This writing practice has taught you many things. You’ve explored the nature of your authentic self, revealed aspects of your story that aren’t true, and questioned your public persona. These steps in the journey have helped you move toward awakening as a creative, happy, free individual. Now it’s time to turn your attention to your unique gifts and talents, the particular genius you were born with. In this chapter, you’ll come to recognize what it is that makes you a genius—though you may not believe this is true. You’ll learn that it’s imperative to accept these gifts before they can become reality, how passion and a spirit of play are crucial to embodying your own genius, and why courage is a prerequisite to stepping out of a small version of self into a more expansive life. This is possible for all of us, as long as we keep telling the truth.
Ancient Romans used the word “genius” to describe the particular spirit, or “tutelary deity,” that every human being is born with. The sole purpose of this personal muse was to guide a person to their full potential, enable them to bring forth their unique gifts, and to manifest their destiny. You can be a genius parent, fireman, waitress, stenographer, or phlebotomist. Genius isn’t about what you do, but about the spirit you bring to your contribution. The great dancer and choreographer Martha Graham described it this way to Agnes De Mille.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it will never exist in any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you.
Few of us are raised to trust our originality or genius. We’re trained to toe the line and focus on security above all else. We tamp down what’s most unique about ourselves in order to fit in. Deafened by the blare of authority and the status quo, we stop hearing the small, still voice within. Fortunately, the more you write, the clearer this voice becomes and the better able you are to follow the directions of your internal guide. Radical truth-telling only helps turn up the volume on your genius.
I see this dynamic at play in people who come to writing practice in search of abandoned parts of themselves. Brenda described herself as a fragmented person. She was an unmarried bureaucrat who claimed to have nothing original about her. Brenda hoped that writing could rouse her spirits and help shift her low-level depression. After the subject of talent came up, Brenda sent a heartrending description of growing up in a love-deprived household where her brother was worshiped and she was ignored. When she displayed a flair for art, her parents could not have cared less. “If it wasn’t math or science, it didn’t matter,” Brenda wrote. “So I stopped showing them my creations and eventually I just lost interest. But I made some cool things. You should have seen my spacesuit dress!” There was such a contrast between Brenda’s downtrodden tone and her excitement over this spacesuit dress that I asked her, “What did you lose when you gave up your artwork?” Brenda sent me this description of the psychic toll that her loss of creativity had taken:
I hid my magic in a box. I hid what I loved the most, my crazy creations, my girl-self. I felt ashamed but I didn’t know why. I was just goofing around. I loved to play with fabrics, colors, different materials, and doing it felt joyous. But I haven’t touched them for twenty-five years. Thinking about it makes me sad. I lost something special.
Instead of following her creative flair, Brenda had opted for a business degree and a good job that paid the rent but made her miserable. Although Brenda’s parents were long dead, she was continuing to live the life they had wanted for her. “Somebody else’s life!” she wrote. “That’s what it feels like. It doesn’t fit.” As Brenda investigated her story, she discovered that her attraction to art had less to do with wanting to excel as an artist, and more to do with wanting to help young girls tap into their creativity, to set their imaginations free. I asked her to respond to the prompt “What would you do if you were independently wealthy?” This set her imagination free.
I’d start a charity for homeless girls—an arts-and-crafts program after school where they do nothing but play, create, and explore their fantasies. A space where girls could have fun, give themselves hope, and feel at home away from their families. If I could do something like that, I’d say my life really matters.
Brenda was amazed by how fully formed this vision was when it popped into her head. That’s how the power of genius works. We don’t know where it’s coming from, we just know that something attracts us with a strange intensity. We find we’re good at something we never learned to do. We might care about something that others don’t take so seriously. It’s a current we touch that’s truly our own, and it seems to carry us twice as far with half as much effort as other people.
Whether or not Brenda pulled off this idea matters less than the fact that she claimed her true voice, which gave her vitality. The fog of depression began to lift. Brenda wasn’t planning to quit her job even if the charity worked; in meetings she was speaking up and her boss began giving her challenging things to do. After four months, Brenda had been able to write her way back from the edge of despair to the glimmerings of a different life.
Genius isn’t about creating something that isn’t there; it’s about uncovering something amazing that is. To be in touch with our genius is to think like an artist, transforming necessity into joy through creative expression. Here are a few pointers on how artists live that can help you get in touch with your genius.
These five characteristics of the artist’s life can be applied to any pursuit. Apply them to your particular genius and see how much they help.
We are born with a particular genius that’s unique and helps us manifest our potential.
