Hey you.
You who writes.

You who keeps on writing.

You who pours out your hurt and your joy and your bliss and your ways of being and existing and understanding onto page and screen.

You who hits the submit button again and again. Even though you’ve papered an entire wall in rejection letters, because you know that somewhere there is a home for your words and if you keep trying you will find it.

You who writes in private, in secret, in the darkest back corner of your closet after everyone else has gone to sleep just so you can write the whole of you.

You who writes to follow the trail, to chart the course, to make your own map through the mystery.

You who writes the path to your own redemption, because you know that clawing your way back to forgiveness of self is the only way through.

You who writes in silence, in a whisper, in invisible ink.

You who writes with the risk of being dismissed, dishonored, ignored because the risks of not writing are even greater.

You who writes because nobody else is willing to tell the truth and the truth must be told.

You who writes to bring the perpetrator to justice.

You who writes to fuel the revolution, to feed the fire, to create the necessary unrest.

You who writes to bring the people into the streets.

You who writes so that your children and their children and their children will know.

You who writes until you are bleeding and then uses the words to staunch the flow.

You who writes to lift others even when you are writing through the thick haze of your own tears.

You who writes to shine a harsh and uncompromising light on what is unjust, on the wrong doing, on the abuse occuring in the shadows.

You who writes to unbreak your own heart.

To you who writes to weave the magical stories that lull the babies to sleep at night.

You who writes to make visible the ones who do the hard and lonely and dangerous work and who risk it all just to stay alive.

You who writes in gratitude and thanks that you are able to bring worlds to life on paper.

You who writes to give voice to the things nobody else is willing to say.

You who writes so that the invisible can be seen, the marginalized brought to center, the spotlight moved away from the stars and onto the ones in the background who make the show go on.

You who writes to make a thing real, to recreate the past, to return to yourself, to mark in ink the path of a new beginnings. 

You who writes the body. The heat and salt and sex of it.  The truth of blood and vein and the secrets the bones hold. The soft and wet and want. The body that winds and dances in the shadows. The body that heals trauma by naming and claiming her own pleasure.

You who writes to claim space, to name yourself, to create a new world you can stand to live in.

You who writes to own your history or accept your present or shift your future.

You who keeps writing love letters to the one long gone or the one not yet arrived or to fall in love with the miracle of your own being.

You who writes to make peace with the ghosts, to release the steam, as a substitute for the therapy you cannot afford.

You who writes because the world inside you is so magical and so real and even if nobody else believes you it must exist somehow, represented in concrete form.

You who writes because to not write would be like a form of death, and you’ve died too many times already.

You who writes to bring us all back to life.

You who writes to set the record straight, to hold the story, to alter the dominant narrative.

You who writes to bring hope to the hopeless and give voice the the voiceless, to share the stories of the ones nobody bothers to hear.

You who writes in the face of all that would silence you.

You who writes to craft beauty in the midst of devastation.

You who writes because the force of creation is what gets you out of bed each day.

You who writes to brighten hearts and lift spirits and to make the sun rise in the sky.

You who writes like the ocean, like waves crashing and crashing and crashing again against the shore of what is real.

You who writes the dance, the movement of clouds across the sky, the way the flowers blow in the breeze.

You who writes outside of the lines. Who ignores the rules. Who has no idea about grammar or punctuation or the correct way to spell things, but who writes anyway.

You who writes in an illegible scrawl on purpose to keep the stories safe from eyes unable to see the the beauty of your truth.

You who writes words that rise like smoke and fall like ashes, still alive from the fire.

You who writes to take the swirl of chaos and confusion and, waving pen like magic wand, makes the spinning stop and the truth rise to the surface, clear and true, like a fortune teller conjuring the future from her crystal ball.

You who writes only the necessary, who casts multitudes from scarcity, who takes the story of the entire universe and reduces it to the exact few words that say everything that has ever needed to be said.

You who writes even though they told you that you could not. That should should not. Who writes over the red pen marks and bad grades from teachers who thought writing had to follow the textbook.

You who writes the things that push people up against their own limitations, their prejudice, their hard edged bias, who forces us to see the things we would rather ignore. You who are willing to endure the discomfort of pushback in order to help us all grow.

You who writes the edges and pushes the boundaries and then calls the words back into the center.

