You can’t be brave if you’re not scared.
Writing prompts for time travel, the best pens, the good sweatsuit, and a plea for help.
I’ve always wanted to be a person you call in an emergency. My favorite pastime is putting together survival kits (for the car, the house, backcountry trips, friends-who-haven’t-asked-for-them, etc). I keep a crowbar under the bed in case an earthquake hits overnight and I need to pry myself out of the rubble. I keep a clotting sponge in the glovebox of my car just in case I stumble upon someone bleeding out. In the trunk, there’s a bag with warm clothes and running shoes and energy bars (that inevitably melt and lure hard-partying mice into the back seat). I don’t really fit the cliché of a prepper, but prepper I am! My brother is the same way. (Only he’s a firefighter-paramedic so he’s actually useful in a major emergency.) Anyway, all of this is to say that asking for help (rather than offering someone directions or a wool hat) makes me a tiny bit nauseous. But here we are. I need your help and I hate asking but, as my wise therapist taught me, you can’t be brave if you’re not scared.
I’ve spent the past seven years working on my new book, What Looks Like Bravery: an epic journey from loss to love, coming out next Tuesday. It’s a story about the ways I was marked by loss, for better and for worse, and my long journey to understanding how to move forward in a world in which you can lose people and places for no good reason at all. At heart, it’s a story about how we find courage to face what scares us most —even if that’s love itself. Many of you have pre-ordered it and oh my goodness, I am SO thankful. If any of you have not, or if you’d like to buy a copy for a friend—I WOULD LOVE YOUR SUPPORT. For now, it’d be great to buy it on Amazon as a bunch of early orders encourage the site to boost visibility and make the book more likely to be suggested to others. Though there is no BAD place to buy books and supporting your local independent, or Barnes & Noble, is also great.
I’d also love your help spreading the word. Please tag me on IG (@laurel_braitman), use #WhatLooksLikeBravery and let me know if you’re liking the book. Leaving a review on Amazon, goodreads, or anywhere else is also super helpful, or….help me spread the word about upcoming events! Here is a little folder of images you can use wherever you are on social media. You can also point people to my website. Even the tiniest action helps!
I can’t tell you how much this means to me. Never before have I felt like my heart is suddenly a bunch of printed paper, winging its way around the world, just waiting for someone to pick it up and decide whether or not to invite it in.
As always, set a timer for seven minutes. Tell yourself that you’re already an excellent writer. You can go back to being self-critical after the timer goes off but for the love of [insert deity or person/creature-of-your-own-choosing], try talking to yourself like your best friend would. Put your phone on silent or in airplane mode if you can, and begin. Don’t stop and edit. Just keep writing. You can do all three prompts back to back or just choose one. And if you don’t want to type, don’t worry. Speak your answer into a voice memo app, or directly into a notes app as voice-to-text. There is no wrong way to answer a reflective question, there is only not giving yourself the chance to do so.
This week’s prompts are inspired by my own story….but as ever, feel free to take whatever inspires you.
What is something you did that other people thought was brave but that you knew was just you being scared of something else even more?
Describe this as a moment or scene if you can, using all of your senses. If you can’t write it as a scene because it was long period of time, just choose a moment that is emblematic to you of this time in your life and describe that.
You have the ability to go back in time to any moment in your life. You will have the consciousness of your current self but the body of the self at the age you choose to return to. No one around you will notice anything different. What moment will you go back to? What will you see? Who will be there and what are they saying? What do things smell, look, sound and feel like? How long would you stay and why?
Make a list of every lesson or piece of advice you wish you’d learned (or heard) earlier in your life than you did.
Do a line break between each one. If you want to, you can describe the lesson a bit and how you came to it. Extra credit: give the list to a young person you know in a nice envelope, you can even gift wrap it and tell them to open it when they next get discouraged. Tell them you know your life is different than theirs, and it’s not a list of expectations, rather you hope they might find something useful in it.
If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments section or on Instagram by tagging me, @laurel_braitman.
I can’t get enough of the Apple+ show Shrinking. I know we have a lot of therapists reading this newsletter—-does it make you cringe? laugh uncontrollably? shudder? I think it’s so funny and sweet even if no one should have their patients move in.
Other great things I’m enjoying at the moment: the book Outlawed by Anna North (late to this one but really liking it); my ex girlfriend (who is one of the heroes in What Looks Like Bravery) and her fiance showed up at the ranch last weekend wearing matching sweatsuits and I immediately bought my own and can’t wait for it to arrive (pants and hoodie); this pepper grinder makes cooking anything more satisfying (I can’t tell if they’ve named their grinders after condoms on purpose); caramel bedtime tea; Topo-chico sparking water over ice with a few shakes of cherry bitters; my everyday pens the Pilot G-2 0-7; and country rap, playing loud enough for other people to hear at stoplights.
All upcoming writing workshops are listed here. We have them for healthcare professionals but also two new workshops open to everyone!
And….
