8. When the wound becomes the work

You’ve undoubtedly heard this bit of common wisdom at some point in your life: “You only grow when things are hard.”

Incarnations of this advice pop up in all sorts of contexts and snappy wordings (“No pain, no gain” or “Growth and comfort do not coexist” or, my personal Tony Robbins fav, “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone”).

This brand of wisdom has a kernel of truth. But when we apply it to our creative work, we can end up inadvertently nurturing another uncomfortable but weirdly beloved trope: the “suffering” or “tortured” artist.

This month, travel back from the edge of the comfort zone to discover the stories (and life) you might miss when the wound becomes the whole of the work.

Writing praxis tips

As promised at the end of the episode, here are two hands-on practices I’ve been experimenting with to actively explore and affirm the ordinary and the comfortable within my writing.

The first tip this month is to take a bit of an inventory of how you connect challenge and growth in your life. You can jump straight to looking at your writing practice, but if you’re feeling a bit at a loss, start with an area of your life where you have some concrete examples to reflect on.

For many of us, this will be our work or professional life. But it could also be something like parenting or physical health - any area where you can identify a specific example of the “nothing grows in the comfort zone” mentality.

Once you’ve got a scenario in mind, ask yourself these questions:

1. What was the real drive or desire behind the push out of the comfort zone? Was it a drive you want to follow or conform to in the future?

2. Were there other avenues available for growth? If not, how did you know? If so, why did disruption or struggle seem like the better path?

3. Was anything lost in the process that you wish hadn’t been? If so, how might those aspects of the comfort zone have been preserved?

This next prompt is a short writing exercise for exploring the narrative potential of the ordinary. At its heart, it’s very basic, but it can be surprisingly tricky as well.

For at least ten minutes, write about a scene or activity you find utterly ordinary, familiar, and comfortable. You can work from memory, but I think this can be especially interesting to do as a real-time description of a setting. Your writing doesn’t need to create a coherent story scene or plot - just focus on noticing and describing as deeply and thoroughly as you can.

You may find yourself automatically looking for ways to introduce disruption or tension, especially when you run out of steam. This is the way writers are typically trained to keep things moving. But for this ten minutes, see what happens when you actively resist disruption within the scene. See if you can feel out an edge where something unexpected emerges without disruption.

Episode resources

Eva zu Beck: I Quit. (YouTube)