You who writes the trauma. Writes the pain. Writes the ugly words that we don’t want to read but can’t turn away from, not because you want to, necessarily, but because you know we all we need to stay present with what is real.

You who writes the worst of the hurricanes and tornadoes of reality and then keeps writing all the way into the eye of the storm where everything is peaceful and beautiful and true.

You who writes the imaginary, the fantasy, the fiction, and in the writing you conjure a world that is deeply real and alive. 

To writes who writes with irrepressible joy bubbling up through your cells, giddy with the knowledge that only you could write this particular story.

You who writes in service to the cause, to the greater good.

You who writes the birth, the death, the honest everyday mundanities of our humanity. The messy and the boring and the deeply human.

You who writes to honor who has come before, to uplift the wisdom of your ancestors and the truth of those who walked the lands long before we were here.

You who writes in the stolen moments, on the grocery store receipts, who scribbles poems on the inside curve of your elbow, inking skin with novels that wash away in the shower but that mark you forever.

You who writes to create a truth that is more true than reality that you are living. 

You who writes under a name not your own in order to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

You who writes to understand what you already know and to learn what you need to understand and embrace the unknowing of all that exists beyond comprehension.  

You who writes to remember the details your brain will not hold.

You who writes your way into your own wide open life.

You who writes. Period.

To heal the world. To right the wrongs.  To save a life. 

Because you couldn’t stop, even if you tried.

It is a brave and beautiful thing to create stories in the face of all that would stop you.

You do that. And it is everything.

The post For the ones who write appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Listen to the audio reading:

Don’t think too much. As a matter of fact, don’t think too much at all. This is not one of those exercises that requires much forethought or preparation. You can’t back your way into this one, all neat and tidy buttoned up.

There’s no clean way to do this. Not this time.

This is one you’ve got to blast your way through – close your eyes and jump, light the match and burn on the way down, get pummeled by the waves, upside down and spitting water, freight train your way all your way through to the other side.

And by all those overused, layered metaphors what I really mean is this:

You’ve got to fucking write.

Not think.

Just write.

Get a sheet of blank paper.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one page.

Fill that page. Pour it out. Do not edit or reduce or backtrack. Do not worry about being succinct or understood. Just write. Just writeandwriteandwriteandwriteandfuckingwrite.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one paragraph.

Make this single paragraph sing with the hope of you, with the want of you, with the very blood and bones and guts of you. Select the lines that speak your heart. Your sex. Your sacred. Spill yourself into this paragraph as if lives depend on it. Because your lives – every last one? They do.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one line.

Choose carefully the words that define you. Choose them with exquisite care. Just one line that is the truth of you and nothing but the truth of you in this living and breathing and beating moment.

One line. Only one line.

Do you have it?

Good.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Get a new page.

Write the truth of yourself. As you know it. Right now. In this exact moment and only this moment.

Limit yourself to one word.

One pounding, pulsing, bleeding word. One word that flies or explodes or burns it all down. One words that is quiet whisper or the living manifestation of insistent howl of your bones. One word that glows white hot or grounds you into the dark blue-black of the deepest night.

One word.

Just one.

Does that scare you? Good – it should. This isn’t child’s play here.

Now scratch it out. Marker it up. Cut it. Burn it. Obliterate it.

Gone.

Are you shaking yet? Is your heart pounding? Do you feel what we are doing here?

We’re not done yet.

Now – now that that is done. Close your eyes. Take the deepest breath you could possibly take. Fill your lungs with all those words and all those truth and all that emptiness and all that fullness and the love-loss-ache-bliss of all that carried story.

Now empty your lungs. All the way out. As your breath goes, watch all those words go too. Watch them float away on the air around you. Watch them turn to smoke and get caught in the breeze and dissipate, just like that.

Feel how damn good empty can feel when you choose it.

Now get a new page. A blank page. Purest white and completely pristine.

This is all yours. This page. It doesn’t contain any of the shit they told you was true. It doesn’t contain any of the shit YOU told you was true. Right now, it contains the only truth there is.

This story is always yours for the telling.

This has always been yours. You can expand to fill it all or take up the smallest corner. You can write in invisible ink. You can tell your story in red wine stains and spilled ink and bite marks. You can only write in pencil so it can always be erased. You can write in layers, and turn the page and write sideways. You can spin spiral and make your words dance.

