I Said Yes Before I Could Talk Myself Out of It

I have always been a writer.

As a child, when the words I needed wouldn't come out right in conversation, they would come out right on paper. My mother and I, who loved each other fiercely and fought each other equally so, kept a homemade notebook for the times when things between us went sideways. 

I would write what I was feeling and leave it on her bed. She would write back and leave it on mine. That notebook was how we found our way back to each other when spoken words got in the way. It was my first real education in the power of putting the truth somewhere outside yourself, so you could both finally see it.

I have also always been a dancer. Ballet for years as a young girl, and then movement, for the rest of my life. The minute music finds me, my body wants to answer it. It is another language I speak more fluently than I sometimes speak my own. 

Something in me has always needed to express itself through the body, through the physical fact of being alive in a moment; and dance has been the most honest version of that.

Writing and dancing. These have always been the ways I find myself when I've gotten lost.

What I am not, by any honest accounting, is an artist. I have never thought of myself that way, not even loosely, not even generously. Creativity, yes. Artistry, no. This is a distinction that has always felt real to me, even when I couldn't quite explain it.

When the pandemic arrived and the world went very quiet, I found myself alone and restless in a way that felt like an invitation rather than a punishment. A few years before, I had discovered a woman named Flora Bowley; a painter, a teacher, someone who talked about creativity the way I talk about becoming, as something that belongs to every human being and not just the ones who've been told they have a gift. I loved her immediately, the way you love someone who gives you permission to want something you didn't know you were allowed to want. I read her book and I felt something open.

So I ordered the supplies. I signed up for the online class. I cleared the space, and showed up to the blank paper, which is something I have never been afraid of in my life.

And then I stood there, paintbrush in hand, with absolutely no idea what to do next.

The paralysis was immediate and total and, honestly, a little humiliating. I am a woman who coaches other women through fear for a living. I teach the tools. I know the terrain. And there I was, alone in my own home with no one watching, completely unable to begin. Eventually, I put the brushes down and started using my fingers, which felt ridiculous, and then vulnerable, and then, somewhere in there, quietly freeing. It was uncomfortable in that particular way that means you are actually close to something. 

I kept at it for a while, and then gradually, the way these things do when we don't protect them, it faded. And still. I carried the feeling that there was more for me there. Some door I had opened and then quietly closed without ever really walking through.

Two months ago, I was scrolling through my phone on an ordinary afternoon when I saw that Flora was offering her ArtSpa retreat in April.

My heart started to race.

Noticing is one of the foundational practices of unfolding. Paying attention to what makes your heart move faster, what catches you before your brain has time to catch up, what arrives as a full-body answer before the question is even fully formed. I have written about this. I have taught it. I have sat across from hundreds of women and helped them learn to trust exactly this kind of signal in themselves.

And I still felt the constraints come flooding in right behind it, the way they always do.

How would I pay for it? Could I take the time away from work? I don't paint, painting paralyzes me, what was I thinking, considering a painting retreat? She sells out instantly, everyone knows that, I had probably already missed my window. The list was long, and it was convincing, and it arrived within approximately forty-five seconds of my heart doing the thing it did.

Understand this: that list is not wisdom. It feels like wisdom. It is dressed in the language of practicality and responsibility and good sense. It knows exactly which of your real concerns to borrow in order to sound legitimate. But it is almost never wisdom. It is almost always fear, and fear is a very good mimic.

Whenever we feel a full-bodied yes about something, the kind that moves through you before you've had a chance to think it through, the mind follows almost immediately with a comprehensive accounting of everything that makes it impossible. Our work, the actual work, the hard and daily and lifelong work, is to learn to tell the difference. To let the yes be louder than the list. To trust the body, which almost always knows before the brain catches up.

So I said yes.

I made the call. I sent the payment. I blocked the dates on my calendar before I could reconsider. And the rest worked itself out, the way things have a way of doing when you stop waiting for the conditions to be perfect before you begin.

In the weeks leading up to it, I could feel something building. Not dread, exactly. More like the particular aliveness that arrives when you know you're about to do something that matters. My creativity has been quiet for a long time, longer than I've admitted, even to myself. This immersion was going to ask something real of me, something I wasn't sure I still had access to. I knew it. I went anyway.

This is what happened.

— Laura