Tell me you will find your way when the candle light has grown dim.

Tell me you will find your way, touching tree bark and constellation when the home in me has scattered upon the surface of a far off pond.

Tell me you will find your way, through trudging mud and jasmine breeze.

Tell me you will find your way to pull me back into your arms.

When the dark snuffs out the light in my eyes, tell me you will know the tonic I need most to drink.

Offer it then, with lips meeting mouth and hands finding flesh beneath my shirt.

Tell me you will find your way back to me.

Because, my love, when I feel you reaching for me, it is in that space between fingertips touch, that I am finding my way back home to me too.

Back to you is back to me and back to us together and then spread out onto the waters once more.

I work in a small office in a suburb of Dallas, and my days are spent constructing publishing plans, writing about platform changes and advising authors on how to nurture their audiences.

But if you were to drive home with me, holding my hand you’d notice a softening — quiet questions, a November Ultra song and daydreams about dinner because the kitchen is my heart’s second home.

I walk in the back door and my feeling senses turn on at full volume. I am Mama, I am energy interpreter, I am shedding one set of armor for gray shorts, my tennis shoes and whatever sports bra I can find in the hamper.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my daily walks. When I step onto the pavement, even when the temperature still reads 101, it feels as though I’m dotting myself with holy water. But instead of baptismal promises, I am reaffirming my covenant with the Earth as my True Mother. These walks are also how I am rebuilding trust with a sometimes-anxious anxious animal body — with each step I am whispering, We are free to walk whenever we damn well please.

At home it’s less structure, and I like it that way. It’s more Let’s squeeze one more icon next to this book or I think Grandma wants fresh flowers beside the framed photo of her and Grandpa.

Where my daily world is structure and order and interpretation and seeingness of others, behind the scenes I wade into an inner world of delight and wonder. It’s where Poet Amanda buys two books and eventually discovers a year later that the titles were a quiet prayer from the future: “Dear Writer”() and “You are here” by Ada Limón.

My work space and my home aren’t as radically different as they were when I worked in a downtown law firm. I am much closer to congruence between Advisor and Poet Amanda, but they do still feel separate.

And after what happened on Wednesday, I can’t decide if I’m OK with that.

I was in the middle of a typical work day when my heart stretched across my iPhone screen and I just had to comment on this Note.

I’d never heard anyone else say they felt safest in the ICU, too. I scrolled through faces, a woman in a hospital bed, a man smiling at the camera from the same kind of bed I slept on in the NICU with Evagene. I knew the blankets, I remembered treasure-hunting for my daughter down the halls of the hospital. And from there I began typing the moment when I felt the most cared for in the NICU and the most torn open.

I've never told this part of my daughter's NICU experience before, and truthfully, I've felt a little wobbly ever since I let it live in public.

I can’t stop thinking about the timing of this storytelling: how a door blew right open into Poet Amanda in the middle of the afternoon and how years ago I would have been off-center the rest of the day but for a completely different reason. I would’ve tried to be sensible and wait until later to answer or comment — or perhaps to edit the story down past the uncomfortable parts. But I know better now. I know that — wobbly or not — I have to let Story digest through my life when she’s ready. And clearly on Wednesday, something was arriving right on time.

I’ve learned to trust the poems that overtake me. I sat down to tell you I wasn’t sure whether Advisor and Poet Amanda would ever feel less apart. And here I am answering myself in front of you: if I can trust Story to interrupt my work day, then I can also trust that two hands will clasp together in just the right moment as well. That Poet Amanda can meet Advisor Amanda can meet authors and founders and the creative in-betweeners and not have to work so hard to thread the line between each.

So I hand you this story, and I trust you. And I’m here to ask you something:

How do you make space for what is at odds inside you, and will you hold my hand in the car?

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It’s the moment I walked out of my bedroom and there were trees in every direction. It was serene, it was gentle, it was not pressing on me in any way that life in a city usually did.

And yet, still, the chorus inside my head raged on.

In that moment perfection was screaming in my face with a message. We had silenced all the things perturbing and curated the most lovely and beautiful life (in photographs).

I knew in that moment: There is something we don’t know.

There is something about time and space and life and sleep that is quite literally always just a little bit out of reach. And not out of reach in a first-world-problems kind of way. Out of reach in that I always feel I have ants in my pants and I can’t tell you why. I am building things to tear them down, again and again. I see the pattern, I engage with my practice and yet, I persist in my ways.

That day I got my marching orders: we need to understand what’s going on inside.

Something INSIDE is not what we think it is.

Over the next few years I would walk a road familiar to many — child loss, secondary infertility, fertility treatments and testing — and sandwiched inside this restless grievance with denied motherhood and medical trauma, I was also diagnosed as autistic and with a dissociative disorder.

Even now, I have a quieter, but still persistent, sense of tracking what I might do wrong next. When I’m walking into a store, I am checking my posture and noting the cars. I’m noting where the sun might be coming down my blouse in the wrong way and making me inappropriate because I wore a white shirt instead of the brown shirt I had anxiety over earlier in the day. I am often anticipating the thud of No and the small voice that whispers: You are wrong again.

✵

Today I want to hand you what I know about how I’ve learned to work what I’m calling The Scattered Yeses.

The curious thing about a scattered yes is that it’s usually keeping company with a lot of persistent No’s.

I’ve learned now to hear the scattered yeses and the persistent no’s in calls I have with writers. They sound like a woman with a beautiful, longstanding painting practice that’s nowhere to be found in her online writing. Or the coach who is obsessed with drawing but hasn’t known how to bring it into the open space of her work without tanking both businesses. It’s the writer with effortless prose who’s never told you about the years she spent making other people’s books. It’s the meditation teacher who has a maybe-book and a screenplay that lights her up but is invisible to readers.

In our conversations, those scattered yeses and persistent no’s are often the static on the line when we talk. Which way next? they ask.

That’s usually when we look at permission. Because permission is something that is built one choice at a time — or torn down in micro-moments of dismissal. It’s saying yes to the foolish thing on the menu, the sprinkles on your ice cream, the laughing with delight in public and not apologizing. It’s walking with your head held high at all times so the sun can find your rosy cheeks more easily.

I’ve lost count of the times in my own writing practice where I have encountered a story clenched tightly inside the fists of my nervous system. I talked about this last week in our Co-Writing Session, in the context of a somatic signal scan [paid subscribers can watch it here]: the body often hides stories in places like our kneecaps, a twitchy eye or — as I described in the video — inside upper-abdomen “ice cubes.”

Hello, ice cubes, how are you? I’ve learned to say.