When we hide, or disregard, this potential, it robs our life of vitality and spirit.
Manifesting this genius means living like an artist.
There are five useful lessons for creative living: receptivity, beginning again, risk-taking, choosing meaning over money, and befriending solitude.
These questions will help you locate and cultivate the genius you were born with. Although you may not believe that you have such a genius, these practices will show you otherwise.
Exploring these questions will help you clarify where you’re strong and where you’re in need of insight. When it comes to your particular capabilities and the transformative power of making them your own, it’s necessary to stop holding out for what you don’t have. You need to accept the gift that you’ve been given. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
Why would we want to disown our gift? What’s the payoff for avoiding our true potential? The answer is simple: the status quo, that warm, fuzzy blanket of numbing sameness that we cling to for safety and comfort. Accepting our gift may mean stepping outside our comfort zone, going against family values, changing professions, changing sexes, climbing K2, or making spacesuit dresses. We say, “That’s not the gift I asked for!” We stomp our feet and miss out on what we’re given and what that gift is there to teach us.
When we learn to accept the strengths we have, we make way for genius to inform our life. This unique aptitude often appears in childhood and can co-arise with necessity and emotional need. In elementary school, I was aware of having an unusual curiosity not shared by other kids my age—I loved hearing older people’s stories. I asked frequent, personal questions about the private lives of the teenagers and grownups around me. Seeing my fascination, they divulged their stories, showing me how much people like opening up when someone expresses genuine interest. Afterward, I’d write down what they shared and my thoughts about what had been said. In the second grade, I started keeping my own journal, recording my own secrets, and felt the same fascination. There was an uncanny shift in how I felt whenever I sensed the presence of uncensored truth. I felt stronger, calmer, clearer, and wiser—connected in a heart-opening way I rarely experienced otherwise.
This sense of being more us when doing a particular thing is a sign we’ve touched on our true vocation. This gift has its own trajectory if we allow it to carry us where it wants. For me, that meant starting a career as a journalist and editor specializing in interviews and profiles, then moving on to memoir and teaching writing as a path of self-realization. I didn’t choose this path, it chose me. My gift showed up mysteriously then grew stronger, fueled by emotional needs.
If we hope to flower as creative, spiritual beings, it’s necessary to follow where the gift leads. This isn’t always easy. The mind wants what it wants and formulates its own stories and fantasies about what the gift should look like. When I graduated from college, I was a starry-eyed writer with dreams of writing complex literary fiction like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. But I didn’t enjoy writing fiction. I labored miserably for several years, angry and frustrated, unable to give up my writing ambitions. I put one half-baked novel after another into a drawer. Finally, I forced down the bitter pill that my fiction would never compete with Finnegans Wake. After moping for a bit, I missed writing so much that I decided to go back to doing what I’d loved doing as a child: creating stories from stranger-than-fiction realities. My career picked up steam and the more I was able to step aside, and be carried forward, the more doors opened. I learned to let the gift guide me, which has taken me places I never dreamed of. The dream of writing fiction became history.
As you explore the nature of your own gift, ask yourself what it wants from you now. Where is it leading? What are you denying? What steps can you take to bring it forth? By accepting what you’ve been given, you make way for miraculous things to happen. You finally step into your authentic life and learn to play with what you have.
Accepting your gift may mean stepping outside your comfort zone. When we learn to accept things as they are, we tap into genius as it is.
Talents, affinities, and unexplainable capabilities seem to arise out of nowhere, with reasons of their own.
A sense of being more us when doing a particular thing is a sign that we’ve touched on our true aptitude.
Our gift has its own trajectory if we allow it to carry us where it wants.
When you learn to accept your own gift, you surrender to life on its terms. The tantrum of resistance to what you’ve been given can end. These questions will move in that direction.
Until you begin to practice acceptance, you miss the opportunity to bring your unique gift into the world. Once you make this gift your own—and change the story of what you deserve—you realize how much energy you wasted in trying to be someone else. This enables you to play more freely in your life, bringing levity and enjoyment where there used to be struggle. Play can bring genius to your endeavors and connect you to the life force itself.
To be serious on the path of awakening requires that we learn how to play. Our predisposition to games and fun, to the sporting dimension of being alive, helps elevate our overly serious selves and infuse existence with levity. Life without play is no life at all. “In a genuine man a child is hidden: it wants to play,” the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche declared. Heeding this pull to passion and play frees our imagination and links us to the child’s wisdom. The key ingredient for sustaining genius is the willingness to play.
