Reinventing Yourself Is Not a One-Time Event

Hi Mindful Writers,

The replay of my latest Liminal Writing Live is now up — this one with the wonderful Mel Moseley of Mel’s Messy Love Lab.

What does it mean to reinvent yourself, not once, but again and again, and to do it without knowing where any of it is leading?

Mel’s life has moved through several distinct chapters — an actor touring with improv, international education and marketing, then back to acting and a one-woman show that was heading for a US tour until the pandemic ended that plan. What came next was a move from Portland, Oregon to Fiddletown, a Northern California town of 187 people, and a slowing down into whoever she was arriving at day by day — including, as she put it, discovering she’s “a witch in a lab coat.”

We talked about embracing the mystery of not knowing what life is about and what we’re supposed to be doing and how leaning into that can be unsettling and playful and joyful all at once.

Mel’s analog letter-writing project came up too: 52 weeks of handmade collage letters sent to people she was thinking about, each one shared on her Substack, some reconnecting her with people she hadn’t seen in decades. That project has since grown into Mel’s Messy Love Lab Live, a gallery space in the tiny town of Volcano where people gather to make their own cards.

And then we went to the place both of us know well: what it’s like to go from a lifetime of city living to somewhere rural and slow, and how that reshapes you and that writing isn’t just how you process an experience, but sometimes the only way you find out what you actually feel about it. We also talked about what it means to live in a community that doesn’t share your politics, and how proximity tends to be what teaches you to find the shared humanity despite the differences.

It’s a warm, wandering half hour on mystery, letters, cows, and love as the water we swim in. I hope you enjoy the replay.

The next Liminal Writing Live will be on 12th August at 4pm UK and my guest is Megan Youngmee who writes Hey Friend, Keep Breathing. Hope you can join us!

Want to be a guest on this live series? Get in touch and let me know!

With love,

Amanda 💙