In conversation with writers, I try to listen for the scattered yes versus the persistent no. Scattered yeses need a few things to come forward:

1. Time and space. A scattered yes is almost always accompanied by the passing of time. A persistent no is often a grief, a trauma, an unresolved question that does not want to be processed in a public way (yet — I’ve had plenty of persistent no’s alchemize into permission-filled, resonant yes’s).

2. Ease and focus. This is a hard one to quantify if you’re neurodivergent or have a fresh trauma you’re processing. But the energy I look for is a thread weaving through fabric: it lets you punch through one side of a sewn shirt and then trusts you to loop through the buttonhole. The work isn’t automatic, but it’s also not filled with friction and pokes and distractions.

3. Readiness. A persistent yes usually sounds like: I am as ready as I’ll ever be. The yes is for me and me alone, and I am satisfied with the yes reaching my toes and no one else. A persistent no is usually accompanied by a demand on outcome: No — unless everyone loves it and it goes viral.

So, dear friends: what is scattered in you right now? Is there a persistent no you want to say yes to?

Tell me in the comments.

Every month, I host a 90-minute co-writing session as a supportive practice for paid subscribers inside the Co-Writing Studio. We show up, we write and if the words get stuck, there’s a place to raise a hand and wo…

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There’s a woman in the Bible who goes seeking her lover in the dark.

It was a garden she snuck out of, but I can’t quite recall the rest of the details.

I remember thinking how brave, how eager she must be, to slip from her room, staying out of sight.

Tip toeing past soldiers who stand guard with sword and shield.

I understand her a little now, I think,

as I wait for you to peer across the field,

walking with tired legs and soft gladness in your heart.

My chin cupped in my hands, elbows propped in the cool grass, I am stirred by thoughts of you. I listen to the sound of the wind pushing past the top of the grass and pay close attention for the sound of feet treading home to me. I am kept awake by memories of you by my side and a promise you will return.

Hours pass and then my smiling face catches yours and soon a wide grin pushes up your cheeks — a flicker of light cast across the acreage.

I stand up from my perch and walk quickly toward you, paying no mind to the crickets or the blades of grass that whip my legs for being so ready.

✵

Hi, friends. I don’t normally share writing like this, but I’m so glad to share it with everyone today. If you’re not yet a free subscriber to The Co-Writing Studio, grab a free subscription to keep reading.

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This morning, I saw an alert on my phone telling me that I had new health trends to discover about my walking habits.

For the last four weeks, I have been walking at least three miles every day. And this may sound unextraordinary, but for someone like me, who has a lot in flux, the anchoring of a daily walk has become somewhat transformative.

I’m not particularly interested in metrics for metrics’ sake or stats for stats’ sake, but I am interested in being able to track myself in a true and honest way. And it turns out that my Apple Watch is a faithful guardian and timekeeper for how I’m showing up each day to keep a promise to myself.

I’ve been in a certain sort of transition since leaving my marriage in April 2025, and it’s been harder than I imagined to go through something so deeply personal and to keep my work going on The Publishing Spectrum as if nothing in particular has happened to me whatsoever. I am trying to hold the wisdom of “write from the scar, not the wound” as soberly as I can, yet, still, it costs me something.

I think about this in the context of publishing anything of any kind. The work of publishing invites you to carry on regardless of what’s going on around you. The show really must go on.

And while I certainly appreciate the structure and friendships that my publishing work continues to give me, most of the time I have felt in some way deeply true in one area of my life and mildly performative in another.

My newsletter has continued to grow, and is helping me set my publishing advisory so I can start earning an income again, and I’m very thankful for that. But on a deeper level, I just need to let you know that I feel I am the least impressive version of myself that I’ve encountered in a very long time.

And that I have been here before — on a threshold of deep, cellular unknown.

I remember in 2014 sitting at my kitchen table in Colorado Springs and reading the email over and over and over again from my landlords (Christian missionaries who had been away on assignment).

I had been renting the basement of their home for the last 18 months with another single woman in town. And now in a short, half-hearted email I learned that in two-and-a-half weeks they would be returning to reclaim their family home.

The letter’s timing couldn’t have been more painful: I’d just found out I didn’t get a dream job in Boston, a relationship that I thought had a lot of potential fell apart at the same time and my current job was good, but I was reaching my point of restlessness inside a single role.

Looking at that email from my landlords was salt on the wound. All I kept hearing in my head was “I’m homeless, I’m homeless, I’m homeless.”

The next morning I was lying on the couch when I remember thinking: Who can I tell that I feel so terribly unimpressive? Can I tell anyone that I am not able to handle this on my own?

And I reached for my friend Casey.

Casey used to be married to my youth pastor. She was the one who knew how to get the kids excited about a change in the church or a new sermon series. She could sing, play the bass and generally brought a certain relational life into any space where she showed up. As I got older, I began to recognize the unacknowledged lantern that’s inside most women in Christian church leadership. She was the truer pastor tending us awkward, shy, skeptical teenaged sheep with diligent care, week after week, while the menfolk stood at the pulpit and rattled on about self-important topics that wove inside secret financial ponzi schemes. All this to say: I am tender to the idea that women are biologically, spiritually and practically equipped to function as the true pastors of the human heart, and in 2014, I saw it firsthand.

When I reached out to Casey, I said:

I am just the most unimpressive version of myself I’ve ever been. And I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where I’m supposed to live. I don’t know if I’m supposed to move back to Texas. I think I’m supposed to, but I’m just not sure.

And she replied by saying, “We’ll come and get you.”

In 10 days’ time, she and her (new, not the youth pastor) husband drove from Frisco, Texas, to Colorado Springs, and they packed up the version of Amanda that I knew how to cobble together. They hauled a small trailer of my belongings — which they paid for — and then for the next eight months I lived in a bedroom of their home with my dog, Georgia.

Here, we started over.

Most people who are in their late 20s might find it embarrassing to share a room in someone’s house, but all I could focus on was the peace I felt inside myself. I was uncovering something new every hour of every day, and I love uncovering something new.

And it occurs to me that right now I am in a similar setup: I am living in another one-bedroom life. I am resetting, sharing a small space with my daughter as we begin again.

The thing I keep thinking about is how much writing requires beginning again. How much life requires beginning again. How much it requires stepping into the not-knowing and trusting that what happens will be better than anything I could try to orchestrate myself.

And so I offer this writing to you today because that is what my meditation practice asks me to do.

It says that when I have had an especially good meditation session — whatever good might mean — that I offer it. That I offer it to the everything and the nothingness that collide all day long inside of me and inside of you.

The best thing I can do right now is to offer these words to you and say: I don’t know what I can do besides offer every moment again and again, whether it is impressive or challenging or disappointing or just plain boring and regular.

I offer it to you.

I offer these very regular words from a person who feels like she is both worthwhile and less impressive than she wishes she were.