This is easy to forget in a capitalist culture where workaholism is held as a social ideal. Citizens of a materialistic, doing culture tend to measure self-worth based on productivity rather than on quality of life. Your writing practice can remind you how misguided this approach truly is by challenging the myth of productivity. Self-exploration, creative fulfillment, and loving others are surely as important as making money and dealing with practical matters. The philosopher Bertrand Russell pointed to the dangers of putting productivity at the center of life when he said, “there was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.” For us to remain fully rounded human beings, we need to remember to lighten up. Play liberates our frolicsome nature and, like humor, loosens up the status quo so we can surprise ourselves.
Jonathan showed up in class looking anxious, clutching a long list of books he intended to write. Jonathan could sit at his desk for ten-hour stretches and kept a punishing, nonstop writing schedule. Yet for all his stamina and ambition, he would come to some carefully planned scene and freeze up. This road block forced Jonathan to abandon projects in despair and rush on to the next. He believed that the problems were technical rather than psychological and used a cartoon metaphor to describe it.
You remember Wile E. Coyote? He’d run off the cliff when chasing the Road Runner and then just hang there a second, shocked at having no ground beneath him. That’s how it feels when a project freezes. I’m in midair, my head is spinning, then I crash to the ground. Then I chase a different bird off another cliff and the same thing happens all over again.
I asked Jonathan to respond to this prompt: “While you’re chasing the Road Runner, what is chasing you?”
I feel like death is chasing me and that there’s no time to waste. I’m determined to finish what I’ve started, but I just feel anxious all the time, scared that I’ll come up with nothing. That fear makes it hard to breathe. I have to stop and catch my breath, but when I do, the momentum is gone. I feel exhausted and realize I’m having zero fun. Why did I ever want to do this? All I know is that time’s running out. And that only makes me feel worse.
Jonathan had weighed his gift down with terror and angst, and forgotten to nurture the key ingredient needed to sustain his genius: the spirit of play. Hounded by fears of mortality, he’d confused the true purpose of his work. It was not to prove his worthiness or guarantee his posterity, it was to love his writing for its own sake.
I asked Jonathan to respond to the prompt: “Would you write if no one ever saw your work?” This confused Jonathan, who responded, “That’s like asking if I’d have sex if nobody was there to share it with. I want to connect. If people aren’t enjoying my work, it’s too lonely. I want to put my voice into the world. To tell stories that make people think and feel.”
Jonathan had touched the root of his calling: to touch other people with his work. Remembering this shifted his anxiety from outrunning mortality to wanting to tell his stories as well as possible: a shift from destructive to constructive anxiety. Focused on his true intention, he felt energized to go back to his novel. He finished it within a few months. Jonathan was enjoying his work again, as his sense of play returned to buoy his spirits in the arduous-if-gratifying process of sculpting literary fiction. He had rediscovered his passion.
Play and passion are deeply connected in us; it’s hard to have one without the other. Passion has liberating, enlivening effects, and play propels the creative gift. We do everything not to end up with rigid lives, and come to recognize the necessity of not always being sensible. As the psychologist D. W. Winnicott said, “we are poor indeed if we are only sane.” As passionate beings, we need to be wild as well, break the rules, draw outside the lines, and indulge our wayward, undignified parts—the abandoned, freedom-loving self—to keep our spirit alive.
Passion and play are both necessary to the process of creative and spiritual awakening. You can learn to trust your own impulses and indulge them, which gives your childlike nature a place to express. This relieves the weight of self-seriousness, reminding you to have a sense of humor as you awaken to your true nature.
Our predisposition to play helps elevate our overly serious selves and infuse existence with passion and levity. The key ingredient needed to sustain genius is the spirit of play.
Meaning and passion are deeply connected in us; it’s hard to have one without the other.
Sometimes we need to be wild, break the rules, draw outside the lines, and indulge our wayward, undignified parts to keep our spirit alive.
Passion and play are both necessary to the process of creative and spiritual awakening. We learn to give our childlike, passionate nature a place to express.
Playfulness in life is a godsend: it relaxes the need for control and opens the mind to new possibilities. Wisdom, passion, and creativity are all increased by playfulness. Use these prompts to help you rediscover the secret of play and how it can broaden your point of view.
When you challenge the ethos of productivity at all costs and reclaim your right to be playful, you increase the desire for creativity and your chances of flourishing. While it’s important to be serious at certain times, it’s equally important to be silly at others. This provides buoyancy and lightheartedness when you need it. Doing this does take courage, which is another ingredient of waking up.
