Shrieking out loud

On hypervigilance, creativity, and working in one's natural voice

Heads up: this letter discusses some aspects of the trauma response, as well as the presence of childhood trauma. Plus also there are snakes, creatures I personally find disturbing (though I know that’s unfair).

I’ve been sending a small scrap of writing—a few sentences or a page—to my friend every week, a helpful deadline that is gently re-training me to treat sharing my work as a casual affair. This safe, low-stakes container is disrupting a pattern I’ve been in: working extensively on a manuscript in private. I don’t think this is all bad—as George Saunders sometimes talks about, like in this Substack post, the conversations we have with ourselves while drafting are often richer and more interesting than the ones that happen we share works-in-progress with a writing workshop classroom. But when one has spent the majority of a lifetime believing that expressing deeply felt ideas and speaking experience out loud is unwelcome or unsafe, it can be tricky to distinguish between productive solitude and ingrained defensiveness.

One of the pages I sent my friend described this hypervigilant response to imaginary threats as it has played out (comically) in my backyard. About two years ago, I bought a house with my partner in a small town, which has provided shocking newfound stability and also riled up all kinds of inner turmoil. After living for a spell in San Diego, land of rattlesnakes buzzing dangerously in the bushes or smeared gold and bloody on the road, and after every shitty or decent rental that have always only held me temporarily (always on the cusp of dissolving), here I am shrieking at the garter snakes in the backyard of my new more permanent home like I’m in real danger.

There are two kinds of snakes, one with a rust-colored ribbon and another striped mossy pond scum green, and they won’t quit showing up jarring and shiny in the straw over the garden bed, curled up alongside the black plastic potted plants, wiggling too slowly out of the way by the compost heap like a slithering middle finger. They pop out like the pseudo-peril that’s jumped out of me when we moved in. Some latent autoimmune-ish symptoms and anxiety flared anew, my fingers swollen and tender with hives, my heart racing in the middle of the night. Somewhere in my body real peril is stored and now it’s projected onto objects and situations which pose the threat of similarity—having a home of my own, being an adult. It pounces out of storage and all over the garden dense with harmless garter snakes. I’m disturbed by their serpentine movement, how they lurk/live in the cracks, their linear form breaking into waves, either quicksilver speed or stubborn presence inside the perimeter of what isn’t really mine but almost, this backyard I am trying to turn into a garden.

When I shriek, I embarrass myself in front of the stoic, enigmatic neighbor we call Bullfrog, shirtless on his back porch and reading the newspaper. This man has never spoken a word to us though he’s had ample opportunity to hear me scream on the other side of the wooden fence. He mows his meticulous lawn and trims evergreen trees by himself. He stands on top of his roof blowing off debris. There’s a loud battery-powered hum and then he relaxes quietly down below. I think of a slogan I’ve heard in Al-Anon rooms about keeping your side of the street clean—focusing on your own mess, not getting resentful about or involved with other people’s situations. I wonder if Bullfrog is a Twelve Stepper or if he is mainly socialized in male isolationism. He keeps his peace and to himself. My side is not clean. My partially disassembled lawn isn’t Gaia’s Garden, isn’t a permaculture instruction manual. Our fence hides the mess of process except for small gaps between its slats. The piles of sod are hidden but my shrieks are not.

So many lurking soundless memories I’ve practiced tucking away and then my defenses gave out when we moved in. What’s up with that timing, being on such high alert and falling apart? My first theory was that I finally could fall apart now that there’s this ground under me—finally there was space to be unwell. But that interpretation gave way to another kind of significance. Each threshold of adulthood I’ve crossed has sent me spinning off into private disaster. I spent a lot of early adolescence not wanting to be alive, an era of despair heralded by armpit hair and menstrual pads. Exposed in my sexuality and pending adulthood to my family and now there is the symbol of homeownership. I’m implicated as belonging in this world. Childhood frozen in my body and when circumstances shift, that ice cuts back. Life is not forever lived as Peter Pan. My body, my house, the danger of adults and adulthood. These threats live inside of me. I have a place here now. I’ve joined those ranks.

