If you’re working on an essay and feel stuck or need feedback, I now offer client-based editing services for short nonfiction works of up to 6,000 words (because I’m an essayist with ADHD). I use a project-based approach to ensure I stay engaged with your writing and you don’t feel obligated to a longer relationship.
Choose from in-document feedback or a Zoom conversation. I’m a good fit if you have some writing experience and an established voice but need outside eyes and ideas. I will give clear written feedback and/or ask questions that get to the heart of your work. Learn more, book a call, tell your friends!
Shoutout to my longtime writing coach, Tara Skurtu, for teaching me so much, for honing my eye and bringing out skills which sat untapped for a long time. Wherever my life as a writer goes, an enormous amount is thanks to Tara.
***
In 2018 I was depressed. I didn’t know it yet, but I knew I couldn’t feel. Life was small and hopeless. In the summer, we visited Ken’s family on the east coast and went to Portland, Maine. I sat on a pink business card on a playground bench. It said Hannah B. Coaching. I had just enough energy to recognize an opening. Ok sure I guess.
For months, my weekly hour talking to Hannah was the only time I remembered play. I learned a lot about myself in our first sessions, through activities and assignments, things I continue to forget and remember again. The Ideal Day is still one of my favorite exercises, a globe-hopping sprint through the imagination which formed a seed of fundamental understanding in me. The work of my life is attempting to find harmony between my solitary self (The Hermit), my familial self (The Mother) and my worldly self (The Artist). In 2018 I lived almost exclusively as a mother. Once I had that recognition, I became capable of setting out in search of the other two. It’s not hyperbole to call Hannah a lifesaver.
When I went to a ketamine retreat last year, I had a visual & emotional experience of the way burdens get diffused across the universe. Expanding above me was a nurturing presence, able to hold all of me. Beyond it was another whose role was to hold my holder. It went on and on like this, an endless chain, each layer of energy available to the one before it, an assembly line of burden lifting until there was no weight left.
My human mom died when I was 23, and I’ve definitely been feeling her absence of late. Sometimes I long, here in my late 30s, to call up my mom with the express aim of receiving some love and hearing I’m not crazy. But nurture-as-energy is bigger than any of us, always available, what countless people call God or The Universe or My Guardian Angel.
Ideally, we also have lots of burden lifters in daily human lives. The people to whom we hand the heavy things so we don’t collapse under them. The difference between humans and the universe is that humans don’t always know or remember to take what we’ve been handed and turn to others to help us diffuse that weight until it’s nothing.
Maybe because my parents lived 3,000 miles from each other when I was a kid, maybe because parentified child, maybe because I’m an extrovert with insatiable curiosity about humans, I’ve been aware for a long time that I have a quilt of support spread out across the country (and sometimes world). I’ve worked to let others know I’m part of theirs. Things have threatened this over the years—depression, parenting, addiction—but the overarching theme is that I offer my friendship to many and I’m pretty good at asking for support. Networks like that are sometimes called community or mutual aid. Also friendship.
Hannah is a little bit of both—someone I pay to be a resource and guide for playful organization and life resuscitation, and also a friend who really sees me. She is unwaveringly supportive, makes me believe I’m capable of anything.
I’ve worked hard to find support and I’m also insanely lucky. When the carrying gets to be too much, I have a life coach, a therapist, friends close and far away to turn to. Sometimes I fuck up and foist it on the the wrong person, someone I know just can’t that day. That’s not a loving thing to do. I regroup, put my face in the sun, remember solitude, iced coffee and pop music. And writing. I don’t think it’s a coincidence many writers are lonely people who don’t believe in god. Activities are in the network of support, too. Art is nurture, writing is nurture.
Optional Assignment:
Make a list of 5 people who make you feel the most seen. The ones who remind you of parts of you that can be hard to remember, the ones who make you feel smart and capable and so very unique. Tell them.
If there are less than 5, list activities or art forms or colors that make you feel good, feel held, like you’re not alone. Go immerse yourself in one today.
obvi you're on my list!
I love this essay. Thanks.