You can ink it on the surface of your skin or x-ray vision the story onto the blank canvas of your bones. You can write a novel and then let the whole thing dissolve in the waves. You can write the truth and bury it in the ground, throw it in the fire, fold it into paper airplanes and watch it fly, roll it into a note in a bottle and toss it in the ocean and let it find its own way home.

Or, you share it with the whole fucking world.

You can care and not care and care-not-care all at once.

But you get to write. And you get to choose the story you tell.

And there’s no freedom bigger or bolder or braver than that.

The post get writing: write the truth of yourself appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I was in a space that held both deep doubt and fierce faith. It was down to the wire, again, and I finally decided to show up for myself.  The words came pouring out of me in a wild rush, and I sent it because I had a a deep need to not feel alone in this.  I KNEW I couldn’t be alone in this.

I was right. When I woke the next morning over 20 messages were waiting in my inbox- and over the next few days the emails continued to come. Deep emails, soul-revealing emails, brave and bold messages of truth that cracked me wide open. In all my years of writing online and sending posts to my subscribers, I have never received a response like this.

When something I write elicits that much feedback, I know I’m on to something. I know that I’ve somehow touched a collective experience – something universal within the creative journey. And this is always my indicator that there is more to write, more to create, more work to do.  And so – I am sharing that email here, and I am excited to continue this discussion.

Hello Dearest,

I’m writing you this from my newly found co-working space. I’ve been a self-employed and fully self-supported single mama for a year and a quarter now, working from my dining room table and haunting local coffee shops for more hours than the baristas would likely prefer.

What a hell of a ride it has been. I made it this far – which I know is far more than many. Truth be told though, It’s been down to the wire more times than I want to admit.

Down to the wire like deadlines looming and people waiting and non-sufficient funds charges from the bank and steadily increasing credit card debt. Down to the wire like the mad rush from school to cheer practice and hockey tournaments and take out pizza for dinner.

I’ve vacillated between mad hustle, and hard core run and hide. Bounced between fierce determination and even stronger resistance. I’ve been living on and in purpose and doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing, and also lived fully inside of the ‘holy-fuck-i’m-running-out-of-money-i-need-to-make-a-new-thing-now-and-pray-they-want-to-buy-it’.

Most of the time I feel like it’s all riding on a wing and a prayer.

Yes – I’m an artist – a multi-passionate creative, a writer and a photographer and a storyteller. But I never wanted to be a walking cliche. Yet here I am, feeling like another starving artist.

It’s not that I dislike the business end of things. Truth be told (and much to my surprise) I love business and marketing. I geek out on it. Ask me to help someone else and I light up. I believe in the magic that happens when we take our passions and offer them to the world in a way that fully supports our lives and the people we love. When it is for someone else, it feels like a scared sort of service.

But when I’m doing it for me – the merging of my own art with the necessity of commerce has been fucking messy. And the more anxiety I feel about making it work – the less I actually create. The requirement that the things I make must make money often shuts down the well of words that I thought would never fail me.

I’ve surrounded myself with walls of my own making – walls that separate me from the work and the gifts which are meant to fuel and sustain me.

I’ve been making it for a year, on the power of words alone. Correction – *almost* making it.

Almost, but not quite.

Though there is always more to know, I have the knowledge and the wisdom to do this. I’ve logged enough years in small business ownership and education, digital and content marketing and automation, and had the opportunity to work with and learn from some seriously incredibly people. I know what I should be doing most of the time, and when I don’t I’ve got a tribe of experts surrounding me that I can call on.

I’ve got angels upon angels (you know who you are) who come through with both love and concrete help and support, over and over again. I’ve got a community of brave and wise and deeply intuitive souls who trust me to guide them into the world of words and story. I’ve got all of you, honoring me by granting me precious space in your inbox and in your day. For all of this I am truly and eternally grateful.

In the end, this isn’t a battle to master online marketing, or sales emails or content creation or social media platforms. In the end, this is a journey – as are all journeys, really – deep into myself.

This is about coming face to face with all of my fears and all of my resistance. All of my issues of worthiness and visibility. All of my blocks to money and my inability – thus far – to step fully into the vastness of what could be. My hesitation to not just step onto the stage but to stay there, and not run back into my safe little introvert hermitude as soon as the spotlight shines too brightly.