“Boy in Flower Garden” / Unidentified artist / 1920-1930’s / Smithsonian collection

This is the kind of stuff I’ve been writing about. More recently I’ve also been thinking a lot about hypervigilance and the nervous system in regards to the writing process. How do those some nervous tendencies shape the ways that I shape my creative work? The ways that I share it—or don’t share it, as the case may be?

There are so many complicated inner machinations that aim to protect me from the risks of putting myself and imperfect work out there. It is vulnerable to share, vulnerable to experience and expose my messy thought process that spreads out through big projects. Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to get it under control, and just keeps growing more wild and tangled. In my more doubtful moments, I am afraid that I am in too deep, and just digging myself deeper. I am afraid of being seen in that messiness.

One such defensive reflex that aims to protect this vulnerability pressures me to be something other than who I really am. It plays into a tendency to overthink and overedit what I’m writing. Who I really am is a messy writer. My ideas spread out in different directions at the levels of paragraphs and pages and entire manuscripts. It is a lot of pressure to try to hold things together in an unnatural way. I am realizing the extent to which operating as though that’s required of me is both a fearful nervous system response in and of itself, and something that further prompts it: feeling like I can’t be who I am puts me on guard. It reminds me of situations where silencing my voice felt like the safest (or only) option. Experienced in the present, this paradigm keeps me quiet, and it also confuses me as to what I really mean to say. The innate weirdness and wildness of my writing style will always be there, but operating under the unhelpfully protective banner of Don’t say it out loud, don’t say what you really mean complicates things with another layer of confusion. It makes it hard to recognize what feels true for me at an embodied level. What if what I really mean is messy, and there’s no straightening it out, getting everything in order? What are the inner conditions of possibility for expressing myself in the way it wants to come out—for feeling safe doing so?

(Also, at another level, the secretarial (or administrative) work that is required of pitching and publishing is extremely boring and challenging for me, and parts of me do a really great job at protecting me from that. I’m sure this mundane aversion has something to do with those more deep-seated fears.)

There is so much I want to say about all of this, but I promised myself I wouldn’t spend too long writing this newsletter and my time will be up soon. (I’m also distracted by Bullfrog’s well-timed leaf-blowing.) So, just a few more thoughts….

One thing that feels top of mind here is about where school and even coaching can intersect with—if not actually play into—these defensive reflexes. As much as I’ve gotten out of writing classes—which have truly opened up worlds of possibility for me—I’ve always felt like the pressure cooker of academia is a poor match for the emotional tenderness that often accompanies difficult writing projects. After I graduated with my MFA from UCSD, I knew I wanted to work with people in a way that merged that emotional thread with the craft skills and frameworks that I’d found in school, and which have been so enabling for me personally. It motivated me to start a creative coaching practice, which I’m currently re-visioning/re-configuring. (More thoughts on that in last month’s letter.) In doing so, I’ve felt curious about the limits (and maybe possibilities) of coaching when it comes to making it feel safe for a nervous system to participate fully in a creative process.

What I’ve personally found is that a lot of that work happens in areas besides a direct engagement with the creative project/practice. Emotional injuries have a downstream effect on creative work, and therapy has helped me safely travel to their source. For all the habit formation stuff I’ve tried to do around writing and publishing, I can see now how seemingly unrelated emotional wounds have presented the greatest obstacles in taking messy action towards those goals. (I’m sharing a few mental health resources below.) At the same time, I also know that writing itself has played a huge role in the ongoing work of healing these injuries; it has also allowed me to engage in a conversation with myself I don’t think I could have otherwise found. This dialogue has taken the form of low-stakes freewriting and journaling, but I’ve also found it through creative projects whose formal challenges have pushed me to grow in my capacity to render my experience to others, too.

