Stepping Into Your True Power

What does it mean to trust yourself? It sounds like a good idea, but it is often a counter-intuitive process. It is sort of like the difference between certainty and knowing. Certainty lacks curiosity, it is a fixed idea, while knowing involves trusting yourself while remaining open to whatever the universe has in store.

To be an artist requires trusting something that you may not be able to articulate. It often exists, at least in the early stages, as a feeling tone, and when you try to explain it, it is met with bewilderment, even contempt.

Trust it anyway. Not everyone is supposed to get it. If you try to please everyone, you will never get to where you want to go.

Since you are the channel through which your art arises, your primary job is to practice kindness to yourself. Stepping into your true power is not about forcing an outcome, but rather, trusting that what you have to express is valid, even if it feels unformed or like it is existing just at the edges of your consciousness. As you inquire, the mist will clear.

Stepping into your true power is an act of faith.

While this sounds empowering, and ultimately it is, it can also sometimes be temporarily destabilizing. It can bring up fear and shame and loneliness, even panic — but these are the gatekeepers of your authentic voice.

Stepping into your true power is a subversive act. No one gives you permission to be true. It can feel strange at first, and unfamiliar. It’s not a destination, but a liminal space, a zone that you can become more adept at accessing. It is achingly vulnerable, and therefore it must be staunchly protected.

Bob Dylan was asked once in an interview, “Why are you so reclusive?”
“I’m not reclusive,” he said. “I’m exclusive.”

Don’t give yourself away. Value your contribution. People might misunderstand you. They might call you a snob, or distant, or superior. It isn’t true. Being curious and trusting yourself is an act of humility.

Remember this: the desire to write is really the desire to evolve.

Stepping into your true power can feel lonely sometimes. You are occupying space now. You are taking a position. You may discover that some people are uncomfortable with your new self. They preferred the person who dropped everything to drive them to the airport or blew off their writing to help them move a credenza.

Stepping into your truth means valuing yourself. It means believing you have something to say.Making art can look like an act of accumulation, whether it is words on a page, or layering paint on a canvas — but it is really an act of shedding everything that wasn’t true and distilling what you have to express to its nature. Look at the abstract expressionists, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, de Kooning, and notice how their work became simpler and less adorned over the course of their career. At thirteen, Picasso could paint like Rembrandt, but by the end of his life no one could paint like him.

Distill. Simplify. Stay open. Be curious.

Stepping into your true power is an invitation to trust that you are uniquely qualified to express something the world has never seen before. But it demands you take the risk, on a daily basis, of trusting your ordinary impulse to create something extraordinary.

Learn more about marrying the wildness of your imagination to the rigor of structure in The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, or The 90-Day Screenplay workshops.