And so here I am once more. Wedged between the proverbial rock and that terribly uncomfortable hard space. Knowing that this is, as it always is, a dilemma of my own making.

And here I am, committed to doing things differently. To invest financially (even when that investment stretches me far out of my own comfort zone) in the support and expertise that I needed to succeed and in a dedicated space to work from. To stare down the demons and this massive to-do list, and to push through the blocks that have kept me from meaningful creation.

No mistake – this is my week of reckoning. At the end of it must lie a solid amount of work done, content and funnels created with sustainable income potential solidly in place.

Today I arrived at my new co-working ‘office’, supplies in hand, quad almond milk latte and freshly blended green smoothie at the ready, intentions clear. Ready to work. I had, as my own teenager daughter suggested – a real no bullshit talk with myself the night before.

I had laid out the work to be done and exactly what was on the line. I had made a tenuous sort of peace and a reluctant surrender to the fact that another corporate job might really be in the cards in upcoming weeks and months. And, with the peace and surrender present and fully felt – I decided I wasn’t going down without one hell of a fight. I set some fierce intentions and committed fully to the path ahead.

And yet this morning I sat there at my new office, and I did nothing meaningful, resistance gripping me so fiercely that I felt my brain begin it’s familiar path of distraction, skittering from one disjointed thread to the next – like the countless open tabs on my web browser.

For an hour and a half I allowed myself to slip into the patterns of distraction and fear that had landed me in exactly this place. And the voices in my head began speaking loudly. And I started listening.

I’m no good at this.
I can’t focus.
I’m not cut out for business.
I lack the drive and the motivation.
There has GOT to be something wrong with my brain.
What am I so damn afraid of?
I’m a fraud. Soon I’ll have to get a job and they’ll all know it.
WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH ME?

And then, I took a breath. And a drink of water. And I decided that it was time – past time – to do something differently. And I put on my headphones and I found a good playlist. I closed all those open tabs and I reminded myself of why I was there and what needed to be done.

And then…well then I fucking did it.

I got almost everything on my list done, and then when the co-working space closed I drove home, picked up the dog and headed to my friend’s house for our weekly evening co-working date to began again. I didn’t stop till I was done. Done with every last thing I had set out to do that day.

I still don’t know if it will be enough, or if it will work. Maybe I’ll have to get a job. Maybe I won’t. But I’m reminding myself right now that if I’m the one who got me to this place, I’m the one who can get me out. And it all comes down to sitting down, silencing the demons and doing the work.

It comes down to believing in the art. Creating. Dancing with the muse, welcoming her home to play. Breathing into the expansiveness right in front of my face.

It comes down to making the art, dammit.

Wherever you find yourself tonight, and whatever demons are chasing you, whatever you’ve gotten yourself into and whatever resistance has you frozen, I get you. I feel you. And I’m here to remind you that you don’t have to stay there. That no, it won’t be easy – but that moment by moment and day by day, you can move yourself out of where you are, and at least one tiny step closer to where you want to be.

Hell. If I can do it, anyone can.

xo.

J.

PS: Are you in an epic stare down with demons or resistance? Are the negative voices speaking loudly and freezing you in place? Are you ready to get fierce with intention? Are you here to create? Reply and tell me all about it – after all, for all that the journey is solitary, we’re in this together. Let’s walk this one hand in hand. All of your emails mean so much to me. I welcome you to continue this conversation on resistance and the voices that try to keep us small. On struggles and blocks around money and income and art.  On the fears and the hold back.  Let’s walk this path together.

P.P. S. Within the next few weeks I am planning to create an online conversation where we can all get together via Zoom to continue this conversation in real time. Make sure you subscribe to my email list so I can send you a link to join our tribe live on the call.

The post Creative Resistance: What I’ve learned in the last year. appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

The inhibited artists.

Those who only dance in the dark and secret corners when nobody is watching.

You’ve got canvas and paint stacked in the closet and an entire novel bursting at the seams of your soul. You burn with the need to make things, but still – somehow do not.

Your doubt speaks loud and clear,  but not loud enough to drown out the insistent call of your muse.

