I was sitting at the dining table in the early morning. The rest of the house was still asleep. I’d just finished my morning ritual of tea and tarot before settling in to write. Client work would take over soon enough. A page was open in my notebook. The words were forming. And somewhere between my chest and my fingers, I felt the tug. The one that says: soften this. Make it palatable. Translate so everybody understands.

I wrote the words my ancestors gave me anyway. Then I sat with my hands in my lap, staring at them for a long time.

That’s where this essay starts. With the weight of a page that is waiting for you to tell the truth on it.

There were laws in this country against Black people reading. Specific, enforceable, punishable laws.

In South Carolina, the 1740 Negro Act made it illegal to teach an enslaved person to write. In Virginia, the penalty for a second offense of assembling to learn could be twenty lashes. In North Carolina, teaching a free Black person to read carried a fine and jail time. I have never once believed these were abstract policies. They were responses to a real fear: that a literate Black person was a dangerous Black person.

And they were right. Literacy is dangerous when it belongs to someone the system was built to silence.

Your nervous system doesn’t know these laws were repealed. The body keeps the record that the legislature tried (and still tries) to erase. When you sit down to write and feel that clench in your throat, that pause before the honest sentence, or that instinct to explain yourself to a reader who was never going to understand anyway, you’re not being dramatic or overly sensitive. You’re responding to an inheritance that lives below language.

The silence moved through families the way most inheritances do: without announcement.

Black families learned to speak sideways. To tell the story in the car but not at the table. To keep certain things oral on purpose, because the written record had been used against us before. The stories that mattered most were the ones that never made it to paper because it was safer that way.

Think about your own family. The things they told you, the things they kept quiet about, and the things you figured out later by piecing together what nobody said directly.

That silence is a strategy that outlived the conditions that created it. And for writers who come from those families, the act of writing isn’t neutral. The page itself has a history. And by filling it, you are breaking a pattern that kept people you loved alive.

Juneteenth named the end of a specific delay.

The Emancipation Proclamation was signed on January 1, 1863. The news did not reach Galveston, Texas, until June 19, 1865. Two years and five months. People were living in bondage that had legally ended, and no one told them.

Sit with that for a minute. The cruelty of withheld knowledge. The freedom that already existed but was kept from the people it belonged to.

This is the writer’s inheritance too. The permission to write as yourself, in your own syntax, with your own grammar and your own references and your own rhythm, has existed for a long time. The news just didn’t always reach us. It got intercepted by writing workshops that taught us to write for a universal reader who was always white. By MFA programs that called our dialect “inconsistent voice” or ghetto. By the editorial process that smoothed us into something readable for people who were never going to read us anyway.

You were already free. You just didn’t know.

Writing from freedom is different from performing freedom on the page.

Performing freedom looks like writing something bold, then undercutting it with an explanation. Adding a footnote that translates your reference for the reader who doesn’t share it. Cleaning up the syntax that follows your actual thought because someone once told you it wasn’t grammatically correct.

Writing from freedom is quieter than that. It’s the AAVE left intact because that’s how the thought arrived. The dialect that doesn’t apologize. The sentence that follows the shape of your mind instead of the shape of the workshop handout. The story that doesn’t translate, and the decision to tell it anyway.

This is a practice. It requires you to catch yourself mid-translation and choose the original. It requires repetition because the conditioning runs deep. You will reach for the smooth version out of habit. The version that reads easily to someone who is not your reader. And then you will put it down and pick up the one that is yours.

Every time you do that, you are doing Juneteenth work.

Call it a posture.

Juneteenth is available every time you sit down to write. Every time you choose the word that is yours over the word that will scan more easily to someone outside your lineage.

Write something that doesn’t explain itself. Let that be the practice.

Years before The Story Temple, before Shadow & the Pen or Write From the Wound, before any of this had a name, I was simply a developmental editor. My client list was a mix of fantasy writers, sci-fi writers, and a handful of literary folks who wandered in from somewhere else. My job was strictly craft. Pacing, structure, character development, voice at the sentence level. I was good at it. I still am (very good at it).

But there was something I kept seeing in the work, and for years I didn’t have words for it.

The writing was often clean. Sometimes it was good enough that I’d sit back in my chair. But underneath some of it sat a quality I couldn’t quite place. Something held back. Something smaller than the story around it.

Here are a few things I was seeing on the page. A protagonist who took up less room than the story needed them to. A fictional world that felt borrowed, like somebody else’s house with somebody else’s furniture, and the writer was a guest instead of the one who built it. I was seeing magic systems that played it safe. And stakes that never quite climbed as high as the premise promised.

