about my digestion problems and sweaty palms and the somatic self-doubt that plagues me, right?
And yet. As I enter this new year with a vision of creative nourishment that won’t go away no matter how fast or slow my heart starts beating, I find myself called to say it all out loud, to say these things that might be little beacons to those of you who are similarly nervous, similarly historied, and similarly devoted to your creativity despite all that. Those of you looking for the kind of slow, sensitive, whip smart and trauma-informed spaces that, it turns out, are kinda my specialty.
How do we better be with the hard feelings while maintaining belief in the celebratory ones? Because they do come back—this I know for sure; a few days after the red curry fiasco, I found myself beaming, enjoying the final hours of 2023 as my partner and I drove to the ocean. Here and there, gently…just so…I resided briefly, but wholly, inside joy.
I think I’m interested in resilience because I have needed so much of it in my life, because it’s the only quality that explains why I’m here, given the history of choices I’ve made and the trajectories I’ve both been and, just as regretfully, not been on; given what here looked and felt like for so long.
Creativity—drawing, writing, making shit up—is the one place where I have always felt safe, where I don’t automatically doubt my personhood or wonder if I might be a ghost, assuming other people don’t recognize my face. (The eternal dilemma, put differently: Is this a normal feeling? Do I look like someone who thinks they might be a ghost?)
This is the burden some of us carry, and—let me say it lovingly—we just might have to forever, honey: Sometimes the thing is going to feel hard. Usually because it is hard. Sometimes we will do the thing anyway. Over and over again, we will wish it felt different. It won’t. May not ever. Our values remain. Our values get clearer, even. Despite colossal feelings, the math is quite simple: Onward!
The Resiliency Circle: Let’s gather, let’s tend.
Friends: The CRC is officially evolving! This next iteration of The Resiliency Circle will continue to be hosted virtually, but I’m folding it into my Substack community and including it as part of your paid For the Birds subscription.
Whether you’re on a monthly, annual, or Founding plan, you’ll have access to all gatherings and spontaneous workshops, on top of every issue of FtB. Free readers—hello, friends!—are invited to upgrade their subscription in order to attend.
Winter + early spring dates:
Thursday, February 15th - Mini Reading Club: Joan Didion’s essay, “On Keeping a Notebook” (5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST)
Didion’s writing has been formative for me, and this essay is one I come back to year after year. Let’s admire its nuances, challenge its limitations, and notice the feelings it brings up about our own notebooking and journaling practices.
(Here’s a PDF of the short essay. Or, you can snag a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem on AbeBooks or from your local library.)
Wednesday, March 20th - Seasonal Creative Attunement: Spring (5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST)
Guided writing prompts, reflections, and optional sharing, with a ritualistic eye toward inviting spring into our creativity (and vice versa). Hosted the day after the equinox.
Tuesday, April 23rd - The Resilient Rejects: Full moon work share opportunity (5:15pm PST / 8:15pm EST)
I plan to say more about this in a separate newsletter devoted to the idea of rejection, but the short version is this: Let’s honor the work we’ve made, but which we’ve struggled to develop, share, or get published. Why? Because subversion + reclamation + asserting the value of our experiences. And because I think it will be fun and good practice. Trust me on this one!
Keep your eyes peeled for future announcements and event reminders here!
Any spontaneous workshops + pop-up gatherings will also be announced directly in For the Birds, as will Zoom links. That means you can either check the “Resiliency Circle” tab on my Substack website for current and upcoming events, or make sure these newsletters are showing up in your primary inbox by adding sarahcook@substack.com to your email contacts.
(I know, I know…does anyone actually do that? But ya’ll, spam folders and algorithms are FERAL. Let’s not miss each other in this noisy world <3)
Why this shift?
In my final reflections of 2023, I realized that my newsletter goals and my teacherly ones are the same: I want to conjure more poetic attention in the world. I want to build a stronger, more sustainable set of creative practices, while helping others do the same. I want to allow this creative skill-building to have a positive impact on the rest of my life, to remember that there are transferrable skills that show up first on the page, where we get to experiment and practice and play. And I want to create little spaces where we can reside together for an hour or so at a time, getting curious & feeling seen, letting creativity make our lives richer and smarter and weirder and more our own.
If these intentions feel good to read, follow the feeling + upgrade your subscription:
P.S. dear readers,
What are you most excited to talk + think about in The Resiliency Circle? What are your scheduling preferences? Would a casual “shared work space” gathering on the first full moon of the year—Thursday, January 25th—be beneficial to you? I take your feedback srsly—let me know your creative wishes + requests:
If you’re on the site or in the Substack app, hit the “comment” button to share your wishes publicly.
If you’re reading this via email, hit “reply” to keep the conversation one-on-one.
Including but not limited to: K, A, S, L, B; J, V, O, B; and—duh—M.
Resilient! Brief visits to your place of joy! Continuing, continuing, punctuated by spirit renewing visits to the beach!!
Thank you for saying it all out loud! <3 And for honoring and offering your gifts.