And I just want you to know that I think that’s where the ground of life brings us something.

I’m holding it in my hands today for you: the everythingness and the nothingness matter.

And we can offer it.

This replay of my conversation with covers a lot of ground.

→ We talk about manuscripts, hybrid publishing, following your creative instincts, spiritual wayfinding and, generally, staying open to the surprises that life can offer.

I loved this chance to check in with an author I worked with a few years ago and hear about how a choice to say “yes” to her book turned into opening the door to a life she couldn’t have anticipated.

Listen to this one on your morning commute, while washing the dishes or if you’re on the fence about a book you feel the pull to write but aren’t sure about the path to getting it published.

Amanda

P.S. When I ran a boutique publishing agency, there was a season I when I built a self-publishing team made up of my favorite people from my print/digital past. Together, we helped authors self-publish their work without it looking (or sounding or feeling) like the self-published work at the time (2015’s standards were iffy).

Tell us: What’s your take on traditional, hybrid and self-publishing these days. I’m going to use the comments section on this post to share about my ideas for my “spiritual resuscitation” book. Join me there?

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when i stopped serving from the silenced side of the church pews,
a bear began to ravage my dreams.
she was furious, i knew.she was lost, i knew this too.
in my dreams, i saw her: she was stretching onto her hind legs,
staring at the tops of the trees
and bellowing, roaring and accusing everything around her of stealing
her most precious treasure.

who
would
take
my
baby?

when out of breath, she collapsed to the floor,
nearly dead from exhaustion, it seemed,
and yet she walked on, her claws and paw pads sprawling tracks
in the dirt where she dragged her animal body.she stared at the dirt.

she lay in the dirt.
she looked for something,
anything,
anywhere,
to blame and hold to account.but, as i would learn in the months and years that followed,
there is no tonic for a mother whose darling has been snatched away.

the bear in my dreams kept showing up.
she was there when i tried to wash the dirty dishes in the sink
and in the moments when i was asked to perform impossible tasks
like getting out of bed and letting my heart pump blood.

the bear kept inviting me back onto the forest floor
to the place where my screams turned electric,
floating above my head, beyond the tall tree trunks,
to the place where my tears vaporized
and dark clouds shielded the sun from my eyes.

in the forest,
as i lay in the dirt,
i pressed my ear to the soft piles
of scattered, dried and torn leaves and needles.

i watched as the Family of Earth walked by my swollen eyes,
wondering and also knowing why
i was still flat, still dazed and always listening.
i am still looking for a heartbeat, i told them.

when i fell asleep among the trees
my face made a pillow from the ground,
where dirt and spittle spread mud across my cheeks like war paint.

it was here that i knew i would always be listening for the earth,
for the place where my baby's heartbeat is a steady, beating drum,
a place i wasn't able to give her on this side of the veil
but the earth knows, i tell myself,
the clouds and flower stems, the meadows where tall grasses chatter and sway,
where sun rays reach down to grow us all…

only the Earth and Her Holy Family know where my girl wanders on.

and if you ever find yourself scouring the empty places to find a precious babe,
even if that darling is yourself,
the only thing i will say is this:

walk as far as you can
for as long as you can
and when you've reached the end
of your tired legs and broken heart,
it's there that i will lie down
and meet you in the dirt.

Everything was mostly normal until about week 9 when I began bleeding.

For the next 9 weeks, I would be admitted to the ER room twice, go through countless scans and encounter the usual shrug from the doctors.

I kept working and trying to act like everything was fine …

When I knew something was very, very wrong but I didn’t know how to scream loudly enough to be taken seriously.

An MFM figured out what was wrong and told me to prepare to be hospitalized, as soon as the baby was viable. (You can see the most current placental abruption in this screenshot.)

I’ll never forget the day I saw this on the sonogram. Her little face? How is it possible? A voice whispered, “If you don’t give her everything you’ve got, you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

I began offloading my client work, while feeling nauseous, anxious and increasingly panicked inside. I was also talking to her daily about our life together.

I was experiencing an exhaustion I’ve never been able to describe in detail. I could barely walk up stairs. If I wasn’t working, I was laying in bed with my dogs.

Something told me to “Take a picture together” and I’m glad I did. The next few days would be a whirlwind…

In this room, I prepared for goodbye.

In the days that followed losing my girl, I began searching for anything to comfort me … I bought art and framed it. But something happened that I couldn’t have ever anticipated …

✵

I would go on walks and wonder about where my girl had gone. I had no spiritual home at the time, but plenty of tidy Christian answers that weren’t just pointless — they made everything worse. They wanted me to skip the grief of what I’d been through and — rejoice that my baby was in heaven?

Soon, the sound of animals began piercing my ear drums.

A bear began showing up in my dreams.

And I began studying her.

She never asked me to be glad.

She was a bear.

And I watched her saunter in a dark forest.

She fell again and again in the dirt, letting it fly into the air and sting her eyes, again and again.

I didn’t have any language for much of what I was feeling back then, but I understand it now as this:

At the deepest rupture, my most confounding moment of loss, the animal kingdom began an induction ceremony.

Mammal body to mammal body, I felt understood looking at photographs of bears. I felt, not necessarily calm, but a very certain steadiness when I read animals … like the mother orca in the national headlines who refused to let her dead calve’s body float to the bottom of the ocean.

Animal medicine met my animal body, and helped me hold that grief, and in a lot of ways, a truer me that had been waiting to scream to the surface my whole life.

For the next few years, animals would keep showing up. In precisely the right moment, without me even knowing what, for example, a water buffalo, represented in the animal kingdom.

The right animal, in the right moment, for the right pain.

I’ll never forget the moment Dr. Kahn said once my baby reached viability, I would be hospitalized.

By this point, I’d already been in and out of the ER a few times because of intermittent bleeding, and she was the first doctor to notice I had been experiencing a chronic placental abruption for weeks.

She told me I would need 24-hour supervision to reach full-term — and that I’d likely need to start designing a plan for spending the last 18 weeks of my pregnancy by myself in the labor and delivery department.

At a routine systems check a week later, the technician turned silent and walked out of the room without explanation.

As a first-time mom in her first pregnancy, I wasn’t familiar with why she might have gone quiet. A few minutes later, my doctor was telling me I had lost all my water due to P-PROM, and there was no path to my baby making it to full term, even if I were hospitalized.

I was quickly handed a series of impossible decisions to make, all of which I won’t go into today. My girl died on March 28, 2019, just a few days shy of viability.

***

At the time, I was 10+ years removed from evangelical Christian environments and six years or so into my meditation practice. I cringed when people tried to comfort me. No, it doesn’t help to know she’s in heaven with Jesus. No, I’m not really concerned about what kind of clothing she’s wearing in heaven.