It takes courage to surrender to passion and accept the uniqueness of our gift. When awakening our genius, authenticity comes at a cost. Saying yes to our deepest desires requires that we say no to other temptations. Commitment to truth can be demanding. Without the capacity to enlarge our emotional tolerance and reach into untapped depths, we may not be able to persevere when winds of adversity blow our way.
Regular writing practice helps build courage by putting you face-to-face with your resistance. If you don’t face your demons, they will continue to run your life. Meredith was not convinced this was true. A timid, diminutive woman, Meredith came to a course with the aspiration of writing a memoir, but was terrified of what doing so would entail. She grew up in a Mafia family, surrounded by crime and violence, loyal to her beloved father who spent most of Meredith’s childhood in prison. “He taught us not to snitch!” she wrote. Telling the truth felt like betraying a man she adored and the family she was raised to protect. But the burden of conspiratorial silence was a weight she no longer wanted to carry.
I encouraged Meredith to write her story as if no one was ever going to read it. She was willing and dove into her memoir with gusto. Within a few weeks, she was enjoying her freedom and writing openly about her family, revealing things she’d never shared with a soul. Meredith described surreal, heartbreaking scenes and felt that each piece of writing was like a weight being lifted from her shoulders. Meredith told me privately that she’d never felt this free in her adult life.
Then her writing screeched to a halt. Meredith was overwhelmed with guilt over being a snitch and breaking the honor code of omertà. This wasn’t a rational response since both her parents were dead and other family members supported her writing. Yet each time Meredith approached her memoir, her dread grew into panic attacks. I recommended she take a month-long break and not look at what she’d written. I gave her a list of books to read about family trauma and memoir writing. I suggested that Meredith keep a journal of her emotional process and new childhood memories if they emerged.
A month went by and Meredith came back, determined to continue her writing. “I’m scared but not defeated,” she wrote. “I decided to take my Daddy’s advice: don’t let the bastards get you down!” Meredith started working again and whenever panic arose to stop her, she responded with epithets I can’t use here. I gave her questions to answer when the guilt and shame tried to snuff her out. “Whose voice is telling you to stop?” “What is the worst-case scenario that will happen if you don’t stop?” “Who would you be if you weren’t afraid? What would you write? What secrets would you tell?”
Answering these questions helped reduce her fear. Meredith kept writing for the next three years and is on the verge of completing her memoir. In that period, I’ve witnessed profound changes in both her character and her writing. She’s far less self-conscious and insecure—she believes that this story is hers to tell and she knows that her family’s code of honor was brainwashing. By continuing to write, saying the unsayable things, she shifted her identity as a free woman. This is how Meredith described herself in one of the closing scenes of the book.
I was an orphan in my own mind when I started to write this story. A foundling in a cold world. I hated myself. I loved my family. I blamed myself. I believed in them. Everything was turned upside down. Now I know what love really is. It’s not about covering up the truth. It’s about saying “Enough!” to secrets and lies. I used to think that if I wrote things down, it made them true. And if they were true, I couldn’t survive it. But that was a story where I don’t deserve to live. I’m writing a different story now.
Meredith’s courage was poignant to see. We all face walls of fear and magical thinking that require bravery to overcome. But courage isn’t the same as machismo. Courage has fragility and vulnerability in it, as well as a refusal to be stopped by our demons. There are two ways to look at the meaning of courage. Is it charging to the front lines without stopping because we feel no fear? Or is it making some small contribution in spite of being terrified? The latter is more humble and self-forgiving. We are scared and courageous, uncertain and plucky, insecure and determined to move forward. You’ve encountered these paradoxes firsthand, as you’ve practiced writing through your fears, and they have made you braver and wiser. You have been strengthened by internal paradox and encouraged by complexity.
It takes courage to surrender to passion and to accept the uniqueness of our own gifts.
Saying yes to our deepest desires requires that we say no to other things.
By confronting our saboteurs face-to-face, writing practice builds courage and confidence.
Courage includes fragility and vulnerability as well as a refusal to be stopped by our demons.
Authentic courage, like genuine strength, doesn’t require that you be fearless. Fear is a testing ground for courage. Awareness of fear fosters bravery instead of bravado. These questions will help you clarify this important distinction and develop a healthy approach to courage.
By cultivating such unconventional courage—what might be called spiritual courage—you uncover the truth that fear, frailty, and self-doubt can coexist with bravery. You transcend the false polarities—black and white, either-or, this and that—and move toward a third position: the integration of opposites into sacred union. Sacredness has deep significance as you learn to express yourself as a whole human being.