The questions these writers brought me were craft questions. Why does this scene feel flat? Why doesn’t this character feel real to me? Is the magic system working, or does it just look like it should? I answered as an editor. We talked about interiority, about specificity, about raising the stakes on the page. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t, and I couldn’t always explain why.

That essay was about the industry. This one stays closer to home: what happens before the industry ever sees the manuscript.

I’ve been in the publishing business for almost 10 years now, and have learned quite a bit from sitting across from those writers with their borrowed worlds and their careful dragons. The tax doesn’t start at the acquisitions table. It starts on page one. A writer who has spent their whole life absorbing the message that their work will read as too much, too Black, not relatable, and not what readers want, learns to shrink the dragon themselves, long before anyone else gets the chance to. Before they’ve written a single line, the white gaze is already in the room. And it’s wearing their own face.

There’s one session I keep coming back to. One of my first clients, a Black writer, working in fantasy romance, three drafts deep into a manuscript she couldn’t get past a certain point in. We’d been over the craft notes twice. The structure had good bones. The prose was clean. And still, every time she reached this one chapter, she stalled.

On a hunch, I asked if she’d be open to trying something different during one of our sessions. We pulled cards.

I read tarot intuitively, so as the cards came up, I started asking questions. About the novel, and about the season of life she was in. What was shifting underneath her. Because all of that comes through on the page, whether a writer knows it or not.

We talked for maybe ten minutes. Then she stopped answering and started writing. Feverish, head down, pen moving fast across the page. She filled two pages in her notebook before coming up for air. I watched something happen in her eyes that I still don’t have a clean word for. The closest I can get is alchemy.

She finished that chapter. Eventually she finished the draft.

Years later, I watched it happen again while teaching a workshop for a friend of mine who is a writing coach. A few days after the workshop, word got back to me that one of the attendees had been stuck on the same project for three years. By the end of the session, she wasn’t stuck anymore. Same thing, in front of strangers this time. Something underneath the craft problem, surfacing the moment someone made room for it.

I didn’t have language for any of it back then. I only knew that something had moved, something that craft feedback alone hadn’t been able to reach. Looking back, I understand now what I didn’t understand then. The inner work and the craft work weren’t two different practices. I’d been doing both the whole time without realizing it. I just didn’t have a name for either one yet.

Let me say plainly what the work I do is for.

It’s for the writer who wants to write the dragon, the joy, the space heist, the ordinary Tuesday where nothing happens except a family eating dinner together, and for it to be enough. It’s for writing anything at all without the nervous system treating the blank page like a courtroom.

The white gaze followed those writers into their invented worlds because it doesn’t live in the genre. It lives in the body. Jesmyn Ward has talked about getting frozen three chapters into Let Us Descend. Ward is a writer at the height of her powers, with every award and every credential. And yet she still met a wall she couldn’t write past. The work I do now dissolves the wound that credentials can’t heal.

Once the gaze loosens its grip, the subject matter can stay exactly the same. What opens up is everything underneath it: the dragon gets its size back, the world stops feeling borrowed and starts feeling like yours.

If you’ve ever opened a blank document to start something that was supposed to be entirely yours… your world, your rules, your magic… and felt the colors get pulled down before you wrote a single word, I want you to name what that is.

It’s the gaze. It’s old, and it’s been riding shotgun longer than you’ve been writing. It showed up before the story did.

Shadow & the Pen is where we look at that directly. Your manuscript and your wound, both in the room at once. Booking are available. To claim your spot, click here.

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About the author

High Priestess Lakeisha is the founder of The Story Temple, a spiritual writing sanctuary for Black writers healing their relationship with their voice. She is a developmental editor with close to 10 years of experience across fiction and nonfiction, an initiated priestess, a certified evolutionary astrologer, and a shadow work facilitator. Her editorial roots are in fantasy and speculative fiction, the genre space where she first saw the patterns she would later have language for.

Lakeisha’s work holds craft and spirit as one practice. The Elemental Writing Energetics framework reads the manuscript. The Elemental Shadow Wounds framework reads the architect behind the words (the writer). The Story Temple exists on a single premise: writing is a spiritual practice, and a free sentence is a prayer being answered.

Morrison knocked the gaze off the shoulder. Baldwin showed what the eyes could do once it was gone.