I knew that Christian teachings on death and the afterlife had nothing to offer me as a grieving mother. But I also didn’t know where to turn next. I turned to tonglen practice, I turned to The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which would later inform many of the grief practices I still rely on today.

But what happened in the immediate aftermath of losing my baby, I couldn’t have predicted at all.

I began dreaming about animals.

I began feeling a certain twitch of attention whenever an animal’s voice was within reach.

Whale sounds translated differently.

There was a national story at the time about a mother orca who couldn’t let her dead calf sink to the bottom of the ocean — I somehow knew the message in the sound she was making as her friends helped her keep the calf’s body at the surface until she was ready to let go.

A dog bark was no longer just a bark. It had words that weren’t made of a human alphabet.

***

Not long after my baby died, I moved to a quiet cabin at 7,500 feet elevation in Pine, Colorado. I had no idea how much I was carrying into the forest.

In the four years I lived in the mountains, animals became my most consistent companions.

I began dreaming of bears, printing bear-adjacent artwork and framing it on my walls, and having imaginary conversations with bears, writing poetry to bears. Without realizing it, bears were arriving in my dreams, walking around my property and showing me how to grieve in my daily life.

The animals just kept showing up. The deer, the hummingbird, the water buffalo, the squirrel, the rabbit, the mole. In my dreams, in my reading, while I sat on my back deck and listened to the pine trees.

I think the gift of animals in this season was actually quite simple: animals weren’t asking me to be anything other than who I was. They didn’t ask me to believe in anything. They didn’t come expecting to be entertained.

They just wanted to come a little closer into my life.

Their presence alone was a certain kind of medicine.

For a grieving mother looking for any sense of ground, this daily practice was more helpful than I can say:

See a deer? There’s a deer. Hi, deer. I see you.

It was a very specific kind of inner grounding.

***

There isn’t anything magical about animal medicine. It doesn’t require any magical ceremony or a certain number of years as a dedicated meditator. Animals carry their medicine inside them, as themselves, inside their bodies.

Animals now are a sacred reminder to me of what happens when I’m connected to the wisdom of my own body. That I am not required to become a differently bodied Amanda in order to give something back.

What a gift.

Hi, Amanda. I see you. I’m glad you’re here.

***

This is the first in a series I’ll be sharing about my animal medicine work. In the meantime, you can keep reading in these posts:

When I was little, my mom implemented a no-talking rule when I climbed into the car from daycare. The reason, she explained, is that I talked so much, so quickly, and she just needed quiet in the car.

I swallowed the words as best I could. I tried not to whimper from the soft pain pushing out from behind my rib cage … like my lungs were two balloons being overfilled with helium. But I complied, every time, and cast my eyes down to the floorboard of the car when she’d correct me back into silence.

✵

For most of my life, I've paid attention to what makes words stick — and where. Because they don't only get stuck in the throat.

Often when I encounter a sense of writer’s block, it feels like a racetrack suddenly filled with spike strips to flatten my tires.

Sometimes words get stuck like a body slamming into a brick wall. This is especially common if I use words in the wrong context, or with the wrong emphasis and I feel the listener’s bodily jolt, noting their eyes searching for what I really meant to say.

This stuckness shows up on the page itself — whatever river a reader has been floating down in your writing suddenly kicks them off their seat and splashes water across their face.

Sometimes words get stuck because telling the truth is far too unknowable to survive.

I learned from a young age to pick my words quite carefully. I carried around a dictionary of phrases that either made our family calmer or more rattled. Sometimes, if I said the wrong words out loud, the walls of our home would start to shake like I imagine it feels to be in an earthquake.

Words have a certain tectonic power

It seems I’ve been editing my words alongside self-expression and feeling for much of my life.

Despite feeling stuck around words, it’s clear to me that I also knew how to use them like a hammock inside which I tried to sway people lovingly back to peace. In moments of friction, I felt myself searching, wanting to feel something beautiful when we were together. Words could relieve tension if they came out in the right order, at the right time, with the right impact and the right consideration.

There’s certainly a lot to glean from how my mind has chosen to work with the nature of the alphabet — letters coming together into words, words forming sentences, sentences forming paragraphs that eventually might become a love letter or an essay or a book or a poem.

What I have had to learn the hard way — and by hard I mean like an editorial surgeon, taking the curve of the letter A and stretching it as far as I can across the page, trying to see when it will finally wince at capacity and squeeze — what I have learned the hard way of playing with language is that language and the flesh of my body breathe from the same lungs.

It’s almost impossible for me to separate bone marrow from how words feel when they come out of my mouth.

When I speak, sometimes it feels as though I’ve coughed up an organ inside myself and handed it to you for safekeeping.

Imagine now that this is what it feels like all day long — inside a social situation or a briefing room, or when sitting down to write.

Sometimes I reach my hand into the bucket of my insides and I pull out particularly pregnant strings of words that read like poetry. What a treasure I have discovered! And sometimes my reaching hands me what I can only surmise is a leftover heartworm.

✵

My youth pastor once gave a sermon about how you’re not just a body. You’re also a mind and a soul, he said. It’s easily been 25 years since he offered that framing to us teenagers while we sat inside a converted Walmart car-repair garage. But the concept has been pushing at me lately in light of the work we do as writers — that we take for granted the framework where body is separate from soul is separate from mind.

Of course we don’t have any conclusive evidence that there is such a thing as a soul.

But I do have two femur bones.

And I trust, from countless dissections, that there is a brain protected by my skull.

But I think we take for granted that the soul is invisible, and that body and mind are inherently separate.

It’s not lost on me that I was just referencing the actual physical brain inside my skull. The Buddhist student in me also wants to offer right now that the mind may not be the brain at all, but rather something of the whole heart encapsulated inside a single person. At least that is how I have pieced things together.

How do we know mind, body and soul are separate? How do we know that one has the substance and the other is something else altogether?

I’ve been asking these kinds of questions inside a deeply formative framework (separateness) that I think was useful as a teenager — but over time it grew into a kind of inner splitness when I tried to understand how I actually moved through the world.

When I began my meditation practice in 2013, in a drafty basement in Colorado Springs, I was invited to sit with my breath. I was told I had unlimited invitations to return to the breath. That there was no way for me to fail at meditation. As I began this journey, something quite surprising happened: I started to observe the nature of my reactions in real time.

I began to recognize that there were warm voices that narrated my day, and there were accusatory voices that showed up in very inconsequential moments of imperfection. I remember one morning sleeping through an alarm — very uncharacteristic for me — and that runaway train accusatory voice was already blazing down the track at 100 miles an hour before I’d even put my feet on the floor.

