Remembering Who the F*ck I am

Erin Shetron joins Cave of the Heart and answers 6 questions on self-trust

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Welcome to Cave of the Heart, an interview series where writers trust-fall into the depths of inner-knowing, creativity, and the craft of writing. Are you ready to get curious about the cultivation of self-trust, give a warm nod to our child selves, and celebrate inspiration in all forms? Come with us into the cave of the heart.

You might recognize Erin Shetron from her popular interview with me last summer, her too-personal-to-not-be-helpful life advice on Notes, or mentioned in Substack circles as “someone I hired for newsletter guidance because Alex Dobrenko` called her a Substack whisperer??” Erin has worked one-on-one with over forty Substackers as a producer, growth strategist, and editor. With a background in creative nonfiction and poetry along with years as a marketing director, she now helps writers and entrepreneurs produce their best, most impactful work while honoring their creativity and wellbeing. Erin enjoys walking her elderly dog, reading fantasy novels, cursing, dreaming about the feminine economy, and espousing the benefits of unabashed, loving honesty.

Describe the setting where you’re answering these questions.

Erin: I am sitting on the fancy Article couch I bought on Craigslist five years ago in a living room I love very much. It is my birthday, and I am about to move after living here for nearly six years. It’s sunny and quiet, aside from my dog’s snoring. I’m soaking it all in.

Childhood

Amanda: Given a choice, were you the child who would run barefoot outside or were you inside reading?

Erin: I don’t think anyone actually cares what I was like as a child, but like most people, I am somewhat fascinated by my own child self. You could usually find me hiding in a closet with a book, but once we moved from Upper Darby (just across the train tracks from West Philly) to the suburbs, you could just as easily find me outside with the trees, shoeless, digging up slugs for my turtle to eat, wearing some whimsical and strange outfit from my dress-up box.

Influences

Amanda: If you had to choose one person from your past that most influenced who you are today, who would that be and why? This can be a person from history, an animal, a fictitious character in a book, TV or movie.

One time I picked my older sister up from a bar and on the car ride home she said, a little drunk and apropos of nothing, In my heart, I think I’m happy. That’s not really an answer to the question, it’s just a nice story I like to tell. Kelly raised me, I am as much her doing as my mother’s. She taught me about gravity by dropping rocks—one big, one small—off a bridge at the same time and height, the difference between pads and tampons, and not to stuff my bra no matter how small my boobs were. Later, she taught me about the sacred connection between us as sisters, how to make a decent chicken curry in under 30 minutes, and about Frank O’Hara and Adrienne Rich and Roxane Gay and Elena Ferrante. She taught me how to write, how to edit, how to open my heart, and how to believe in myself. She is still teaching me. It’s like that Sharon Olds poem “Ode to My Sister,” the last bit that goes:

And I think there was nothing my sister
wanted to take from me. Why would
she want to, she had everything—
in our room she had control of the door,
closed, or open, and the light switch,
dark, or bright. And if anything
had happened to me, I think my sister
would not have known who she was, I was almost
essential to her, as she to me.
If anything had happened to her,
I think I would not be alive today,
and no one would remember me,
as if I had not lived.

(She taught me about that poem, too.)

Creative Spark

Amanda: What do you think about the concept of a “creative spark”? Is it something we all have access to?

Erin: Imagine if I said only some people have access to a creative spark. God that would be hilarious. But I won’t do it! It’s not true and I will not lie, humor be damned.

I believe we’re all inherently creative, we all have creative sparks, and creativity is not really something we have to work to access so much as we have to allow. It’s our essential nature to be creative, but there are all sorts of blocks that life deals us along the way. It’s like Meek Mill once said, there are levels to this shit. Levels of self-doubt, of crushing capitalist demands, of societal injustice and prejudice, of being very sleepy and having a tummy ache. Creative sparks aren’t just for the free—if they were, none of us would have them. It’s about giving the finger to all the forces that would numb and silence you, and connecting to yourself, your rage, your peace. I am still learning this process, and slowly I think my creativity is coming back to me. I’ve missed it.

Writing Process

Amanda: What one thing do writers most often do that erodes self-trust and they don’t even know it?

Erin: I’m going to answer this as someone who works with writers vs. someone who themselves is a writer (listen, I’m working on it!! If anyone wants to take an extremely rusty writer under their wing or do The Artist’s Way or something please @ me).

If I had to pick, I think the one thing that writers most often do that erodes self-trust is, after hitting Publish, listening for the applause before listening to themselves. (To be clear, I don’t think we can ever stop listening for the applause entirely. We’re like Tinker Bell—we’ll all die from lack of attention.) I just mean, there’s a threshold that gets crossed once you hit Publish, and on the other side of that threshold is silence. If you use that silence to await your applause, it’s going to suck. You are going to feel sweaty and weird and the people around you will be like “...you okay?” 