In 2026, there are over 144 Black-authored books tracked across every major genre: historical fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, Southern gothic, literary fiction, biography, cozy mystery. Black writers are writing pirates, space races, hip-hop dramas, neurodivergent family stories, and multigenerational epics. They’ve been doing this for decades. They’ve never stopped.

And yet.

Every few months, a review, a panel, or some publisher announcement uses the phrase “expanding the range of Black storytelling” as though the range were new. As though it had been waiting for permission. As though the surprise were genuine.

It isn’t.

The industry’s surprise isn’t a discovery. It’s a posture. And postures serve a purpose.

The evidence of range isn’t subtle. Percival Everett’s James won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Best Novel Hugos for the Broken Earth trilogy, a feat no one before or since has matched. Nnedi Okorafor published Death of the Author in 2025. Stacey Abrams is on her third thriller. Nicola Yoon is writing dystopian horror. The inaugural Atlanta Black Romance Book Festival in 2025 showcased every romance subgenre: paranormal, fantasy, queer, sports, historical, erotica, and inspirational, all in one room.

Eugen Bacon’s anthology Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction won both the 2025 Ignyte Award for Creative Nonfiction and the 2025 Locus Award. Africanfuturism,1 the literary movement Nnedi Okorafor defined formally in 2019, keeps producing major award winners. It’s not emerging. It’s been arrived.

The breadth isn’t new. The tracking of it is what’s new. And only barely.

The industry acts surprised because it’s structured to be surprised.

According to the Lee & Low Diversity Baseline Survey 2023, released in February 2024,2 72.5% of the U.S. publishing workforce identifies as white. Among executives, it’s 76.7%. Black employees represent 5.3% of the total workforce, a number that has held essentially flat across all three Lee & Low surveys.3 When the people controlling acquisitions, marketing budgets, and front-table placement overwhelmingly share one cultural vantage point, the range of Black storytelling becomes invisible. And the people with the power to invest in it are not, by and large, the people reading it.

Regina Brooks named the acquisitions filter directly: “If you know there’s an audience for a book and you know the book is going to sell — but it’s not something you would pick up and read — would you acquire that book?”4

#PublishingPaidMe is the clearest receipt for what that structure costs. Roxane Gay received $12,500 for An Untamed State and $15,000 for Bad Feminist. N.K. Jemisin received $25,000 per book for the Broken Earth trilogy, the same trilogy that won three consecutive Hugos.5 Jesmyn Ward had to fight, after winning the National Book Award, to get $100,000 for her next novel.6 Kiese Laymon paid ten times what his publisher had originally paid him to buy back the rights to two of his books.7

Lydia Kiesling received $200,000 for her debut novel. Lacy Johnson received $215,000 for her essay collection.8 These are the baseline for how the industry prices work it has already decided matters.

N.K. Jemisin named the mechanism: “Advances indicate what the publishing industry thinks readers will like in the future. In a racist industry trying to sell books to a racist public within a racist society? Implicit bias alone will make negotiations harder.” She called it “Lots of little biases at many points forming a big racist Voltron.”

Then came 2020. After George Floyd’s death, every major publisher issued statements. Black editors were hired into visible roles: Lisa Lucas as publisher of Pantheon and Schocken at Penguin Random House, Tracy Sherrod at Little, Brown, Dana Canedy as publisher of the Simon & Schuster flagship. DEI commitments were announced. Numbers were promised.

By May 2024, Lucas and Sherrod had both been dismissed or laid off.9 Canedy had departed in 2022. Researchers Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So found that between 2019 and 2023, novels by Black authors rose from 4% to 9% of Big Four output, then named exactly what the industry does next: “Publishers announce the acquisitions with fanfare. But publishers then fail to provide adequate investment in marketing, publicity, and sales; the titles underperform and, set up to fail, provide publishers with an excuse to disinvest.”

Print unit sales of books by Black authors fell 14% in 2025 compared to 2024.10 Black writers are writing more. The industry is supporting it less.

The surprise isn’t neutral. It does something specific.

It positions Black writers as newcomers to genres they’ve occupied for decades. Samuel R. Delany debuted in science fiction in 1962. Octavia Butler published her first novel in 1976 and became the first sci-fi writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. Charles R. Saunders coined “Sword and Soul,” an African-rooted heroic fantasy subgenre, in 1981.11 Jemisin has spoken about being told as a child that “Black women don’t write science fiction,” and about The Killing Moon being rejected for being “too Black.”12 Sixty-plus years of documented range. The industry still reaches for “surprising.”

