In the spring of 2024, I signed onto a series of courses that make up the Professional Writing Strategist, Marketing Director & Indie Publisher program as offered by Sufani Garza of the Place of Bliss Academy (POBA) on the Udemy platform. The first course in the program is called Writers Workshop #1 - THE DIVINE IMPULSE TO WRITE. This online journal will serve as a repository for my notes, written reflections, and other links and videos of interest I stumble upon over the course of taking these workshops.
Written Reflection Number 1
What do you do as a writer? What is your routine? What are your habits, current rituals - that is, what are you already doing to commit to a writing practice? Do you want to write more? Think about what you do and create, identify, and establish your own routine, schedule, and ritual.
I often feel as if I’m not doing much as a writer, that I don’t have much of a routine, or any discernible habits, or any specific rituals I can opine about. And during the times I am doing something, my monkey mind is great at telling me that I’m doing nowhere near enough to be able to call myself any kind of an artist, let alone a serious writer.
SUBVERSIVE SELFIES
Currently, the most significant amount of writing I undertake daily are for a subversive selfie project I’ve been doing on and off since January 1, 2020. It’s a project I started to illustrate a more authentic portrayal of my daily life. This project holds my interest because I found that people often use social media to paint a picture of their lives in a way that was very curated: where every photo or video appeared to represent a seemingly perfect life. Ultimately, I knew that if I was going to post regular selfies with written reflections on an ongoing basis, I didn’t want to present a false appearance of perfection and happiness. Because that just isn’t me, and never has been. At some point in 2020, I stumbled upon and purchased a black t-shirt that had simple red text on it, which read: “we are a sad generation with happy instagram pictures.” It was a perfect shirt that symbolized what I was pushing back against with my subversive selfie project.
ARTIFACT 01 > PHOTO > Steven H, Lee. “We are a sad generation with happy instagram pictures.” 14 Mar 2024.
With my posts, I do my best to present an honest look at my life, where I’m not afraid to shine a light on the struggles I grapple with such as:
issues with my physical health including:
my high blood pressure,
obesity, and
type 2 diabetes, as well as
issues with my mental health including:
my battles with the addictions of:
binge eating junk food, and
overspending, as well as
anxiety; and
major depression.
In terms of the routine attached to this project, I find that today I’ll snap selfies throughout the day mainly using my iPhone. At the end of the day, after I’ve retired to bed, I’ll edit the photo slightly, and compose the caption story directly in Instagram using it’s in-app editing options. I then back the post up by also posting it to Flickr. This workflow can be dangerous though, as the Instagram app does have a tendency to sometimes crash in the middle of my composition - resulting in me losing both the edited photo alongside whatever caption text I had written up to that point. When this happens, it really does test my commitment to actualizing mindfulness in everything I do, as I end up letting out an angry series of expletives that could probably make a sailer blush. When this happens, my small Maltese-Poodle Kira will, without fail, lift her head up and look over at me from her spot in the bed, before getting up to lumber over next top me, flopping down by my side, her head on my chest, as if to say “don’t get mad Daddy.” After giving her an appreciative belly rub, assuring her I was mad at my phone and not her, I then remind myself to breathe, and begin again. Altogether, it usually takes about an hour to compose a subversive selfie project post, and most days I’m happy with the results. The project gives me a chance to descriptively share a part of my day, and to convey the undulating series of emotions that I experience.
SOME KIND OF A ROUTINE
I don’t know why I let myself be so mindless when I loose my work, as it’s usually fairly easy to remember what I had written, and often this second draft flows out of me more concisely than the first draft. When my life was more organized, or I felt a deeper desire to create, combined with a kind of self-imposed deadline, I could wake between 4-5 am, get dressed, and head to a local Starbucks to write. But even as I handwrite this reflection in a small journal while sitting in a local Starbucks, I find myself distracted by the present moment. I’m sitting here and the busyness of the place has produced a heightened hum of noise that has me looking up from my page more often than I’d like. Usually, the busyness of a cafe doesn’t bother me, where, as writing guru Natalie Goldberg once described, the frantic noise often provides my monkey mind with enough amusement to keep it preoccupied as my hand moves across the page, forming letter after letter with my Papermate ballpoint pen, methodically constructing the words that makeup whatever stories I’m putting down on paper. Specifically, Goldberg describes this ability as being in the zone, and notes how she:
“…read an article by Lawrence Shainberg about athletes training for the ‘zone.’ The zone is a special place that opens up at moments of peak performance. In the middle of fast action and pressure - in basketball or soccer, say - everything slows down. The players feel calm, clear, confident. How do they prepare for this? Their coaching includes reading a book while watching television. One young Olympic archer practiced wearing earphones, listening to the radio as she shot her arrows. All this increased concentration… This is also why I write in cafes. The more activity in the restaurant the better - juke-box blasting, phone ringing, cook calling out orders - more entertainment for monkey mind, leaving the deep mind to do its task” (202).
