StoryLetting: Inaugural post

Designing the Storyletting section of my Substack has been a salve. Like a balm made of one’s own bile and other vital matter, just giving myself the permission to write about the underbelly of my creative calling has felt good for a few days. But saying you are going to do something and actually doing it are hardly the same thing.

So, the ‘coming soon’ notice has been lowered and now, I’m OPEN.

When I’m overstimulated or anxious, a touch of low-grade dyslexia emerges in my writing, I transpose the letters in words or whole clauses in a sentence. Enter Storyletting - a delightful typo that inadvertently defined a frantic need for the release of storytelling with true candor.

Looking at the simple switch of the L and the T, the relief was instantaneous. Back in the day, (the ‘day’ marking about 3,000 years ago through to Louis Pasteur capturing diseased air in swan-necked flasks) the purpose of bloodletting was to restore vitality by eliminating toxins through the flow of blood from well-intentioned incisions. The erroneous plan meant to restore bodily equilibrium, based on the belief that illness implied an excess of blood that was contaminated, unmetabolized, and requiring elimination.

I treat this analogy gently, knowing full well I am brushing up against actual self-harm, which is certainly not to be taken lightly. It’s the malaise and, for me, the illness that comes from self-censoring our true creative nature that I intend to treat seriously here. The earnest aim for release is how journaling and memoir writing serves me.

The systemic back-up of an inborn need to show-and-tell demands metabolization. Just like my artwork, storytelling serves as transmutation into understanding and communion.

Putting my memoir work and my visual art production on hold these last few years has taken a cumulative toll on me. I exchanged these vital practices for building my mentor-coaching business. This has taken the form of writing my book on Creative Intelligence and much less glamorously, catering to the dizzying whims of marketing platforms.

I wrote in my first Substack post in January 2026 that I would openly share the process of achieving integration as artist-writer-educator. I promised to ‘turn the teacher tables on myself’ - to be an example of the genuine process of living on the learning curve, aiming high for a life-work balance that aligns with our nature and hard-won values. I support others in uncovering their innate creative capacities and to use them as fuel for figuring out what their acute frustrations are, and which aspects of their life have expired or gone unexpressed.

What’s gone unexpressed in my is officially spilling out at the seams.

Bloodletting was also performed in efforts to release evil spirits or to ‘appease supernatural forces.’ Within me, the call to sharing stories, to a less polished (or LinkedIn friendly) truth-telling is a supernatural force. It’s bigger than me and when I deny it, the more I try to contain it, a mental and physical inflammation takes hold. I suffer and my internal lantern begins to sputter out.

I hope for Storyletting to have a prophylactic effect on my creative and holistic wellbeing.

Storyletting is a weigh station for intimate story-telling, dedicated to the raw material of a memoir writing journey. Gushing with true tales of making meaning from memory and its aftermath, however glorious or gory.

Author Parker J. Palmer (born 1939) writes about the intersection of our vocations and intrinsic leadership. In his book, Let your Life Speak, he draws subtle parallels between our limitations and our potentials.

Palmer defines vocation as doing what you ‘can’t not do’ and as how 'our deep gladness meeting the world’s deep need.’ He describes the constraints and limitations we suffer as “the guardrails that keep us in our destiny lane.” I love this because it doesn’t ask me tor reject parts of myself that are not so anodyne.

I am called to teach, and thus called to execute on the business side of what is required in my mission to raise global Creative Intelligence, that I am crystal clear on. NOT, however, at the risk of my health and NOT if it requires that I suppress the full expression of my creative calling.

I wouldn’t be on the path to integration then, would I?

The risk of greater exposure to my vulnerability feels like petting this cat the wrong way, but what kind of non-conforming artist would I be if I didn’t set the example of going against the grain?

Cheers to divergence, to disrupting the polished fitting-in that too often feels like faking it. Of course I’m happy to play along, I want to hang out with everyone and to understand what makes us all tick. I pride myself on being able to wear another’s shoes ... to a point. That point is when withholding hurts me. I’ve realized that work-flow means I MUST have an outlet for the full story.

Here’s to allowing Storyletting to become my creative phlebotomy.

Let it flow, trickle, run in rivulets into the grooves. Let it fill the crevasses, rush over the precipices, cascade over unseen edges, and flood the plateaus.

Thank you for reading. Take care, Laurie