The surprise reframes the industry’s failure to invest as a discovery to celebrate. It allows gatekeepers to take credit for recognizing what was never lost. It keeps the bar of proof permanently higher: a Black writer can’t simply write a great fantasy novel. They must write the one that finally “proves” Black writers can do this. As L.L. McKinney put it: “when our books flop or fail, it’s seen as a reflection on all Black storytelling instead of just that one book.”13 Then the clock resets.

Toni Morrison said it plainly: “If you can only be tall because someone is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”14 The industry’s surprise requires Black writers to remain perpetually emerging, never arrived, and always having to demonstrate range anew.

Black writers were always in every genre. The industry is being forced, slowly and selectively, to look at what was already in front of it.

The surprise is the tax. Black writers have been paying it for sixty years: re-proving range that was already documented, fighting for investment that was always deserved, and entering genres they never left.

The range was never missing. Only the recognition.

If you’ve been writing in the genre you love and something still feels like it’s being decided for you, that’s what we look at next.

She opens the document on her laptop.

Not for the first time this week. The third time. Maybe the fourth. She knows where she left off. It’s the scene she’s been circling for two months. The one that keeps coming out wrong, calibrated down, the feeling right but the words doing something she didn’t intend.

She reads the last paragraph she wrote. Her chest tightens. She closes the laptop.

And opens Substack on her phone instead.

Most writing advice will tell you that this writer simply isn’t disciplined. That real writers write every day. That resistance is just fear. That if you wanted it badly enough you’d figure out how to make time.

I’m going to tell you something different.

The block ain’t about discipline. It was never about discipline. The block is located in three places: your nervous system, your ancestors and the imagined white reader sitting on your shoulder while you try to write. And there ain’t a single word count goal, accountability partner or morning pages practice that can reach any of them.

This is not a character flaw. It is a wound. Three wounds, to be exact, and they’ve been operating in your writing sessions without a name for long enough.

The first wound is the Silence Wound.

Our ancestors were punished for literacy. Punished, whipped, killed and legislated against for the act of reading and writing and speaking in languages that belonged to them. That is in your nervous system. Not only as history we know about, but as inheritance our bodies carry.

So when you sit down to write something — a scene with full rage in it, a character whose spiritual life isn’t explained for white comfort, the thing you’ve been circling for three years — your body reads it as danger. The chest tightening isn’t procrastination. It’s protection. Your nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do across generations: keep you quiet so you stay safe.

The problem is, you’re not living in your great-great-grandmother’s reality. But your nervous system doesn’t know that yet.

The second wound is the Worthiness Wound.

You’ve been writing for an imagined white reader for so long you don’t even notice the moment you start. The hedge that shows up in the third sentence. The cultural reference you explain. You know… the one your people don’t need explaining. The scene that softens right before it gets real. The character whose interiority is calibrated down, made legible and made safe.

You’re not blocked on the writing. You’re blocked on the permission. The belief — installed by publishing culture, by MFA workshops, by a hundred small corrections — that your voice needs approval before it can matter. That your specificity is a liability. That you owe the imagined white reader access to everything.

You don’t owe them shit. But the wound doesn’t know that.

The third wound is the Performance Wound.

Somewhere you absorbed the belief that producing constantly is proof you deserve to call yourself a writer. That real writers write every day. That your inability to maintain a consistent rhythm — while working a full-time job, while running a household, while carrying your nervous system through a world that was not built for your flourishing, while doing the labor of being a Black woman alive in this particular historical moment — is evidence of inadequacy.

It isn’t.

You can’t productivity-hack your way through systemic oppression. You can’t grind your way to a regulated nervous system. The Performance Wound makes your very real constraints feel like personal failures. It keeps you grinding, judging and never resting, which is not a writing problem. It’s a survival pattern wearing writing’s clothes.

I didn’t name these wounds from theory.

I named them from watching them operate in the manuscripts of my clients.

Before I had a framework for any of this, I was a developmental editor working with fantasy and sci-fi writers. Black writers who had chosen speculative fiction specifically — I understood this later — because they thought it was a way out. A genre where they could finally write without performing their Blackness on every page. Magic systems, invented worlds, characters who simply existed without having to justify their existence to white readers.

The white gaze followed them in. I watched it happen in the manuscripts before I had language for it. Characters who came out flat, guarded, emotionally small. These writers had mind-bending imaginations and mad skills. But their nervous systems were still performing safety even in a world they made up entirely.

