What TRUST has to do with it.

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own, Inspiration.

woman smelling a rose in watercolor

Trust has been following me around lately. The word, the idea, the suggestion. While undergoing my annual existential crisis last September over how to meaningfully approach another school year, I chose trust as my word for the year. I wrote it on my whiteboard. At some point every day, I look at it in ALL CAPS, right above the weekly yoga pose. If you’re wondering what this has to do with cultivating creativity (which is what I write about here), I’m going to ask you to trust that I will get around to answering this. I’ve got a little setup to get through first. I picked trust as my word because I’d been deliberating a lot about curiosity, and how to spark more of it in my students. I kept coming back around to how trust in the process of learning is so critical to our ability to drum up curiosity. There is so much uncertainty that has to happen before knowing, and that requires a certain amount of trust to get through.

Then, when I went to do my Year Compass goal setting for 2025, I chose a different word at first: love. But then I pivoted back to trust on January 2, because I just couldn’t get away from the word! Furthermore, love seemed (like curiosity) to be born from trust.

Trust keeps calling my attention. It has me confessing to the instances where I have stifled my work and my art and my life for lack of it.

Then, this past Sunday morning in a yoga flow class, the teacher (Leah Harvey) began class by inviting us to take up the intention of trust. As we warmed up, she elaborated.

I was already itching to write some things down for this post and in my head, I was asking, “There’s that word again! What gives, Universe?” Listen, I told myself. Trust that you will hold on to this lesson. Stay in the practice. Listen. Breathe. Move with the breath.

I’m relating to you now the message from my yoga teacher about how to trust your practice, because the same is true for your creative practice. Trust, requires a willingness to devote time, have patience, cultivate a positive attitude, and let go of your attachment to the results. This is the recipe for trust delivered while I was following her cues to move and breathe. It was one of those moments where you come across something that you know is true in your bones and realize you already knew it, you just hadn’t teased it out of your experience yet.

You may not even need to read on to see the connection to your creative work, but I hope you do.

There’s a story about me as a young writer I’m ashamed to tell (even though I have told it often enough before). I wanted to be a writer, and I’d made some attempts. But I didn’t really yet know how write, not the way I wanted to. Nothing I wrote felt good enough. This introvert had found a way to wear her heart on her sleeve and be heard, and she finally knew what she wanted, but she did not have the skills yet.

There was this young author event in my county every year. One particular year (seventh grade, I think) the deadline rolled around, and I did not have a single sample ready to submit. But the idea of not having any writing with my name on it submitted felt like a death sentence for my dream. So, when my friend offered a couple of poems she’d written, and said I could put my name on them, I accepted. I still remember every word of one of the poems. I won’t recite it here, since it isn’t mine.

Looking back, I did not trust the process, trying to skip the creative line, as it were. I did not trust myself. The poems I did not submit were the best I could do then, and I should have submitted them. I need skills, sure, but more than that I needed to trust.

Nothing came of that incident, and I did keep writing. Poems, at first. Then, my first short story, typed with many false starts (and no correction fluid) on a used typewriter I’d picked up at the junk store. A first draft of what would eventually be my first published story. A story about a brother and sister that was very much an attempt to understand the love and fear I had in relationship with my own brother.

I know now what I did not then.

Wanting isn’t enough to be a creative. You have to put in time, be patient, keep a positive attitude, and let go of your attachment to the results. You have to trust: the practice, yourself, the community of creators who are waiting out there to guide you. Easier said than done, I know.

But one thing’s for sure: you are not alone.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.