"No one will do it like you"

An end of year love note from me to you about trusting your creative dreams and yearnings.

I have mentioned this story before, but as we wrap up 2024, I want to share it again as its own post because I think the message warrants it. Hearing this message the first time was life changing in the moment, has stayed with me, and continues to bolster me in moments of creative doubt. It’s something a very dear and wise friend (T Kira Madden!) said to me at a residency eleven years ago, and I hope you can carry it with you into the new year.

To set the scene: I was twenty six, four months pregnant with my first child (a child that now says “sus” and “slay” at every turn) at my first residency ever (MacDowell heyo) in the deep snow of early February and feeling a sort of rush that my writing sample had been accepted to such a prestigious and storied residency. I was somewhat fresh from graduate school, had just turned down acceptance into a masters in counseling program to become a therapist (a wise decision for me at that time) and had been working at a PR firm knowing nothing about PR, barfing in the bathroom multiple times a day, eating saltines and making ginger tea, not pregnant enough to show or tell my coworkers yet, probably just weirding everyone out.

Here I am at MacDowell in Veltin cabin in 2014 where Thornton Wilder famously wrote Our Town

I was very disengaged from that job for many reasons, but mainly because it had nothing to do with my soul purpose, so when I got the very Owl-like acceptance to a residency I had no expectations of getting into, I knew I had to go, and I had to go for a long time. I had a feeling it would be awhile before an opportunity like this came up again with a baby coming (and I was right—I’ve never been to another residency since!). I quit my job at the PR firm to little objection—they were probably relieved the weird saltine girl was leaving—and set out for New Hampshire for five and a half weeks with a fledgling idea for a novel I wanted to write, trusting, as they say, the process.

I was in love with the way my morning sickness quelled as I crested the second trimester, how I was able to read whole books in single gulps and write endlessly. I wrote a novel draft in three weeks, took naps—something I could only do in pregnancy, wrote a couple short stories, twiddled my thumbs a bit, did some prenatal yoga, watched True Detective, ate omelets in town, researched a court case I was obsessed with, and started rewriting my novel, realizing I had only scratched the surface with the first draft. I came home with the first iteration of what would become Godshot.

So all of that was happening alongside the unexpected magic of being around a group of artists who were endlessly inspiring. Meeting T Kira was fireworks for me because we seemed to connect on the level of souls. I knew by her work that she understood me deeply and I think she felt the same way about mine. It’s the sort of unspoken bond I think we make as artists, our work communicating a frequency that accelerates connection. But it wasn’t until we spent time in her cabin together, exchanging life stories, that she casually deployed some wisdom that she couldn’t have known would change my life. Or maybe she did, and that’s why she gifted it to me.

Perhaps T Kira and I bonded also because she convinced me and many other artists to take nude photos in 10 degree weather. (2014, MacDowell)

She asked if I would ever consider writing my story, the things I’d experienced as a child, etc. Would I write a memoir or some essays?

I remember saying something to the effect of, “well, people have had it worse than me. I mean, my story isn’t that unique in the grand scheme of things.”

I feel so departed now from the version of me who said this, but I think my line of thinking must have been that my suffering wasn’t like, winning the ultimate suffering Olympics, so why write about it? A defeatist idea to be sure and illogical also because how could one ever hope to measure such a thing?

Though I suspect it was coming from something deeper. I suspect I felt there was something about my story that wasn’t worthy of being told. There was fear involved.

She looked sort of surprised. Then she said, “yeah, sure, but I mean, only you can write it the way you would write it. That’s what’s valuable.”

Ding ding ding!

Not the what. The way.

This was life changing because it shifted right away how I was thinking about the Work of being a writer, and it has come to be true over and over. And the truth is simply this: no one can make the art that only you can make, the way you will make it.

Like a fingerprint that is uniquely yours, as is your work. I remember being freaked out during the process of writing Godshot that a book would come along that was too similar and steal the wind from my sails. I remember the day I read the announcement for Gold Fame Citrus and my heart leapt to my throat—it seemed someone else had beaten me to the punch in writing about drought, California, a young girl in peril... Soon after, a different book came out with the same working title I’d been using for years. Now that was out.

But then I read GFC and it turned out it was nothing like Godshot because no one could have written Godshot other than me, just as only Claire Vaye Watkins could have written her work in the exact WAY she did. And I let go of that old title that wasn’t quite right anyway and I’d always known it. In fact, that other writer had done me a favor. As my friend Kimberly King Parsons likes to remind me, the obstacle is the way.

If we believe that nothing truly meant for us will miss us, then we stand in total trust of ourselves and our work, and from that place we create the work that only we can create. The work authentic to us. The work we are meant to make and share. It’s almost not even up to us. It’s by a grander design.

But I suppose the question is, how do we get there exactly? To that place of self trust? I believe we start by acknowledging that our creative yearnings have meaning, and have not revealed themselves to us by accident. It’s not an accident that you have the desire to write a collection of stories, or you have an idea for a play, or you can envision an art series or a film, or or or or.

What, do you think everyone wakes up wanting to write a tricky little book of essays, or a novel about your deepest heartbreak, or a collection of poetry about the sea? I can assure you, they do not. It’s not an accident you feel pulled toward what calls you. And once you answer that call you understand more deeply that also, no one will answer that call in just the way you would.

How beautiful is that? It’s so expansive. Just as a rising tide lifts all ships, so is there value in your desires and the way you will answer those calls. So let me tell you in the same way my dear friend told me—write the stories you need to write, and trust in their value, trust that no one will do it just as you can.

It’s not the what, it’s the way.

By doing this, we turn down the noise of comparison. Of fear. Of stories that aren’t true.

We must all confront eventually is that time is finite. The only thing that matters is that you satisfy the calls of your soul while you still have time. And we only do that by trust.

There’s a beautiful Jung quote I just encountered in Satya Doyle Byock’s fabulous book Quarterlife and it I will leave here as we step into 2025.

“What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.” -Carl Jung

Happy New year, and thank you for being here as you travel along your one glorious way.

C

PS—I am looking forward to revealing more in the new year about The Fountain, the platform I am busy building with Kimberly King Parsons. Please join our waitlist here!