A tarot pull on a hunch named what two years of craft notes hadn’t.

That was the beginning of The Story Temple.

Here’s what I know is possible on the other side of this work (cuz I’ve seen it and experienced it myself):

A writing session that doesn’t start with chest tightening. A scene where the rage is real and stays real all the way to the end. A character whose spiritual life is fully inhabited, not performed for the back of the room. A rhythm built for your actual body, your actual energy and your actual life, instead of some ideal writer’s body that doesn’t have your history or current responsibilities.

The book gets written. The block gets named. The voice gets returned.

It has nothing to do with finding the right productivity system. And everything to do with you no longer trying to fix something that was never broken.

Your writer’s block ain’t a discipline problem.

It’s information your body has been holding. About your ancestors. About the white gaze. About what it has cost people who look like us to be fully heard.

Naming it is the first step.

The work of unlearning is what comes next.

𓂀✧⟡

If these words named something you’ve been carrying: Write From the Wound is the framework for going deeper. It’s a 7-day shadow work journey designed and built specifically for this type of excavation. The ancestral work, the white gaze, the nervous system and the page. On sale this week only for $27 (then, it goes back to $47). Join here.

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I mean that thing was pristine. Clean prose, consistent point of view, well-paced scenes that moved the reader along. It was the kind of writing that would get high marks in any creative writing class. The kind of manuscript an agent would call “polished.”

I read it twice. And both times, I set it down feeling nothing.

I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t frustrated. I wasn’t even bored, exactly. Just… empty. Like I’d walked through a beautifully decorated home and everything was covered in plastic. Like sofas used to be back in the day depending on whose house it was.

When I wrote the editorial letter, I struggled with how to say what I needed to say. Because the writing wasn’t bad. There wasn’t anything to circle in red, per se. There wasn’t a craft failure to diagnose and offer solutions and/or suggestions for. The structure was solid. The sentences sang. Every element was present and accounted for.

But the writer wasn’t in it.

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I’ve been an editor for years now, and the pattern I see most often isn’t bad writing. What I see is hollow writing. Writing that performs competence while the writer stands at a distance from their own pages.

Sidebar: Writers don’t hire editors because they write poorly. They hire editors because they write carefully. Too carefully. They want someone to call them back into the work they’ve been circling.

Hollow writing looks different than you might think.

It’s not the first draft that reads like a mess. That’s usually a writer who’s still inside the work, still discovering what they’re saying. The mess is honest and true. The mess has heat.

The hollow manuscript is the opposite. It’s the fifth or sixth draft. Or even the tenth draft in some cases. It’s been critiqued and beta-read and revised until every rough edge is gone. And somewhere in that process, somewhere between the raw truth and the final version, the writer left the room.

They can’t tell you when it happened. Half the time, they don’t even know it happened. They just know that the manuscript they sent me took months to finish and they can’t feel it anymore. They tell themselves that it’s just part of the process of revision. That distance is professionalism. That the absence of feeling means the work is finally ready.

Beloved writer, it’s not ready. It’s abandoned.

Not the way you abandon a project in a drawer. never to see the light of day. This is worse. This is a writer who kept showing up to the page consistently, kept doing the work, kept hitting their word counts and deadlines, and still lost the thread of why they were writing the book in the first place.

Stay with me cuz I’m not talking about writer’s block.

Writer’s block is when you can’t get to the page. When you can’t get the words to flow. That’s its own wound and it has its own medicine. But the writer who lost the way? They’re at the page every day or every week. They’re producing. They might even be publishing online. From the outside, they looks like they’re doing everything right.

The hollowness isn’t visible to anyone but them.

And sometimes… not even to them. Sometimes the only evidence is a low hum of dissatisfaction they can’t articulate. A feeling after they hit publish or type “the end” that should be relief but instead feels like indifference. The quiet knowledge that they used to feel something when they wrote. An aliveness, a heat, a sense that the words were pulling them somewhere they hadn’t been. And that feeling is gone now, but they can’t tell you when it left.

Some will call it burnout. Others will call it a creative rut. Some will buy a new planner or try a different writing schedule or sign up for another course on craft.

None of it will work cuz the problem isn’t any of those things.

The problem is that somewhere along the way, through all that revision and critique, they stopped writing toward something that mattered and started writing toward something that performed.

Here’s what I mean.

There’s a version of writing that moves. And there’s a version of writing that performs movement.

