This morning as I was walking by the big church in downtown Edgartown, the bells started to ring. I imagined that as much as the bells were loudly calling the hour, they were calling me in their doors to sit down and feel safe, adored. I thought of how much, since I was a child, I have wanted to have a place to go to every Sunday morning, every morning, that felt like home to the center of my heart. 

Just as Emily Dickinson said she knew poetry when she felt the top of her head lift off, I knew church when I became more space than body. The thing is, if you don’t know who you are yet, and you feel yourself start to disappear, this is not a small thing. It certainly doesn’t feel like a good thing. It’s like you are a tray of cookies and someone’s trying to take you out of the oven before you are baked, before you have taken your final form. Your body slams down and hardens and refuses the tapping at the door of transcendence or the cookie sheet of love.  

Leave me alone. I’m not done holding on the the idea that I have control over here and I need to isolate to carry on this bullshit of I’ve got this. This crazy song of I’m fine over here with my aching stomach and hurting head.

I was twelve I attended services at every church in our town. I was looking for something, but I felt like a single body out at sea with nothing to grab hold of, so I just kept swimming. It’s hard to attach to something when something in your brain whispers for you to keep moving because your stomach doesn’t feel right, and when your stomach is worried, it tells your brain something is not right, you are not safe, and then your brain dumps worry chemicals all over your system, and your stomach’s reaction to life becomes your reality, and no matter how badly you want to sit still in church, you keep moving because that’s what your stomach tells you to do. 

I didn’t write the book I dreamed of writing for all those years because I was upset. To be upset is to be unhappy, worried, disappointed. It is also to have a disturbed digestion. Upset is a hard place to write from, just as running is hard when you are on your knees.

I developed the six questions I ask in Write or Die as a way to address upset.

I developed Write or Die as a way to prepare my body to go to church of I have a story I want to tell you. When I was writing my book in those 93 days I had in Martha’s Vineyard and the East Village, I was finally living my own kind of holy days, and I was able to stay in that place. The staying meant I was able to make my dreams come true.

The thing that had changed was that I was finally able to sit and stay with my feelings. This ability to sit and stay gave me voice. It gave me audience. It gave me purpose. It gave me focus. It gave me a way in to tell the story that had been causing mayhem in my head for decades.

It’s hard to write a book when you are out shopping or cleaning your house or walking by the ocean for hours and hours each day in the effort of catching up with yourself, the self who is two steps ahead, keeping you on the run so you don’t have to feel whatever it is that drives you to want to (to need to) write a story in the first place.  

When you carry a story inside your body/mind, it can feel like a watermelon or a flock of birds or a mirror shattered into a thousand pieces, and your system tells you the story is too big, too messy, too disorganized, and that you are never going to be able to put these things together in a way that makes sense to another person, and so the curtain on I can do this goes down, and all you see is darkness. Your arms go weak, and you think you are separate from your story because it is a thing that is out of your reach even though it also feels as close as your skin, as the beating of your heart. 

I think writer’s block is an energetic thing that indicates a really good story is banging at the door.  Every time I’ve asked someone who says they are blocked to tell me what they want to say, they say it. No one has ever stared at me blankly, wordless. The words are there. The block is not in the way of the story: the block is part of the story. 

The antonym to upset is settled. When you unblock your system, a settling happens for you are now living in flow. This is better than crack because crack is illegal and fucks up your teeth. Living in flow just makes life a cool adventure without sending you to jail or to an oral surgeon. 

When you are living in flow, everyone around you, all those you love most, benefit. It’s like the lights in the house just went on and everyone can see better as a result. 

The more you you are, the brighter the world becomes.

I love doing individual Write or Die sessions by phone because, in the span of about 75 minutes, I get to see change happen. I love that people I have never met call me and trust me and that together we can get right to work and let the lights come on.  

If you are feeling stuck or sad or not quite yourself, set up a call with me. It’s a $150 love fest for your truest self. I’ve never had someone say they with they hadn’t bothered. A lot of people cry. A lot of people tell me the call was life-changing. 

If you have no idea how beautiful or strong or amazing you are, give Write or Die a shot. When you do the exercises and see who you are and what it is you want to say with your life, your body and mind settle and doors appear where before there was just wall.

Settle. Open.

Rest in love.