I am confused and intrigued by these kinds of overlaps and (dis)junctures between writing and healing, like how creating work to share can be a portal for self-inquiry and collective repair, and/or generate pressure that gets in the way of that. The subtext is that I’m considering going back to school to become a therapist. (Yikes, another Masters program…) I have so many questions about this idea. A big one is about if and how I could do that while staying firmly rooted in a role/identity as a creative person (and a helper of other such multi-passionate and differently-wired creatives). I want to have it all and I want us all to have it all—to be able to safely access our creativity, and also to have access to affordable and relevant mental healthcare. I want us to get the care we need to feel and be safe communicating with ourselves and the world, and to have meaningful, fulfilling opportunities to do so.

Only the coming months and years will tell how I end up working with these interconnected desires, but here’s one thing I feel for sure at the heart of this: when we tap into our creativity, we exercise the same generative reflex that could make a world where all these things are possible, limitless and without barriers.

Yours,
Siloh

Resources

Here are a couple resources that have really helped me understand my own nervous system in general and also understand some of the defensiveness I experience in my writing:

Internal Family Systems (IFS) — I feel a little like I’ve drunk some Kool-Aid whenever I whip out the name Internal Family Systems or the acronym IFS but here goes. No framework/system will work for everyone, but for me it has been enormously helpful. (It has also taken me a while to get past the embarrassment factor that comes along with it.) My therapist uses this model, and I’ve learned more about it in the book No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz and on the IFS Institute website. In terms of how I put this into practice in my writing is that if I’m writing about something and start feeling anxious on a visceral or intellectual level, I turn my attention to that sensation and start writing into a conversation with whatever part(s) of myself feel unsafe with what I’m doing. Even though it can feel like a divergence, I am beginning to feel that slowly and gently working with myself in this way is freeing me up in ways that will be, in the long term, more impactful and “productive.”

Shaking — Also potentially really goofy and embarrassing, but it turns out that just shaking your body around can be a deeply grounding of a broader trauma treatment plan. If you search “shaking exercise” on YouTube, you will find some funny and possibly helpful short videos to shake along to. It has been literally a decade since I read Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger, but his work pops up here, too. (If you’re looking for more direct support in this area, my friend and herbalist Kelly McCarthy offers somatic support her in her practice.)

Additional resources — Here is a great list of trauma resources compiled by Seattle-based therapist Canh Tran. (I’m honestly super grateful to have found this list, and will be spending more time with it myself.)

If you’re experiencing acute distress or in a crisis, there are some immediate channels for accessing support in the U.S. You can dial 988 for crisis support (more here) or text the crisis text line.

Thank you, thank you

In last month’s letter, I included a short survey about what forms of creative support you find most helpful and accessible. Surveys are tough-ass pills to swallow, and I’m incredibly grateful for (and touch by) everyone who filled it out. Thank you! I really do feel encouraged and supported by your feedback.

I’ll be sending out a very special offer to everyone who requested that early next week. If you still want to get in on that, click that link below! The survey should take just 2-3 minutes to complete, all questions are optional, and no writing is required.

Hitting the road?

Experimental Practice podcast’s not dead, just sleeping! As you gear up for any summer adventures (or routine walks and regular old chores), let me remind you that there are still three conversations with stunning creatives just waiting for you in the usual podcast apps if you haven’t yet listened in:

• Episode 1 - The revolutionary comes from the future | Miranda Mellis

• Episode 2 - A shimmering scene | Selah Saterstrom

• Episode 3 - The soil we were in | Alissa Hattman

I’m excited to get back to my extremely sporadic podcasting routine, so stay tuned for more. In the meantime, enjoy these gems!

Offerings

• My website — Learn more about my work

• Experimental Practice podcast — Conversations about cross-genre and interdisciplinary work, culture, writing craft, and creative practice

• Follow me on Instagram — I’m there sometimes

• Read more Essence of Toast — Archive of past letters