It's Okay To Fuck Up
On revising & abandoning the backspace key
Hi, sweet beans. Thanks for reading Healing Field Notes, a newsletter I send out twice a month. This newsletter will always be a free offering. However, consider a paid subscription if you’d like to support my writing.
Do you want to chat with me about writing, poetry, creative advising, personal style, newsletters, or anything else you have questions about or want insight on? Or maybe you want someone to co-work or hang out with for an hour? Schedule an office hours slot with me.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a trauma-informed facilitator, trained educator, therapist, or doctor. I am just a human sharing my perspective, experiences, and insight. If you need crisis resources, you can find a non-exhaustive list here.
Questions? Email me at samslupski@gmail.com
I took a writing workshop in September called Kin Keeping. Alongside exploring writing about family, we discussed the ethics of writing about the people we love or those we have complicated relationships with. We read pieces by writers I admire and writers I had never heard of before, and what I took away from the workshop, above all else, is that it’s okay to fuck up. It’s okay to change your mind. Revision is not only a part of the process, it is the process.
My book coming out next year is largely about my mother. More specifically, I write about how I was left to teach myself what nourishment and care looked like. This workshop helped me reflect on my motivations as a writer. When I wrote my book, my motivations were to process what mental family heirlooms I had inherited. I held a lot of grief (anger) towards my mother and had been working through my relationship with my father outside of my writing that still made its way into my writing. I wish I could have written more tenderness into the book, but I didn’t have access to that the way I do now. As I work on my next book and think more deeply about queerness, homemaking, and nourishment, I am writing from a place of tenderness and empathy.
In the last week of the workshop, we read Write Like a Motherfucker, and I reflected on my advice to my writer self. I’ve been feeling really scared to write and say the wrong thing. I’m scared that I will write something, publish it, and then learn something new that will have me change my mind. I’ve been scared to write the full truth. Some days, I feel unsure of the full truth because trauma has left me with fragments. But the truest thing I can show you right now is what I wrote in the last week of the workshop:
It’s okay if you fuck up. It’s okay if you say something wrong. You have grown into communities of accountability that will tell you when you’re wrong. The things you have to say inside of yourself are not wrong – you assign too many judgments to your existence. You are not good or bad. When you feel like you cannot write, read instead. Someone probably said it exactly how you need to hear it. Let community be the compass pointing you to yourself.
Also, fuck Grammarly. I think I need to stop using it when writing because I don’t need to see all the edits before I’m done. The red lines are distracting. You have red lines inside of yourself and can ignore them all for now. Come back to them later.
There will forever be more things to learn, and you can revise yourself. Remember when you thought your pronouns were she/they, then they/she, then they/them? Learn from your own gender. Forget the gender fear, allow yourself to lean into gender revision. Let queerness be the north star. Look at all the queer people around. We are all doing things differently. We challenge everything we were ever taught. Thank god.
It’s okay to be challenged. It’s okay to revise your insides. It’s okay to revise what comes out. Sometimes what comes out first is messy. Maybe the nuance comes with the revision because you have more spaciousness to uncover what else may be true under the most urgently true thing. What feels urgent isn’t always the whole picture – almost never. I want to tell my writer self that the things you wrote when you were 19 sucked. They were terrible, and it’s because you didn’t know any better! Thank god for growth. Thank god for always being open to changing your mind. Isn’t that what writing is for anyway? As I write this, I changed my mind. As I read, I learn something new. Isn’t that storytelling? We shift our perspectives and learn about someone else’s. If I write a book and look back and question everything I did, it’s okay because that means I got older. I lived. I learned. I survived.
As I navigate this next season and lean into telling the story that feels like my second heartbeat, I look to revision. I look to allowing myself to write what feels most true in the moment and let myself know that it doesn’t have to be what’s true forever. What was true when I wrote my book is that I was angry at my mother. What’s true is that I had a lot of grief stored inside of me that is only just now finding its way out.
What’s true:
I do not know how to write about my father without unraveling.
I am still really angry at my mother, but I have a tenderness towards her now.
I want to write a book that others can feel seen in.
I hope people feel seen in the book that’s coming out next year.
I want to write about homemaking, being queer, and learning to make a home without a blueprint or foundation.
I am building this foundation as I go, and it turns out I am not a talented contractor. I put up walls and realized I wanted it somewhere else. I put a nail in the wall and have to spackle it days later. My metaphor is unraveling a bit here but what I mean to say is: I am learning not to edit as much while I write. I am learning to let what is true in the moment be true and discern when the backspace key is appropriate. Am I backspacing out of fear? Or is there a deeper truth to be told? Here’s to using the backspace key when it feels right and abandoning it, especially when it feels scary.
This fall foliage map is everything to me.
I love this archive of gay t-shirts.
Watching this video about suicide prevention.
I wrote about my experience with vaginismus. You can read about it here.
Hi! Curiosity Corner is my monthly mini-podcast, where I answer & chat about the questions you ask me through this form. Last month, I responded to questions about my experience with OCD. You can read the transcript here. And who knows, maybe this month I’ll have a little extra special guest or something? I’m experimenting!
If you have made it this far, THANK YOU. I’m so glad you are here. If you have enjoyed this newsletter and want to support me you can:
Share a snippet on social media & tell someone to subscribe
Forward this email to a friend you think would enjoy it
Venmo me a one-time donation at @samslupski (15% of donations will be redistributed to mutual aid funds and/or local grassroots organizations)
Hire me to write for you
Thanks for sticking around.
Love,
Ah. Thank you. I needed this reminder to just write. The bit about being afraid of not writing the truest truth because of the certainty of change. The fear of writing something wrong, that you later learn about and cringe at how you thought before. Letting myself capture a moment of where I am, with flexibility towards the self. So delicious! Thank you!
Also I have never come across anyone else who refers to folks endearingly as beans. hehe!
sweet spicy bean over here, giving you a squish!
This is GREAT. It’s an important message to anyone who writes or wants to write and is paralyzed by the fear of getting it right. The great writers we individually admire? They all wrote things that sucked. We just didn't see them because those people weren't famous.
One of my writing heroes is Larry McMurtry and when he died last year, I read an interview where he said that he wrote a minimum of 1000 to 1500 words per day. That's how you get the suck out of the writing. Do it until you get better.
Thank you for writing this piece! It has so much application.