That morning there was a shift: a brief, tiny nudge in my mind said, I wonder why that voice shows up for something as small as this?

I learned through meditation that the texture of my own mind, the substance of my own heart and my inner experience of the world, often jumped outside the normalized framework I’d been raised in inside evangelical Christianity.

There are certainly cases to be made that understanding the mind and the soul and the body as separate can be a useful teaching tool.

What I found is that we don’t experience them that way at all.

You are you in this very moment, and a million different collisions are happening between your soul and your body and your mind — and no one has actually mapped those with complete accuracy or empirical evidence.

Language and the flesh breathe from the same lungs

In the same way, I have come to challenge the idea that words are separate from my flesh.

I’ve come to challenge the notion that relating to them as separate is actually quite harmful to their mutual flourishing.

When I sit down to write, I sit down with my body, and I sit down with the words that are lodged and woven between flesh and bone and epidermis. That’s the picture — a swirling tornado of alphabet pieces coming together and making agreements inside my body about how they’d like to land on the page today.

Only when I invited my body to have a voice inside my writing practice did something relax a little. It would be irresponsible of me to say that everything about my writing improved and now I never struggle, never lose my sense of belonging or purpose.

But the more I sat down to write assuming I’m working with a friendly tool — that body and words are somehow the same — my relationship with writing began to change forever.

Instead of glossing past them, I started to work with the echoes of amnesic memories. I began playing with inspiration not as a sense of excitement that leaves me breathless, but as small hand pulling me down into deep quiet — not because I might reach writer’s enlightenment, but because my writing depends on me being open to the unusual.

And it turns out the best thing I can do for my writing is to playfully, lightly, hold the possibility that a chapter of my book is hanging out in my grubby pinky toe. When I offer that kind of room, it seems the rest of my body and mind begin to relax and enjoy themselves.

I began today’s piece wanting to tell you what happens when words have nowhere to go.

And I think the easiest answer is: we don’t actually know.

But we can observe and report on the aftermath of words getting stuck. (Hi, two blank days in 1000 Words of Summer.)

We do know how to step toward them and see what happens when we let them come through a different vessel.

We know how to play enough to let the words tell us when they don’t know where to go next.

I won’t go into the years of firsthand experience I have of giving my words to someone who had no capacity for receiving or responding to them. I won’t go into the years of firsthand experience as a child, when my words caught in my throat and slid back down to somewhere else in my body.

For today, I just want to share that it’s possible your words are trying to come out through a different back window of your writing practice.

And if you’re at all curious about what it means to let your body and your words share the same language, I hope you’ll keep reading my work here. Because the season we’re walking into right now is one of co-discovery.

What happens when your body speaks first

I want to co-discover what happens when your body has a voice on the page.

I want to introduce bodily attention to the moments where we all get stuck.

Because those moments of words-and-body togetherness are where I’ve found the deepest joy in my writing life — and that is what I want for you.

I want you to discover what happens when you let your body speak first.

I want you to report back what happens when your words finally have somewhere to go to be witnessed.

For many writers I know, being witnessed on the page is the closest they come to being fully known. I understand now that many autistic people find their most natural register in the written space, for many reasons. For me growing up, the page was like a peaceful ocean, where there were no social contracts I had to negotiate with another person — or miss completely, and then feel mortified by. The page wasn’t asking me for anything but to share a few words at a time. There is a certain powerful witnessing that happens when our words are no longer lodged in our body and are instead placed on the paper.

What I also want you to know is that there’s something to discover about your writing when you let it live in raw form and be heard by someone you trust.

Using your vocal cords and the presence of your body can create an entirely new container for your words to communicate something back to you.

I know this because I’ve tested it in many settings, and I think the truth of the last 13 months of my life is that when my words are not digested in safe spaces, something inside me starts to cave in on herself.

Words unexpressed fall back into safekeeping until they start to smell of rot. Putting them on the page is one form of setting them free. Giving them to another person is a wholly different opportunity for substance and transformation.

This is why I’ve begun offering co-writing sessions — because sometimes we need someone to practice alongside when we hit resistance on the page. These sessions are a way to step into whatever your writing practice looks like now and open a new door inside your own process of words-to-flesh-to-paper. That door stays open; come through it whenever you feel the pull.

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This month, I’m walking through someone else’s door. My friend runs a kindred offering called Write & Witness, and on June 15 I’ll be joining as a paid subscriber — bringing some of my own very raw, dropped from my body writing to a space I trust, because Sarah cultivates creative safety everywhere she goes. There’s something I’m sensing about my work these days, and I think I need more human witnesses than usual as I bring some of this writing into the world.

→ If you feel that same pull, come with me — you can join her gathering through this link.

The thing I most want you to leave today’s essay with is this: what has you stuck might not be obvious — but it also might not be invisible to everyone. Come discover if there’s someone who has the capacity to see you and hear your words with heart.

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After every live session, I share the replay and writing prompts with all paid subscribers — so even if you can’t join us live, you can still write along and join us in the comments to explore the month’s theme.

→ This session opened with a reflection on storytelling heritage.

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Read more

There are two ways to join us.

Option 1: Become an annual paid subscriber

Join The Co-Writing Studio as an annual paid subscriber if you want the ongoing Studio writing — deeper essays, prompts, reflections and resources for writers working with voice, creative resistance, spiritual writing practice and the inner life of making work that feels true.

Annual subscribers receive access to the paid archive and all future paid posts for the year, plus one complimentary ticket to an upcoming live Co-Writing Session.

Currently: $90/year.

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Option 2: Purchase a One-Time Ticket

Join us for the June 6 session only.

This is the simplest option if you want to experience the live writing room before becoming a paid subscriber — or if you already know this particular session is the one you want to attend.

The live Co-Writing Sessions are 90-minute gatherings with a short opening frame, quiet writing time, and the option to step into a private 5-minute breakout with me if you hit a place where your writing goes quiet, tangled or overly managed.

🎟️ June 6 | One-Time Ticket | $75

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If you’re wondering what happens during a Co-Writing Session, you can find all the details here:

CO-WRITING SESSION PAGE

What would writer’s block taste like if you could chop it up into a salad?

And what shape do words leave behind when they slip out of memory mid-sentence?

I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in what I’d like to call language-adjacent work.

I watch the page for the places writing gets stuck.

As a young editor, my job was just to clean it up and make it good and print it.

When I became a managing editor, the way I understood that stuckness began to change.

I started to see that telling a team of writers to go do independent research often wasn’t enough to make their articles better.

They were fine writers. What they needed was an editor who could find the point in an essay where the material grew flat — someone who could show them, and listen alongside them and ask: I wonder what this piece would be if it were wild and free?

