The Gift and Failure of Words

On writing, coaching, the truth of contradictions, using language to “make meaning,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I wanted to say a thing or two about my coaching philosophy: this ongoing attempt to articulate the details of how I’m showing up for my clients, and to do my best to capture something about the unique depth and flavor of my wisdom, my skills, and my aims. It’s something that I’ll never be able to communicate with 100% accuracy…ah, but that’s the rub of language: we use it to communicate things that exist outside of it.

Spoiler alert: this is a crucial part of why I love writing!

And talking about why I love writing might be the best way to talk about what kind of Creativity Coach & Mentor I am.

I love writing for it’s constant failure to do the things we ask it to do, and its ability to nevertheless create emotional, ecstatic experiences that are SO much bigger than mere sentences on a flimsy page.

Yes: I’m saying that words are always failing us at least a little bit, except for when they aren’t; sometimes the failed words are what help us shimmy our way up toward a meaningful feeling or insight. That truth can often appear like a set of contradictions is the first bullet point of my coaching philosophy. And as it turns out, my coaching philosophy and my writing philosophy are in cahoots with each other.

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“Good writing changes you; shares its life with you; imprints itself on your brain & heart; keeps unfolding long after you’ve consumed it.”

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There are truths that reside in the experience of grappling with language, an almost bodily experience, that get polished out the minute we start to articulate them. Which is a clumsy way of paraphrasing Wittgenstein and a fancy way of asking, can we ever really say something definitive or final? I sometimes wonder if this reality, paired with certain K-12 classroom experiences, explains why so many adults are so scared of writing. Oh, you’re a writing coach…they say to me, and I see their mind’s eye conjuring a thick red marker and a gigantic “F,” the assumption being that creative experiences of language are always trumped by corrective ones.

But there’s so much liberation to be found in the messy / failing / impossible space of using language creatively and grappling at length with words, not to mention endless opportunities for play, and safe risk-taking, and experiment. Rather than giving up on trying to articulate the things that matter to us, there’s an invitation here to see writing as something that simply doesn’t sit still; to see in language a dynamic, living medium, always in flux. Never finished, only abandoned, so the adage goes. A stable instability. And perhaps a mirror?

Q: What kind of creative weirdo devotes themselves to a medium so fraught and impossible?

A: The kind who knows the experience of being transported by language into that magical, beyond-language place, and who believes in the otherworldly intersection of craft plus that other thing, whatever it is—supernatural, ephemeral, miraculous—that can make our experiences of reading and writing so extraordinary.

Good writing changes you; shares its life with you; imprints itself on your brain & heart; keeps unfolding long after you’ve consumed it. It does its magical, feral, literary thing even after you’ve forgotten the words or stopped recalling the particular instance of reading them. “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. No joke: I went to elementary school with his great-great-grandson, who shared his exact full name. He had a crush on me, and I remember making my peers laugh one day in 5th grade when he flung a sassy hand in my face and shot out a valley girl inspired hel-lo!, to which I responded, with a similar hand and lilt, good-bye! When I saw how quickly the girls tumbled into laughter, I felt like I had invented comedy.

There are entire periods of my life that I can’t remember, and yet here’s this crystal-clear moment, me and a few girls I really wanted to impress, and this boy with a famous ancestor who was probably just trying to make me laugh but instead I made everyone else laugh; me feeling liked, and funny, and warm, and briefly safe. I had no idea that the famous ancestor’s writing would become very important to me one day, but I probably already sensed that those girls weren’t going to like me forever.

Why this memory? I google “Ralph Waldo Emerson” trying to shake something loose, and I learn that he died on the exact same day I was born, only 105 years sooner. What does this mean?

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Coaching, if I were asked to summarize it, is about being in a safe, trustworthy, and intentional relationship with someone as you work to get clear on the boundaries between what you can and cannot control about your life. This work, in turn, makes it easier to distinguish between the things in your life that you desire to make meaning out of, and the things you no longer need to. Both amounts—what we can control, what we can’t control—are much bigger than we tend to assume, and there it is again, Truth, that pesky contradiction! Getting clear on these differences is the second bullet point of my coaching philosophy, and it is such an important, mysterious, can’t-sit-still kind of distinction. It creates in me a pulsing feeling, the one present in my chest even now, in this moment of writing and backspacing and cutting and second-guessing and continuing onward ruthlessly, feeling really grateful for this creative life.

Memory fails us, and cliques fail us, and technology most certainly fails us; and terms and labels and industries can fail us, too; and sometimes childhood fails us altogether.

And words fail us, but they also propel us upward and forward, and inward, and elsewhere. They make meaning, but not always, and there’s real freedom to be found in both cases. And sometimes words let us say things like, I turned down Ralph Waldo Emerson lol. Nothing’s objectively connected, other than in that strange mushy subjective way that everything actually is.

Let me use a few last words to describe it, this philosophy of the writing coach and her weird relationship to words. Picture her as a mapless woman, equal parts confused & excited as she searches for something without parameters. She isn’t alone, even though alone is a feeling she carries in her always. The feeling is one of a light sitting beneath her, your, sternum—delicately, like a stunning bird in an elaborate birdcage. It’s safe. But also? Let’s free it.