How to create your world, one thought at a time

I grew up in an environment that didn’t always feel safe.

And unsurprising as recent events have been, watching a mob of angry, racist insurrectionists storm the Capitol has triggered some familiar trauma responses.

My brain keeps telling me:

These people are creating a world where it will be more unsafe to live with integrity.

You know what it’s like to live in fear.
To be hyper-aware of your surroundings.
To organize your life around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And now you know what it’s like to live in safety, to create joyously and freely, to collaborate, to let your guard down.

You can’t live through that again, it says.

It’s too much.

Of course, in thinking this way, I deprive myself of the ability to create in THIS world, and to shape THIS world consciously...and there’s certainly value to exploring why I’m approaching the future of this country as a very dark foregone conclusion when the future is yet to be created.

But there is also this truth:

That we have the authority to give ourselves space to feel whatever the fuck we are feeling.

That nobody can take from us the ability to carve out emotional space to connect with ourselves. To grieve, to feel afraid, angry, numb, indifferent, disgusted, worried, sad, unaffected, distracted, discouraged, optimistic, to have any emotional reaction at all.

That ability is ours and ours alone.

As is the choice to not shame ourselves, however we’re feeling, however long it takes.

To give ourselves grace and compassion in the process.

To view this process itself as one of creation and resistance.

For ourselves, for those whose lives touch ours in direct and indirect ways, for those who are currently living in fear.

Creativity isn’t just the method by which we produce entertainment, or beauty, or Story Product, or whatever.

It’s also the act of creating and re-creating how we relate to ourselves, to each other.

It’s the act of building our very world, one step at a time, one thought at a time.