After a couple of years working with authors on their manuscripts — and letting my small team get their books published — the questions around the block took a much more personal turn.

I began wondering what it would look like if words could flow through our inner organs.

What it would look like if an editor could read a writer’s x-ray and say, this is where you’re stuck.

I was no longer content to fix the writing and let it be fine.

I wanted to learn how to mend a person, so their voice could come through clearer onto the page in the first place.

I won’t pretend my career has unfolded blissfully, on organized timelines, by strategic design.

Much like Gandalf, I’ve learned that when in doubt, you follow your nose.

My nose has made me a curious creature these last 10 years or so. I kept writing, of course. I also got married. I trained as a meditation instructor in the Shambhala lineage — and right as I was finishing my courses, I felt the most curious blank feeling come into my body.

I couldn’t turn the training into something. At the time this made me anxious: I felt nervous about investing in something like meditation instruction without proving to my then-partner a real return on the family’s investment.

But the budding Buddhist in me trusted the resistance more than the pressure to turn a practice into a product. Chögyam Trungpa had a name for what I was refusing — spiritual materialism, the move that turns the sacred into one more thing to sell. My body knew to decline it before my mind had the words.

The editor I am today is also colored by three years of weekly Somatic Experiencing therapy — revisiting the flesh and blood of my own writing foundations. I come to writing with deep experience, and a deeper reverence for the unknowing that language always carries inside us.

It seems the work of time has been to help me let go of much of what traditional editing instills in you. I don’t fret about style guides or proper sentence structure. I do care about the reader’s experience. I care that what is written is true — and accessible.

Editing, to me, feels more like medicine.

It felt like medicine when two men getting their MBAs at Harvard showed me original research and asked, how do we publish this as a book? — and my first response was, it needs the voices of real people, not just data.

It felt like medicine when a bestselling author and his son set out to retell the Scrooge story, and chose to work with me because they were committed to being ecumenical in their reflections.

It felt like medicine when I helped a doctor’s wife write her coaching stories.

It felt like medicine when I read through ’s first draft of Tiger in a Lifeboat — a spiritual memoir circling her own deconstruction — because her story was telling so many other stories on the page at once.

It felt like medicine when a woman named Liz Anderson brought me a manuscript called The Thoughtful Proclaimer and told me her vision: helping lay people be a little more responsible in how they read Scripture before they preach.

In some small way, I became the kind of editor I’d always needed. I was reading between the lines of their aspirations, helping them find the voice stuck between the letters. I often come back to those questions — what is the color, what is the shape of the block — because the experience of being trapped is, I’ve found, nearly universal.

Sometimes you just need the light to come in and help you see how to step toward the next words, the next person — or even the next chapter of your life.

I’ve known for a long time that there’s a physical moment in which a writer most needs support inside the writing experience itself.

Something kind of like a spacial relationship I’ve been working to make real for a very long time. It’s something where the work of co-regulation enters the writing process in service of the writer’s lived experience.

I’ll never forget the first time I felt bodily co-regulation. It was with a woman named Helen Grigg who works in Boulder, Colorado. I went to her for work on my spinal fluid and neck vertebrae. She worked in typical modalities for a cranial-sacral massage.

But there’s one thing she did that felt like an editing moment on the page: she stood at the foot of the table, wrapped her hands around my feet and simply held them — steadily, calmly, in a firm embrace — until my whole attention flooded down into them.

As it did, the rest of my body’s muscles began to loosen.

I couldn’t tell you how. But I knew, in that moment, she was offering a counterbalance to something my feet had been trying to carry all on their own.

This Saturday’s Co-Writing Session is a kind of live group meets writing co-regulation.

At 10 a.m. CT on June 6, we’ll gather in a small group on Google Meet, and I’ll share a few thoughts about our storytelling heritage — something to consider about where voice and language and words live for you in this lifetime. Perhaps we’ll even dabble in ancestral reflections! You’re welcome to use your time responding to this prompt, or bring a writing project of choice.

Then we’ll write together for 90 minutes.

But rather than each of us tucking away to write behind a dark screen, when you get stuck — really, really stuck — I want you to raise your hand and talk to me about it.

My job in that moment is to listen for the nature of where and how and on what material you got stuck.

I might ask you to read a small portion of what you were writing when the stuckness set in.

We might even explore the somatic signals showing up while you feel it. (Muscle squeezing, shallow breath?)

The idea is to bring what’s stuck out of the darkness and into the light — and I’ll be there to hand you tools from my years as an editor, meditation instructor and a student of the human somatic experience.

Of course, I know what it takes to trust someone with what I’m asking you to trust me with. If you’re stuck on something practical, that is welcome in a 1:1 breakout space. If it feels emotional or personal, that’s welcome too.

If you have questions about what this space will look like, leave them on this post and I’ll get back to you when I can.

Learn more + grab ticket here

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If there’s one thing I can leave you with — after this long and winding exploration of the block, and the ever-evolving play between writer and editor and language — it’s this:

Writer’s block is often nothing more than a playful energy that wants to turn into something else.

Together, we’ll find out what it wants to become next — and what voice you’ll bring into the world once it’s free.

Leave a comment

Press play, and come wander with us.

Here are a few places below you might want to linger.

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What is a writing or creative container, anyway?

Sarah: A container is both literal — the desk, the paper, the textures of a room — and something more energetic and harder to name. It’s the boundaries of attunement. It’s what holds the space in which something can move.

Amanda: A container is what creates something in response to you. The problem isn’t containers — it’s that a lot of the writing containers we inherit were built with assumptions inside them. For neurodivergent writers especially, those assumptions can feel less like a door and more like a brick wall.

What have creative containers been like for you? Tell us in the comments.

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What happens when you find the right container?

Last June, during one of the hardest seasons of my life, I joined ’s 1000 Words of Summer. Here’s what I was publishing publicly at the time on my other publication, The Publishing Spectrum:

• Trust-based audiences: What trust feels like on Substack

• Writing Seasons (Start with Part 1 here)

• The 30/90 rule (for publication experiments)

Organized, useful, genuinely mine. And then, in response to the 1000 Words of Summer challenge, I wrote this by hand, in a journal sitting on my lap. Something else entirely other came through.

A chance to be witnessed

Sarah hosts a monthly workshop for paid readers of her Substack publication, For the Birds. This June, she’s offering something new — Write & Witness — and she’s planning to bring it back seasonally.

In her words: it’s not an open mic or designed to deliver live critiques. It’s an intimate space where you bring something you’ve written — a journal entry, a poem, something you can’t quite name yet — and you let it be alive in the room. Non-speakers are welcome; a designated reader can read on your behalf. The whole point of Write & Witness is to observe what happens after you’ve let your work live in a shared space — which, as this conversation keeps circling back to, is its own kind of alchemy.

