Who’s That Girl?
I had writer’s block for five years, y’all.
Seriously. The only things I wrote during that time were this and this.
I entered such a deep emotional healing period that my voice essentially went mute. I couldn’t imagine baring my soul publicly with my writing - and my mind made sure I wouldn’t be in that position by withholding all but the tiniest drops of authentic phrases with all the flair of a malfunctioning citrus press fruitlessly attempting to squeeze an oversized lemon.
And then everything changed this year.
I joined Emily Pereira’s Quest for Love Academy coaching. The idea of transforming my love life might have drawn me in, but the personal transformation and intense focus on honing my writing craft through gateless writing is what kept me going back.
Gateless writing pulled me right out of my writer’s block and back onto the page where my keyboard and I always belonged.
It’s a writing modality specifically designed to alchemize darkness into light by focusing only on the strength of the writer (referred to as “the narrator”) and her piece.
This shuts off the critical mind and associated fight-or-flight response it usually accompanies. Through group feedback, the narrator’s strengths grow each week as their trauma and weaknesses fall away.
This process is proven to work on PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and all the other fun things that come with fight-or-flight.
It certainly helped mine.
Suddenly, it became laughably easy to pull authentic, heart-centered content from brain onto the page without overthinking. Writing hasn’t been this easy for me since I’ve been a kid.
And while I may not have publicly shared much yet, I’ve amassed quite a collection of short pieces from each week’s exercises.
Some, like the one you’re about to read, will become posts I share with the world. And others were strictly for my personal healing and will remain close to my heart, seen only by my beautiful gateless writing community.
By the time we completed yesterday’s final gateless writing exercise, it was a no-brainer to write about the assigned topic: Write about ourselves and who we are as if someone is seeing us for the first time.
Who are we now, after weeks and months of transformation?
Well…keep reading below the photo, and I’ll tell you.
Who’s That Girl?
I love her.
A lot.
And it’s refreshing.
Because there were so many days, even recent ones, when I couldn’t find anything nice to say about her.
But things have changed. I can feel it in her energy.
Her desperately frenzied hypervigilance, once strong enough to rival that of a dog eyeing a deliciously plump autumn squirrel for dinner, has faded.
In its place is a calm awareness of her surroundings, with a demeanor inquisitive enough to take in everything and process it through her mental motherboard, yet relaxed enough to easily print out the necessary input without overexertion.
She’s come a long way.
She’s able to be with herself instead of hiding every time I, her mirror, get too close.
Suddenly, she’s comfortable looking at me when our paths cross.
Instead of cringing and hiding when I walk past, she pauses. Comes closer. Asks me questions. Holds space for whatever I have to tell her, even when she might not like what she sees or hears.
I can tell her anything now. Our intimacy grows by the day.
She is beautiful, even on days when she’s less inclined to believe it. Sometimes she still gets a little uptight when she thinks she needs to look, act or be different to be accepted, but I always remind her that her flaws are beautiful and perfect.
I can do that now because she listens, pauses, and responds instead of immediately overreacting to the things I lovingly reflect back to her.
Her confidence grows every day. She no longer stands in front of me for hours on end, wondering how she can fix herself and what she needs to do so that I will never reflect anything about her that isn’t perfect.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen her look this powerful in my presence.
She used to cower in front of me. She could never see what I saw in her, what I now see magnified a thousandfold.
This is a woman who has done the work.
She has faced her demons. She has gotten up close and personal with them, albeit sometimes with as much reluctance as the entire cast of The Breakfast Club at 9:00 am in the Shermer High School library.
But she did it. She’s so much happier now.
She can show up for other people now because she’s not feeling so defective that she needs to pull into her protective shell and avoid vulnerability or connection.
This is a woman who knows her worth.
Her mind clear now, free of the thoughts that weighed her down so heavily, she feels confident spending less time with me than she used to need. I can she knows if she turns her back to support someone else and lean into their lives, I’ll still be there.
She trusts me. It took us a long time to get there, but she’s no longer suspicious every time our paths cross, glaring angrily at me as she demands to know what went wrong and how I’m going to fix it.
She’s warm. Sweet. Honest.
There’s a zen quality to her that’s never been there before that just makes it easy to be in her presence and drink it in.
Instead of constantly looking at me for reassurance to reflect back what she needs, she cultivates it from within and looks back at me, confident she will see it when our eyes meet.
We’ve never been this securely attached to one another. It’s jolting in the most exhilarating way.
I want to know more. I want to get to know her.
I’ll admit there were plenty of times when, frankly, I hoped she would leave me alone so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed by her presence.
But not anymore.
It’s time to follow her and find out more.
Because I 100% had this song running through my head the second we got the assignment. Thanks for the post title inspo, Madonna. xo
