Dear Writing friends,
How are you this Friday?
If you’re in the UK like me right now, at this time of year there seem to be so many end-of-term things to remember and organise. My nervous system is feeling a bit frazzled. Or perhaps, even if you’ve already embarked on summer vacation time, you’re wondering when exactly you’ll manage to slow down a little.
This letter is a reminder to myself just as much as to all of you, dear friends, to seek out some moments of slowness or, if that’s just not possible, to talk to myself more kindly, to go a little easier on myself. I’m trying. It’s not always easy, is it?
Earlier this week, my daughter attended two ‘transition days’ at her new school. She’s starting secondary in September. I’ve been rolling that word ‘transition’ around in my mind over the past few days. It makes me think about the classic book Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes by William Bridges. You can find out more about Bridges’ work here.
Bridges points out the paradox at the heart of all transitions, which is that transitions begin with endings and loss - of people, places, relationships, identities. We have to learn to somehow let go, to come to terms with those endings and losses in order to be able to create space for new things to begin. No wonder transitions can feel so difficult and exhausting and scary.
Perhaps those middle stages of transition are a little like the new blank pages of a notebook. We’re moving out of the past but not quite ready to move into the future. We can feel stuck for a while, frozen by grief or uncertainty.
I’m struck, once again, by how similar the processes of life and writing can be.
For my little family, this year has been marked by transitions: grief and loss; death and growth; endings and beginnings. In one sense, of course, we are all always in a process of transition. The world around us shows us this constantly. Yesterday, I scooped up the scattered petals of the roses in my garden. They were magnificent this year, and they were over so soon, but now the hydrangeas are bursting into fat, white blossoms.
Wherever you are, in whatever phase of ending and beginning, I hope you can be kind to yourself this coming week. I hope you can use your writing as a kind and faithful friend, the kind of friend who takes your hand and underlines the best parts of your work, perhaps even speaks them out loud with relish.
If you’d like some support with finding kindness, rest and restoration this summer, why not join us this coming Wednesday 19 July 7pm (GMT+1) for our next live Zoom Dear Writing Together session.
Write with us in supportive community for just £6 for the month. There’s no need to share your writing in progress. At these relaxed sessions, we just take a little time to try a Writing Experiment together, working individually in our notebooks (cameras on or off - your choice) and then we come back together for completely optional sharing of our reflections afterwards. Welcoming, supportive, nurturing and low stakes. We’d love to see you there.
Coming soon also for paid subscribers: A month of Creative Rest
Resources to nurture your creativity in restful and gentle ways over the month of August.
Wishing you a week of kindness.
Sophie x
I’m catching up on your offerings since returning from Norway, and this one really resonates with me. It was a phenomenal trip, and it was so full there was precious little time to write -- so I carved out moments here and there to write a sort of multi-week travel journal rather than try to publish a fresh Substack each week. I really needed to give myself the space and permission to do that, and the way I came to what worked for me was looking at all the options as a spectrum. On one end was taking a whole day out of each week I was there to just write and publish as usual, and on the other was to just “be on vacation” and forget about it. I looked at a bunch of options on the spectrum and landed on the one that felt best -- and I’m so happy I did. I got to be fully present, available, and engaged in nearly every moment of this life-changing trip, and also made time here and there late at night or early in the morning to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, which I later wove into a long-form published piece. In this way, my writing became that friend you mentioned, holding my hand and underlining the parts of my life I wanted to highlight and remember in detail.
I really think that’s a beautiful way to approach writing. Thank you for that image. It’s so easy to try to turn our loves and talents into merit-based capitalized endeavors instead of just letting them be our friends.