Ultimately, I’m hard pressed to remember when I last got up at 4-5am to create. It’s been over a year, at least.
HOSPITAL MEMORIES
I remember in September 2021 when I was hospitalized following a suicide attempt. The first few days I was kept under observation, in a small room with cement cinder block walls, and a heavy steal door. A security camera was in one corner of the room, up high, covered by a metal plate with a plexiglass window from which the camera peered down at me from behind. The plate was flesh with the wall and the ceiling, protecting the camera from any possible damage that might otherwise be flung at it by the room’s occupant. Part of me wondered how long it was hung without such a protection in place, how many were damaged before a more fortified camera was installed. The corner of the room had a metal toilet, with a small metal sink on top of it, but it was out of order. I sat and slept on a single sized plastic mattress that sat on the floor. I was given one blanket, and a single pillow to rest my solitary head upon. There wasn’t much to do. I practiced meditation, and breathing exercises. At one point I used the Ho’Oponopono prayer as a mantra, along with what is often said during a loving kindness meditation.
“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you… may I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live a long life with ease.”
Then I’d repeat it for someone I loved. And someone I was having difficulty with. And then, for the entire world. Eventually, I felt a great release, a deep, full bodied sobbing, that started in the pit of my stomach, in my solar plexus. Later that same day, when the hospital psychiatrist saw me, he asked me if there was anything that could make things easier. To that, I asked if I could have a pen or pencil, and a notebook to write in. He said no, that they couldn’t give me such an object after a suicide attempt. Even though we had talked about how I’d never engaged in cutting, or any kind of physical self-harm to my body aside from taking too many prescription medications, in an attempt to die by overdose.
He added, “You were crying earlier the nurses said. How come?”
I told him how I had been meditating, and that it had brought up fairly strong emotions that had been stuck inside me for too long now. I explained how it had been cathartic, and said that writing was also cathartic for me. But his answer was still no. Later that night, I would be moved from isolation to a bed that sat in a hallway, with other beds in front and behind it, with other patients sound asleep. Another patient had been brought in by the place, and was clearly having some kind of mental breakdown, shaking, screaming. It was a sharp difference from how I had been brought in. I had been down, so quiet, handcuffs keeping my hands secured behind my back, cutting into my wrists. At one point I stood in the doorway of the little cell they were putting me in, and the doctor asked who the patient was, and seemed shocked that it was me because I appeared to have everything under control. There was no screaming, no yelling. I wasn’t physically trying to resist being put away.
I wasn’t in the hallway for long, that afternoon I moved from the emergency room at my local hospital to a mental health unit, in another hospital, about an hour’s drive away from where I had been. This would be my home for the next week or two. After getting a brief tour, and putting what little I was allowed to keep away, I showered, and put on a clean pair of hospital pyjamas. It felt good to move up from the hospital gown, although I had kept on a pair of bumblebee boxer shorts I had on when I was first admitted and ordered to strip off my jeans and shirt. With the brown pyjamas in place, I retired the boxers to a drawer next to my small bed, as I had been wearing them for several days now. I was tempted to stay in the privacy of my room, and just sleep. It would have been so easy to ignore everyone in the outside world of the ward, but I knew that wouldn’t help me in any productive way.
So I left my room. I went to the nursing station and asked if they had anything I could write with, and to my surprise they provided me with several small elementary school exercise journals, and a pen. I was excited, and relieved, and I found a spot in the cafeteria area where I just wrote. I wrote down the words I had committed to memory, the words scratched into the back of the metal door that kept me locked away in the emergency room. I wrote how the plastic mattress felt cold under my naked legs and feet. I wrote about meditating, and sobbing.
Each morning had a routine. I’d get up, meditate for 10-15 minutes, and then journal for thirty minutes. I approached the journaling as prescribed by Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way. It was a way for me to clear my thoughts, to quiet my monkey mind. I had been given several of these small journals so one ended up being reserved for these morning pages. Then, the nurse would come and take my vitals, as well as my blood sugar, and give me my medication. I’d then shower and head out to the common area to have breakfast. At different points during the day I found time for writing practice, as described by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Ten minute exercises devoted to different topics. At one point, I was allowed to use my iPhone to find the number of my counsellor that I had been seeing at my university. I also used it to open my Kindle app, and jot down some of the ideas Goldberg listed in her book for writing practice topics. Eventually, I had to stop, as they noticed I’d had my iPhone for too long. It was probably the first time in two decades that I’d been without a smart device or computer for any length of time longer than a few hours. And it was a bit of a relief.
Works Cited
Goldberg, Natalie. “Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft.” Open Road Integrated Media, 2000.