Her May workshop details are here. June details coming soon at For the Birds.

And I decided — audaciously, maybe foolishly — to participate in ’s 1000 Words of Summer challenge.

I wrote in the margins of a whirlwind season.

Think: 15-minute spurts while my daughter played in the backyard. My notebook on my lap during nap time. Seven sentences and then Mama, snack snack.

What came out onto the page stopped me cold — there was a voice, a certain palpable imagery I didn’t know I still had.

My body ached with grief: Where has she been hiding?

I’m signed up to join Jami and the community again this year.1

But before I dive back in, I’ve been sitting with something that feels worth naming — because it has long-complicated my relationship with writing containers for most of my life.

As a late-diagnosed autistic woman and a longtime editor, I’ve found that most writing frameworks and challenges operate on the same assumptions as corporate productivity culture. They include absolute expectations, rigid structures. Prompts so derivative I can’t get past day two. My voice doesn’t just struggle inside these containers — it arrives dead on arrival.

Maybe you’ve felt this too: you step into a challenge hoping to find your voice, and instead you lose track of it entirely.

What I’ve learned is that voice needs permission before it needs a prompt. It needs room to start small or silly, to go sideways, to be completely unproductive. The moment we make voice responsible for something — for output, for a finished draft, for proving we’re serious writers — we’ve lost sight of something close to a universal truth:

If you have a voice, you’re called to speak. Not to perform. Not to produce. To speak.

And that’s what I want to explore today.

and I are going live at 1 p.m. CT for a conversation called Magical Containers: Writing That Works for Neurodivergent Creators. Sarah is a creative mentor and as we’ve been getting to know one another, this conversation naturally unfolded. You can learn more about Sarah’s community here. During our conversation, I’ll be pulling out the journal I wrote in and reading the raw writing that emerged last summer — the stuff that surprised me in a single room in my parents’ house. And Sarah and I will dig into what it actually looks like to build a container your voice can flourish inside, not just survive.

If you’re on this list, you’ll get an email from me when we go live. I hope to see you there.

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The story is inside you — you can almost squeeze it between fingers and the palm of your hand.

But when you sit down to write, something drops onto the page that isn’t quite it.

The letters are forming words, the words are making a sentence, but what is flowing between paragraphs is a version that is safer, smaller, respectable.

Or: you finally commit. To the practice, a platform, maybe even to the dream book contract. And then the thing that was so alive in you goes quickly, sometimes suddenly, very quiet.

Or: you’ve done this before. You’ve written the thing, published the thing and now someone (a publisher, a readership) wants more — and you can feel yourself wondering if creative writing magic has an expiration date. Can the well actually dry up permanently? What if you were a one-time event…

Or — and this one is harder to say — you sense that what you actually have to say is more powerful than what you’ve been writing. And something in you would rather stay small than find out what happens if you let it through.

This is how writers disappear before we ever sit down.

Becoming invisible to our own voices is rarely dramatic.

It shows up in quiet moments of erasure. In the edits we make before we begin. In the shape we hold our breath in.

The Co-Writing Studio is where we look at that together.

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What happens each month inside a Co-Writing Session

Once a month, we meet live for 90 minutes inside a live Co-Writing Session.

I open with a short frame — something to orient us, not to instruct us.

You write into this focused prompt or write toward your project of choice.

And if you hit something real — a place where you get stuck, go quiet or start to edit yourself in ways that feel familiar — you can step into a private 5-minute breakout with me during the Co-Writing Session itself.

This isn’t feedback after the fact. It’s editorial and creative advocacy inside the writing moment, while you’re still in it.

During these Co-Writing Sessions, I’m actively tracking what’s moving in the room. When something surfaces for you, we work with it then.

Why this newsletter is $60 a month

Most newsletters at this price point are charging you for posts.

This one is asking you to sign up for a monthly act of inner reflection and writing — all inside a once-monthly Co-Writing Session.

You’re not paying for access to my writing (though that comes with it). You’re paying to hold a seat in a live, small-group space where real inner and editorial work commingle — and where I show up each month to be present with your voice, not just your words.

$60 is the cost of keeping that space small enough to matter.

Subscribe now

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This is for you if…

• You feel like something in your voice is just out of reach

• You’re writing, but not fully grasping what you mean

• You want guidance while you’re inside your work — not a critique of it afterward

• You’ve done enough of your own excavation to know there’s another layer waiting to emerge

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About me

I’m Amanda. I’m a trained journalist and editor who has spent nearly 20 years doing high-stakes editorial work — the kind where getting the voice right actually matters.

I’ve ghost-edited books for executives, including a self-published book for the man responsible for marketing The Purpose Driven Life. I’ve worked with an emerging writer who went on to hybrid publish and receive a full scholarship to theological school. I’ve interviewed and edited renowned architects and interior designers for published books. I’ve served as a communications and data strategist for top Substack publications trying to understand their readerships more deeply.

The writers and thinkers I keep company with are people at thresholds — public intellectuals, contemplatives, founders, authors and emerging writers of substance — navigating what comes next in their work and not always able to say so publicly. I understand that landscape from the inside. If you’re in a place where you need immediate support on an editorial or publication moment, you can find time on my calendar here.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this work, I started to notice something precise:

The editorial problems writers bring me are almost never just about sentence structure or cleverness.

The place where the writing goes flat is almost always the place where something true got quietly set aside inside of the writer themselves.

The work of finding the writing is often indistinguishable from the work of finding the person. In my work with authors, I am watching for what door opens us up best: somatic signals (the body’s response to writing/voice), creative prompts (linking to voice, identity, inner friction) or meditation instruction (as a path to befriending the mind, not cranking out a product).

What I’ve built here is what happens when you stop separating those things — the craft from the contemplative, the editorial from the embodied. When you let them work together, something different becomes possible on the page.

Become a paid subscriber — $60/month

She came to a workshop I hosted last week.1 When she raised her hand and started telling the room about the memoir she was writing, her whole face changed.

There was a certain kind of light in her eyes and smile I recognized.

It’s the kind of creative spark where you just know you’re going to read her book one day.

And then she got quiet:

But I don’t really feel like publishing on Substack. What do we do with that?

I said: Trust it.

A wave of relief moved across her face.

I went live today because I don’t think she’s alone.

If you’re watching the replay above — there’s a question at the end I’d love you to answer in the comments.

Why are you here? Not just hanging out on Substack. As a writer: what brings you to the page even when you’re unsure?

Leave a comment

We’re starting with a concept that might feel uncomfortable: warriorship.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist master whose work has shaped my practice for years, writes about warriorship in his book Smile at Fear.