I’m heading out on book tour and we can meet in person! See events below and on my website. If you’re in Ojai, Seattle, Portland, the CA Bay Area, NYC and more…come say hi. I will probably have some whiskey on me and would be happy to share.
Yours, till next time,
Laurel
I'm going to be honest and say I'm not exactly sure how I ended up here. A couple hours ago I was checking my email before bed. I scrolled through the latest weekly roundup from Tim Ferris and started reading, "How to Show Up for Someone in a Crisis." I was impressed - I've been through my fair share and I'm also an ICU nurse which means I see people going through crises on a regular basis. Then I clicked a link to a book and started reading...until I had read all I could for free and it cut me off. I never have time to read. I'm not even sure the last time I used my eyes to read a book - I always listen to them. But this is different... and the timing of all of this is too surreal. If your book is a nonfiction book then your dad was/is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Two weeks ago one of our cardiothoracic surgeons passed away completely unexpectedly. I've known him for 20 years, since I was 19 years old. I felt I needed to honor him in some way and also process my own emotions, so I wrote a little eulogy and posted it to my Facebook. A few people have reached out since and said I should write more often. I hate writing. I used to anyways. Now maybe it does feel different.... Freeing....? Is freeing even a word? Anyways I'm still amazed at all of this. At some point after the book cut off I clicked on something that led me to somewhere that mentioned a writing club for medical professionals that looks like it started during the start of the pandemic. Am I in the Twilight Zone? I feel like this is one of those butterfly effect moments. It's almost 2AM. I shouldn't have been looking at my phone before bed, but I was. It led me to my closet, where I am still currently, reading your book and clicking around in this substack place that I've heard about on podcasts but never explored. I read a couple of your writing prompts and started crying, which has to mean something. Maybe it means I'm tired. I haven't heard anyone talk about avocado trees in a long time but my mom used to tell me about her avocado and lemon trees in California growing up...
I've subscribed to Dark Horse because it seems fabulous and I'm looking into the writing class but I work most Saturdays so I'm not sure it'll work out. I've ordered your book because even though I've only read four chapters it's one of the most refreshing things I've read in a long time. I can tell it will be dark at times and heavy but at the same time it's honest, rich and beautiful.
I have *zero* doubt this book will be a bestseller. Have you heard of the podcast The Doctor's Art? I think you'd be a fabulous guest and it would be a great way to promote your book. I'm just a listener but I imagine if you reach out they'd be thrilled to have you on the show ☺️
A conversation about life and suicide:
My sister committed suicide when she was 21. I’m always scared when someone is suicidal, and traumatized all over again when one of my patients or someone I care about dies that way. My ex-husband tried killing himself with alcohol and loaded guns and deep, dark depression when I left him 10 years ago, after 32 years of marriage.
A year ago my ex had a major stroke. He was an amazing musician who survived life and its traumas by immersing himself always in music and song. He is paralyzed in his right arm and can’t write or play guitar, mandolin, saxophone, bass, or concertina. Now he is limited to the one-handed harmonica. He loved telling stories, being with people, traveling, talking. His expressive aphasia gives him the ability to understand what people are saying and writing, but the inability to talk or write in response. His garbled responses are frustrating to the extreme.
In the past, we talked about life worth living or not. He would have looked at someone like he is now, and said, “If that happens to me, send me out in the tundra on a cold winter’s night. Hypothermia is not a bad way to go.” But a year later, he has survived, and keeps trying to talk, and walk, and play harmonica. He’s not happy, but he wasn’t happy before. Its actually really hard to die, or to choose to die. What value is any life when the alternative is death?
I’ve had conversations with my daughter and friends about how he could kill himself if he didn’t want to live like this anymore. I took away all his guns because I can’t bear the thought of him shooting himself. He could stop taking his medicines. He’s already started drinking and smoking again. He could stop eating. He could go on hospice in Oregon and get the death with dignity drugs. I’ve thought about these things, but I realize I am very scared of him actively making himself die. It is much easier to passively wait for “come what may”. Even if life is hard, and unhappy, and most things you care about are gone, if you don’t believe in an afterlife, when you die you are gone too.
I’m scared to talk with him about these things. And I’m more scared that he will do any of them. And if he does, here is my survival guide:
1. I don’t have to and I don’t want to participate. I don’t believe in suicide as a way out of this world for myself, and it doesn’t feel right to actively help anyone else do it either. But I do believe in people having self will and the right to make their own choices for life and death.
2. Remind me, my kids, and everyone else that what he has done was his choice.
3. Take a break from work. Take as much time as I really need, to be OK, and ready to help other people again.
4. Take care of myself in all the ways I know are good for me – walking and exercise, mountains and beaches, gardening and reading, writing and talking, and being close to my friends and family.
5. Be there for our kids, and support them emotionally and practically – whatever that may mean for however long it may take.
6. Play music and dance, and share that with his friends who have lost him.
7. Remind myself that he didn’t want to live this way.