There’s a well-used (and wonderfully wise) line: you need to live a story before you can tell it.
But then, there are times when you write a story and only start living the full truth of it once you see it on the page.
In my case, it was only once I wrote about being an Overcommitted Queen During Quarantine that I realized the depths of my exhaustion. I’d reached peak over-promising and needed to slowly come down from all those plans, intentions, and commitments.
We’re Being Called to Be More Creative Than Ever Before
Right now, every single activity (with the exception of watching TV, reading a book, or snuggling a cat) requires creativity and innovation.
Whether it’s figuring out how to make grocery shopping feel safe, managing the kids’ morning, or navigating a family’s moods and responses to anxiety, everything about domestic life that used to be second nature requires conscious engagement.
And patience. So. Much. Patience.
That means that the stuff that “should” require creativity and focused attention - like the next writing project - suddenly seems that much harder because your creative well has already been tapped (and probably overdrawn).
Then, when you think about the massive amount of bravery and imagination it takes to think about what your business or private practice is going to look like in the weeks and months to come…
Yep. Utterly and totally exhausted.
And utterly and totally committed to keeping it together and moving forward, somehow.
Sovereign of Your Realm. Sovereign of Your Attention.
In that post from a couple weeks ago I declared, “I become a little bit more Sovereign every time I say no, every time I limit the size of my realm.”
There’s more to Sovereignty (and quarantine sanity) than just saying no to invitations to meetings, however. It’s also about saying no to every website, post, and news headline that threatens to pull from your well of creativity, patience, and attention.
From Chapter 11 of The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic:
The quest for Sovereignty on our own terms asks us to craft alternative versions of the oppressive stories we’ve been taught to believe. Recognize the power you have—and often squander— when it comes to holding and focusing your own attention. Allow yourself to see how your attention has been conquered and occupied, either by modern marketers and politicians or by storytellers who speak for so-called tradition and place a singular claim on the truth. Mistress of your own attention, you become Sovereign in your own mind and in your own living story. You then gather the power to change the narrative so we treat all people and animals as they should be treated, here on a planet that truly can sustain all the life that grows upon it right now.
At some level - at many levels - you know all of this, of course. You’ve always been mistress of your own attention and you’ve always had to be conscious and discerning about your information diet.
Let this merely be reminder then - a timely, necessary reminder from one overcommitted queen to another - that you are more creative than you ever have been in your life, even if you don’t write a single word or conceive a single professional offer.
Be kind to yourself.
Be careful with your most intimate, essential resources: creativity, patience, and attention.
And thanks for sharing a bit of your precious attention with me.