It’s hard to have capacity for all the changes on your plate if you’re beating yourself up all the time. 

It’s hard to make room for someone else’s pain if your own mind is busy stabbing you in a tender place. 

Some of this mental stabbing comes from brain chemistry, which usually needs to be treated with expert care. 

Some of this mental stabbing comes from experienced trauma, which—at this point in our history—we now all share. The degrees differ, and every person’s exact experience is unique. But I haven’t yet met a person who emerged unscathed from the past few years.

But some of this wounding, perpetuated by our own brains, comes from habits made normal by the culture we have inherited. 

That’s what I want to speak about. 

For example, we writers may speak casually about our “inner editor,” a voice in our heads that tells us what we’re making is terrible or worthless. At best, we may trade techniques on how to shut this voice up long enough to keep on writing in spite of the noise in our heads. 

We don’t often speak about how often this cruel voice shows up in other areas of our lives. We rarely mention that many of the writers we grew up reading—including those assigned in our writing classes for their artistic brilliance—struggled with mental health and engaged in self-destructive behavior. Who has emerged from high school without studying Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or Sylvia Plath?

It is immensely human to want to end pain. I can’t fault anyone for that impulse.

It is however cultural to accept that creativity must be paired with stabbing yourself with your own thoughts—and perhaps other more physically dangerous forms of self-harm. 

I challenge that belief. Instead, I encourage an alternative:

Make your mind a nicer place to live. 

Commit to retraining your brain’s habits until it’s a safer space for you to inhabit. 

Experiment. Use as many modalities as are effective. Allow your creativity to support your emotional wholeness.

Investigate the stories, whether internal or inherited, that are giving your mind a knife to cut you with, and rewrite them until you dull that blade—until it loses its power to cut you.