But if you can use that silence to ground down into yourself, I think you can save yourself from some of the jittery frenetic panicky stuff. Grounding, to me, sounds like taking a few minutes to ask yourself questions, ones like: 

• Now that my writing is out in the world, how do I feel? 

• Am I proud of myself for just getting it out there and meeting my own deadline? Or am I happy that I took the extra time this one needed?

• What am I especially excited about accomplishing in this piece - a specific word choice, a bomb ass paragraph, a surprising arc?

I think this is how you start building a more trusting relationship with yourself and your creativity. The applause will come, and it’ll shoot you to the moon, but the crash landing back down to earth will be far less painful if you’ve already built a strong foundation where your own beliefs and feelings about your work cushion any lows and blows.

Resources

Amanda: What one book, poem, piece of art or chapter of writing would you give to your younger self, and why?

Erin: I would give myself Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert when I was a teenager. It wasn’t written yet, but this is a dream scenario so just go with it. While I was obsessively thinking about perfection, I could’ve been reading things like, “What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.” 

I would also give myself Black Women Writers at Work edited by Claudia Tate. While I was thwarting my own creative efforts and feeling pitiful, I could’ve been reading Maya Angelou on basic self-respect: “I don’t see why I can’t sculpt. Why shouldn’t I? Human beings sculpt. I’m a human being. I refuse to indulge any man-made differences between myself and another human being. I will not do it.” Like??? Yeah, that shit is medicine. Medicine that, potentially, could’ve liberated me, and maybe even changed the course of my 20s, which were the years I became swallowed up by self-doubt, got thrown into the deep-end of startup life, and struggled with chronic back and hip pain. I wish I’d carried my writing practice throughout that time, but besides journaling and the occasional mini essay or poem, I mostly didn’t. 

At 34, I am allowing space for creative practices back into my life, and I intend to reread both books before the year is done. 

Neurodiversity 

Amanda: After being diagnosed neurodiverse (self-diagnosed counts!) did you have to rebuild trust in yourself in any way? What did that look like?

Erin: Girl, YES. There was so much grief and disorientation and erosion of my self-concept. It’s been three years since I was diagnosed with ADHD and I am still trying to rebuild trust in myself. I am excited to answer this question, though, because I like the possibility that it might help someone else. Here are a few things that have helped me drastically:

1. Learning about my nervous system and what it looks like to be in chronic flight and freeze, along with terms from the neurodivergent community like overstimulated, understimulated, RSD, executive dysfunction, ADHD paralysis, body doubling, etc. Just understanding these terms and starting to integrate them into my self-concept has really helped me reframe my struggles, cast out some shame, and seek solutions that work better for my brain.

2. “Of course I feel this way.” I say this to myself to get back in my own corner. It’s easy to get stuck in big feelings or catastrophizing. But as soon as I respond with, “Of course you are feeling overstimulated, because you had more client calls than usual this week and a lot of your mental energy is getting spent on moving apartments,” suddenly I feel way more regulated and self-trusting. Finishing the sentence, “Of course I feel ___, because ___” has been a game-changer.

3. Consistently and enthusiastically connecting with my own opinions and beliefs. I make it a habit to ask myself, “Did that go how I wanted? Do I like how I showed up? Did that feel good to me, or do I have a spooky feeling in my tummy that’s about more than just eating too much chicken curry?” This process of checking in and honoring my own feelings and beliefs builds integrity and self-respect, which helps with, well, everything but most especially RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), which as any other neurodivergent folks know, can be extremely debilitating.

4. I stopped surrounding myself with fuckin losers people determined to misunderstand and judge me. Yes, you guessed it, this is the part where I tell you definitively to BREAK UP WITH THEM!!! (Your notes app is full of carefully worded texts and pro-con lists? Dump them.) Seriously though, rebuilding self-trust is far easier if you surround yourself with people who deeply, unwaveringly, trust you. People who trust your big, overflowing feelings, trust that the train horn really does make you physically unable to continue a conversation, trust that you can’t eat the last banana because it’s 2.5 hours past its prime and now it’s too soft and grainy. Even better than trusting you, they’ll stop asking you to eat the last banana. They’ll cover your ears when they hear the train coming. They’ll say, tell me more and of course you’d feel that way. Find people like that. I say it like it’s easy. It’s not. But please try, try for your tender little heart that has been through enough already.

In last year’s interview, we talked about how difficult it was for me to leave my startup and how I spent a few years very lost before starting to work with writers. I bring that up because being here today, working with you and so many other incredible people, is truly the fruit of all the above labor. It’s ongoing—I still feel lost sometimes, but it’s working. I can feel it. I am remembering who the fuck I am. I am so much closer to my authentic self, my beliefs, my purpose. And I think that’s what rebuilding self-trust is all about.