Are You Brave Enough to Face the Page through Fog and Fear?
Hard News in the New Year (and a story of how we carry on)
Dear Brave Soul,
It’s 2025 🤷🏼♀️ and I’m so glad you’re here, caring about small, kind, brave, creative acts.
On New Year’s Day, after our sound bath and dance ritual, I learned my 84-year-old mom’s heart, lungs, and kidneys are failing. She’s now in hospice; nobody knows how long she has. To show up for our parents’ mortality demands courage from the heart. I’ll write about this soon.
Today, I’m grateful to share a story of the everyday bravery that writing requires, from at Create Me Free. Thank you, Kathryn! 🙏🏼 (To inspire us with your story of everyday courage, see the WANTED link below).
Celebrating the bravery of showing up to the page, again and again
The light streams through the rain-streaked window, muddled by San Francisco’s ever-present fog. It’s morning, I’m the only one awake, the coffee is brewing and I’m warming up in my favorite cozy thrift store sweater. I’ve finished my morning journaling and now I’m here, ready to write. My fingers hover over the keyboard, pausing in a moment of tension that feels familiar yet disconcerting. And for a moment, nothing happens.
What I want in this moment is seemingly simple and seemingly impossible: to write. Not just any writing—the real writing, the writing that uncovers my deepest truth and reflects it back so that I understand it and can convey it to someone else who needs those words.
The pragmatics of life—deadlines, client revisions, SEO-optimized drudgery—can sometimes pull me so far from my purpose that I forget why I began writing in the first place. Each word that feels more transactional than transformational becomes another thread in a tangled web of creative fatigue.
As a writer-artist-researcher-crafter-dreamer-connector-collaborator, I've woven my career across diverse mediums: crafting essays about art and mental health, conducting visual interviews, and exploring the therapeutic benefits of crafting in books like Crochet Saved My Life. I've also written countless mundane pieces for companies and clients, leaving me wondering if I have any words left at all. What if we’re each allotted a certain number of words, like heartbeats, and they simply stop?
What if we’re each allotted a certain number of words, like heartbeats, and they simply stop?
I pause, I breathe, I start to write, I erase the words as quickly as they appear.
Anxiety fills me. The doubts flood in: I'm not a real writer. I don't have anything important to say. Or maybe I do, but I don't know how to say it. How many people have already said this more eloquently?
I ground myself in visceral memories of when creativity felt amazing, powerful, heart-touching. The Mandalas for Marinke project stands out—collecting over 1,000 crochet mandalas worldwide to honor a crochet artist who died by suicide. The vulnerability shared in those mandalas, the stories that emerged through them, reminds me of the profound connection art can foster. I didn’t know it would become the project I’m often most proud of. I just knew that I needed to write.
The brave action begins with a single word on the page. And then another. My bravery is in choosing to show up again and again, recognizing when I’ve let writing become a monotonous task that dulls its brilliance. As I write, I eventually feel the shift. Not a sweeping epiphany, but a gentle softening, an opening of space for the words to land where they’re meant to land.
As I write, I eventually feel the shift… a gentle softening, an opening of space for the words to land where they’re meant to land.
When I finally step back, there's a sense of fullness, as though I've just had a meaningful conversation with an old friend. The challenges haven't vanished; they're simply part of the landscape. But for today, I've chosen to navigate them with courage.
The fog is beginning to break. I glance at my bookcase, which holds the physical evidence of my journey—authored books, contributed magazines, early zines from my teens and twenties, a scrapbook of art projects. Each piece is a testament to the bravery it takes to show up, again and again, in the face of doubt, irrelevance, depression, fear, and stuckness.
This is the paradox of a creative life: to lose your way is inevitable, but so is the opportunity to find it again. And each time you choose to return, you do so with more resilience, more clarity, more grace. Because this is what it means to be a writer—not someone who has it all figured out, but someone who keeps coming back to the page, again and again, and sits with the words in the morning light.
🗣️ Your turn: What helps you show up to the page, or a project, again and again and again?
Thank you for being (Mostly) Brave, and for being You. 💗 Please like this post, comment, and share with a friend, so more of us can feel brave in troubling times.
More to come,
Wanted: Your Brave Stories
Dear Brave Soul: 🫀That moment your throat tightens, your hands shake, but you speak up anyway? That's what we're here to celebrate. In my second year on Substack, I'm creating a space for our collective acts of everyday courage, from the heart - and I need your story.
A multi-passionate writer, illustrator, and singer, my work has appeared in Time Magazine, feature films and television, newspapers, YA fantasy novels, and on West Coast stages. HeartsQuest and Holy Sh*t! creative oracle decks are used in therapy offices and bathrooms across the USA 💩 More at HeartsQuest.com.
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Your words are so heartwarming, Christine!
I am so sorry to hear about your Mum 💚 I can relate, though not to the full extent. My Mum is also ill, also the lungs, though she is still battling on and somewhat stable.
You are not just "mostly brave"... you ARE brave. My thoughts are with you and my heart goes out to your Mum.
Despite the hardships right now, I would still like to wish you a very happy, peaceful, creative, joyful, healthy, adventurous, safe and comforting 2025.
Sending love across the waves 🐳
Hi Christine, blessings to your mom. I’m super tired in this moment, but I want to say I get inspired a lot by reading other people like you and just showing up to the page and starting, stopping, starting, stopping in so on and so forth.
Some days it feels brilliant and other days it’s like what the fuck
sending you love