You’ve something to say but the power of that message makes you want to shrink and hide.

What could happen if you unleashed it all? What would change? What would you lose.

What would they say? Who would you be?

So you don’t. And you hide. And you avoid. You get caught in the loop of perpetual busyness and debilitating self-doubt and priorities that put your call to create near the bottom of the pile.

You ignore the calling. You negate the gift. You aim for perfect and fall short and you speak unkind words directed only at yourself.

You try to content yourself with everything but that terrifying thing that you are meant to do.

That thing that is your purpose. Your passion. Your art.

Enough.

Enough already.

You are here to create.   And it is time to show up.

***

Show up for yourself.

Show up as yourself.

Show up on your own time. In your own way.

Show up with your wild broken open heart.

With your tear stained face.

Show up with ink on your hands and paint on your clothes.

Show up terrified and full of doubt that this will never work.

With all your hopes and every last thing you can no longer believe in.

Show up to announce your letting go.

Show up with whatever scraps you have left.

Show up full force, guns blazing.

Show up ready to burn that shit down.

Show up heart red and pulsing, ready to rebuild.

Show up to break the chains, to smash the cage. To say once and for all, I am done with restraint.

Show up to create.

Show up with your paint and your canvas. Show up with your words of honey and wrecking ball and sunflowers and broken things.

Show up with your hips slow spin.

With your wild and crazy and impossible dreams.

Show up to map the wilderness

Show up to get eternally lost and found deep inside the empty that comes when you spill it all.

Show up naked.

Open your arms. Let your voice ring clear.

Tell them here I am. All that I am. Tell them that you won’t play small for one more day. Tell them you’re here for a reason.

Tell them the resistance is over. The walls have fallen. The people are dancing in the streets.

Show up and change their minds.

Show up and change your own damn mind.

Just show up.

Everything changes when you do.

{an invitation}

Are you ready to blast through the resistance, slide around the excuses and really get writing?

Join me for a FREE 10 Day Challenge designed to help you create a sustainable practice dedicated to the ACT and the ART of writing. 

10 days.
10 practices.
FREE YOUR STORY

FREE YOUR STORY
Completely complimentary - my gift to fuel your writing revolution. 

10 days. 10 practices. Get writing. 

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GET WRITING!

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The post you are here to create {an invitation} appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art”.

Bella looked at my quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world.

“Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real”

And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student.

Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be.

~~~~~~

{art is always real. all of it.  even the stuff you don’t understand.  even the stuff you don’t like.  even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend}

that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder?    still art.

the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critqued to death?  it’s art.

the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world?  definitely art.

the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows?  art. art. art.

the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light.

the dress you want to sew. the song you want to sing.

the clay you’ve not yet molded.

everything you have made

or will one day make

{it’s all real, every last bit.   because there is no such thing as art that is not real. bella said so}

The post art is always real appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.

Tossing and turning in bed at night.  I’m keeping her awake again, I know.  She always sleeps easy, slips into dreamland with the ease of someone who has finished her days work and is satisfied by it.

In the middle of a sentence sometimes, her breathing changes and I know she’s almost gone.  Just like that.

Not me.  The dark and stillness makes my brain come alive.  It is then – when all the activity has finally ceased and the house settles into its quiet nighttime rhythm – that the artist inside finally wakes up.

~~~

Are you having trouble falling asleep baby?

I can’t sleep yet, I’m writing in my head.

You need to stop that and rest. You’re exhausted.

I can’t stop the writing.  I can’t.  It just is.

~~~

Sometimes I envy it, that letting it all go accessible to those not possessed by the ceaseless drive to create.  But then I wonder, would I really want that?

Yes, my brain and heart have an inconvenient tendency to spin in endless loops at 2am, stringing words together into something beautiful, imagining an image not yet created, conceiving of some incredible community or action or change.  But those middle of the night loops are connected in some fundamental way to the depths of my spirit, to who I am as a person and to why I am here on this earth.

It is those moments, curled up in the chair in the corner, scribbling lines upon lines in my journal by the light of the moon, that I am the most fully alive.  And when that happens, I feel sad for all the people who just sleep.

~~~

Where are you going?

It’s okay.  Go back to sleep.  I have to write.

The post sleepless appeared first on Jeanette LeBlanc.