He says that the foundation of warriorship is facing ourselves — seeing our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts. That’s the basis of conquering fear.

But culturally, the word warrior can have some negative connotations.

So for today, I’d like to invite you to set aside the notion of what a warrior is and instead …

→ Grab a piece of paper. Grab a big marker. And I want you to write these letters out:

W-A-R-R-I-O-R.

And observe yourself.

There’s nothing magical about writing this word down.

The power in this prompt is in observing your reaction to me asking you to write it down in the first place.

I want to hear from you:

• What was your gut-level response to this prompt?

• What did you notice you wanted to do?

• Were you annoyed by me and thought about unsubscribing right away?

• Did you rush through the prompt and pick up a book, open your phone, walk to the kitchen?

• Did you put it off for a few days?

• Did you notice any sensations showing up in your lower stomach or inside your upper chest?

The reason I want to start our exploration of intuitive leadership around the word warrior — and bravely, brazenly writing it down in big letters — is because our relationship with strength is everything that our relationship with our leadership and public voice is built on.

And how we see strength inside ourselves influences how we speak and show up in our daily lives.

I’m opening this door for a good reason.

Because I can confidently say that there are tools you were given in your childhood that taught you what strength and warriorship are actually all about. And not all of them are serving you.

If you feel like sharing, reply to this email (or comment below) and tell me: What happened when you wrote that word down?

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The instructions read: Meet at the top of the parking garage at 5 p.m.

We’d never done something quite like this before.

I arrived a few minutes late to find nearly 200 peers lying prostrate, their bodies strewn zig-zag across parking spaces, while our college pastor spoke loudly into a microphone. He was saying something about revival, college freshmen, the Spirit.

Searching the crowd for a familiar face, I rushed over to my friend, felt my chest relax and quickly got on my knees to begin praying, too.

The rest of the meeting, I was unsettled, observant, unsure.

The pastor gave us instructions. We were here for a new school year, in search of freshmen.

I was 20 years old, entering my sophomore year at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, experiencing my first-ever “new year orientation” at the church where I’d been a college leader.

In between labored breathing, he spoke about how to befriend and invite freshmen to church, how to remember their vulnerabilities while we helped carry their boxes into the dorm rooms.

I noticed a pit forming in my stomach but quickly brushed it aside.

As the prayer vigil continued, I watched in my mind’s eye as the pastor transformed into a sort of religious Elmer Fudd — clad in worn-out camouflage gear and a floppy hat.

As we lined up for leader anointings, instead of handing out Bibles, it seemed he handed out something completely different.

Before I knew it, a long-range rifle was strapped to my back and I’d been told to get to work.

It’s duck hunting season, I thought. He wants me to hunt freshmen.

***

In the months that followed, the pressures in my second year of college piled on.

I tried not to vomit as I clicked through the online financial counseling for my student loans. Between a 17-hour coursework load, 15 hours of work-study, and living in the dorms as an “unofficial” RA, my days were packed.

Then, of course, I had church leadership commitments: about 13 hours of one-on-one meetings, group gatherings, and services each week.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that my grades began buckling.

So I practiced my script before going to talk to my “zone leader.”

The script where I said I loved the Lord and I promised I would still faithfully attend church services and teach 2-year-old Sunday School and attend Life Group every Tuesday and get out of bed every Friday for Early Morning Prayer and maintain four weekly discipleship meetings.

I promised to be faithful, but I needed to step back from four hours of leadership meetings — just to see if that could help me focus on my education a little more.

Little did I know: a firestorm would erupt.

My faith was questioned. My sanity doubted.

My wish to step down from leadership was reported as if I was defecting from a commune. Initially I was told “no,” that I should “reconsider my choice.”

Once I made my decision clear, friends stopped returning my calls.

If they saw me walking on campus, they’d cross to the other side of the street.

Layer by layer, the only community I had in town fell away.

I threw myself into my degree, into caring for my health. (I developed a heart murmur from the stress.) Slowly I began making friends in my journalism classes.

It seems the only thing the church left me with was a hunting rifle as a parting souvenir.

***

That was 2008. I’ve never belonged to an in-person community since.

I’m glad I deconstructed my faith before it was cool, before Christians began co-opting deconstruction into an evangelizing tool — even if I went in circles for years. I earnestly sought experience and knowledge inside the world’s major religions: the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, online Buddhist meditation communities.

Things look differently inside me today because of this searching.

But it’s been lonely.

When someone first suggested that my paid newsletter was a community, my body did its best interpretation of a kung fu fighter on high alert.

Hello, panic attacks.

Hello, essay insisting we are not a community.

Hello confident assertions, classic reframing — I long for camaraderie, so cute.

In truth, rapid-fire reframing (”It’s not that, it’s this which is safer”) is just a sign that I haven’t found my footing for difference, for the incongruence that always shows up between my inside feelings and the way the outside world always feels.

In the years that followed my first deconstruction “moment,” more layers of religious and spiritual reckoning emerged from within my home church. It’s the stuff that makes The Righteous Gemstones such amusing TV fodder. I’ve seen worse firsthand and watched it ruin lives — people I love lost entire livelihoods because they trusted a smooth-talking pastor.

The curious part about losing everything you used to trust is that it tends to strip you down to the bare essentials.

Losing my confidence in religion opened the door to find enduring trust inside myself. A place where Spirit, Purpose, the Divine can still find me but the world’s smooth-talkers can’t rattle me.

I can see now that every time I was let down, a belief was stripped of its falseness. I was being asked to turn inward, to seek a sense of inner sovereignty and figure out how to build a home inside myself.

It’s taken me nearly 20 years to learn that sovereignty isn’t the same thing as isolation — and that the people who meet you there, in that grounded place, they’re not carrying rifles either.

***

What I’m only beginning to understand is that care is something wholly other than what I thought it to be.

Years of practicing lovingkindness meditation — may you be safe, healthy, happy, live with ease — taught me that care means acknowledging that no one is exempt from this wish. It means confessing, every time I sit down to practice, that building a life of safety and flourishing is monumental work. That showing up as your whole self is rarely simple or straightforward.

And it means wishing these things anyway — in spite of not having proof that it’s possible.

Embracing the blind faith of building belonging, of discovering what lovingkindness actually asks of us.

In 2026, I’ll begin hosting “Mixed Messages in the Faith” meetings in cooperation with a local Episcopal Church. Mother Katherine and I have developed a friendship, and her diocese is open, affirming and willing to host this series despite my not even formally belonging to the church. This gives me confidence that, at a minimum, we’ll be uncovering something true for each person. I’ll be chronicling the experience right here in The Listening Field. You’re welcome to follow along there.

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