What is the work that is calling your name?

Chances are, it's what you are most resistant to pursuing.

I noticed this sign on my daily walk through the neighborhood with my dog, Daisy. It was an ordinary morning - hectic, I was pressed for time - but the message alone became an encouragement that the doubts I held about my writing were unwarranted and that moving forward was the solution. - September, 2023

She hiked to a fishing village in Washington, an area familiar to her as a child but one she hadn’t revisited in years. It was a hunch for her, an intuition that what awaited her might awaken something dormant inside of her. Her expectation, she shared with me, was to access core memories from the past, and I suggested she remain open to what those might be. We both believed some of the retrieved stories would add dimension to her book on mental health.

About a month later, we spoke again, and she told me in detail the intensity of recalling painful things about which she’d forgotten, buried somewhere in the recesses of her subconscious. There were visions, conversations with Natives on the Reservation, big emotions, and unanswerable questions. Then she said, “I don’t want to write about the ways people I love hurt me. I don’t want to damage their lives.”

I listened to her reasons, as she shared a new project idea that took her off the path of writing the Other Book, the one we’d first discussed many months ago. The tension with which I sat, from my vantage point, was one in which I sensed I should encourage her to keep moving forward with the Other Book while also validating the new creative project she’d begun.

“It seems to me that accessing these painful memories suddenly activated your defenses to protect your heart and the relationships of those you love,” I finally said. “But I want to assure you that you can write about whatever you want - whatever you need - without harming others. You can be honest without compromising the true work you feel compelled to create.”

She hesitated, then sighed. “Hmm,” she finally mustered, “I guess I can see that perspective. But I just think this children’s book on mental health is really needed and my daughter can help me with the illustrations and it will strengthen the bond between us and…”

I interrupted her, which I try to avoid in conversations like these. “I hear that. This children’s book does sound like something you are meant to pursue. But what about the original outline we discussed, the one you told me you believed was part of the meaningful work you are meant to do?”

She nodded, and I continued. “I think it’s important to ask yourself: What is the work that is calling my name?”

What is the work that is calling your name?

It is the work that you are most resistant to pursuing.
It is the work that tugs at your heart but that you tend to avoid.
It is the work that feels uncomfortable and beckons you to confront your pain.

The best creative work is the most honest work. It is laborious, but it will never push you into an unsafe zone. You will feel the twinge of tension (this is your fear, so let it speak to you), but you will not venture into territory that will harm you.

There is journaling, and there is writing for publication. These are not the same. One of the most irritating pieces of advice that others (who are non-writers) offer me is this: “Just make sure you don’t vent when you write.” As if I don’t understand the difference. Here’s the thing about that: you don’t always know the difference when you’re in the act of putting a stream of consciousness on the page. But you can be prudent enough to recognize that not everything you write must, or should, be shared publicly.

This practice of sifting through the cathartic release of what psychologists term as verbal ventilation and the underlying, universal application of your insights takes many years to develop into a natural habit. The purpose of journaling, in my experience, is to get everything inside of me onto the page - without censorship, without editing, without criticism. I can allow myself to go below my conscious thinking (the “monkey mind”) and give my subconscious the freedom to express anything and everything.

What tends to happen is that I start by spending the first few paragraphs on nonsense, on topics that only mean something to me. It often sounds like griping or whining or just dumping thoughts that have no meaning into scrambled words. But then something interesting happens. After a short time of letting my thoughts meander wherever they’d like, a memory or phrase surfaces that leads me to a new insight.

Something shifts inside when we move from ephemera to an epiphany. For me, it feels like an electrical jolt in my heart, followed by the understanding that I have hit upon something valuable. So I follow that seed. Creative consciousness is like that: sometimes we are in seasons of flourishing, in which many seeds are handed to us, and our enthusiasm about the potential of each distracts us from the deep work that is calling to us in this space and time.

How do we know what is speaking to this space and time? I don’t think any of us truly knows the answer to that, but I will say that highly sensitive, creative people tend to have a pulse on the zeitgeist of their era. And often what they are meant to do contributes to those cultural mores or contradicts them.

This is not to say that we should ignore the other seeds of inspiration that come to us unbidden. What I’ve learned to do (and have often heard from other creative people) is to jot down the seed somewhere. As I type this, I have these words scribbled onto a sticky note from a talk I listened to by Natalie Goldberg while I was organizing my daughters’ Barbie toys: “Restlessness is connected to regret.” And “I don’t have time to hurry.”

These were sentences that leapt from the overarching message about which Goldberg was speaking to a group of Buddhists during a retreat. Though I was half-listening, it was as if these clusters of words were highlighted by some auditory amplification that told me I needed to pay attention. The rest still intrigued me but jumbled together into something I could discard.

This is what I mean by filtering or sifting through the constant bombardment of stimuli to which we are daily exposed. Recognizing the creative work that is meant for us is about attunement at a subconscious level, in which part of us is always receptive to when something is grabbing a hold of us and when something is not.

What I told the woman who seemed to be avoiding the Other Book is that it was good that she carried an openness to the seeds around her, but that the deep work urgent to this moment, this time and place, required focused attention right now. We can attend to seeds and continue to add to our notes and ideas surrounding them as they reappear in our lives, but they must not detract from the more timely work into which we have begun to delve.

That’s a hard truth for those who are free-spirited and do not like to be tethered to any one thing for any length of time. I think it is beneficial to maintain this connection to the cadence of this instant, while also homing our ability to discipline ourselves in seeing a creative project to its end.

Birthing cannot happen without gestation, but we can’t be in a state of perpetual germination. Eventually a seed must sprout and continue to grow; if it stagnates, it withers. So, too, with the deep work written on our hearts.