They look almost identical on the page. The sentences are strong in both. The structure holds in both. You could put them side by side and a casual reader might not know the difference.

But the writer knows. And as an editor who views writing differently, I know.

Writing that moves comes from a place inside the work. The writer is there, in the room, in the wound, in the body of the sentence. They’re writing toward a question they don’t fully have the answer to yet, and that not-knowing is what gives the prose its heat. The reader feels it. They probably can’t name it, but they feel it. Something in the writing is alive. Words carry energy, and it calls to them.

Writing that performs comes from a place behind the work. The writer has already decided what they’re saying. They’re managing the reader’s experience instead of sharing their own. The sentences are grammatically excellent but emotionally flat. The conclusions are arrived at before the essay or novel or whatever they’re writing begins. There’s no discovery happening because the writer already knows where they’re going, and that certainty is what makes the whole thing feel dead on the page.

I’ve done this myself. Written entire pieces that were well-constructed and completely hollow. Published them, even. Got the likes and the shares and the comments that said “this is so good,” and knew in my body that I hadn’t said the thing I sat down to say.

That’s the performance wound doing its work. It’s not visible in the craft execution. It’s visible in the why.

The writer who sent me that manuscript wasn’t a beginner or an emerging writer as some of y’all would say. She’d been writing seriously for over a decade. Had the credentials, had the writing practice, had the discipline that most writing teachers would hold up as the gold standard.

And she was miserable because the writing had stopped meaning something.

When I asked her, very gently in the way you ask something you’re not sure the other person is ready to hear, when she’d last written something that scared her, she went quiet. Not thinking-quiet like she was trying to remember an actual date in journal or something like that. The kind of quiet that means the question hit her somewhere she wasn’t expecting.

She said she couldn’t remember.

And then she said something that broke my heart a little:

I think I’ve been writing for an audience I don’t even want anymore.

And just like that, she identified the wound.

This isn’t a problem that any productivity system or writing course or editorial feedback can solve. The question underneath every sentence she’d written for years wasn’t “is this good enough?” It was “who am I writing this for, and when did I stop writing it for me?”

As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the full moon we had on April 1. Libra energy: the sign of balance, of reciprocity, of relationships. And it makes me think about how the relationship between a writer and their audience is one of the least examined relationships in a creative life.

We talk about finding your audience. Growing your audience. Serving your audience. Writing for your audience.

But we never ask: is this relationship costing you something?

Is the version of yourself that shows up on the page the version that’s true? Or is it the version that gets the most traction? Are you writing toward the readers who need your real voice? Or toward the ones who reward you for performing a voice that’s easier for them to consume?

Because there’s a difference. And the writer who lost the way can feel it even if they can’t name it.

The hollowness isn’t about the audience being wrong. It’s about the writer abandoning themselves to keep the audience comfortable.

So what does the road back look like?

There’s no four-step action plan.

What I will say is this: every writer I’ve worked with who found their way back did one specific thing. They stopped asking “is this good?” and started asking “is this true?”

I don’t mean true in the factual sense. I’m talking about true in the body sense. True in the way that makes your stomach tighten when you write it because you know it costs something to say it plainly. True in the way that makes you want to revise it into something softer and more palatable before anyone sees it and has something to say about it.

The road back is toward the writing that scares you.

It’s the paragraph you delete before anyone reads it. The sentence you hedge with “it felt like” or “in some ways” because saying it directly feels like too much. The piece you’ve been circling for months that you keep telling yourself isn’t ready yet, when what you mean is you’re not ready to be that visible.

That’s where your writing is. The real writing. The writing that moves.

It’s been waiting for you to stop performing and come back to the room.

Lemme ask you something directly:

When did writing stop feeling like yours?

When did it stop belonging to you? The real you. The one who writes because something inside them wants and needs to be said, not because something outside them needs to be produced?

Can you even remember?

And if you can, if there’s a moment, a season, a manuscript, a rejection, a revision that took the heat out of your voice, what would it look like to go back to the page before that happened?

That question might sit with you for a while. Let it.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

This essay was written as a door. If you felt something shift while reading, if the hollowness I described felt familiar in a way that caught you off guard… Write From the Wound is where that recognition becomes practice. It’s a self-paced course that helps you name what’s underneath your writing patterns and write from the other side of it.

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We have been included in this month the same way we have been included in just about all institutions: partially, belatedly and on terms we did not set. So when March arrives and the tributes begin, Black women writers are somewhere in the acknowledgment — but rarely at the origin.

Rarely treated as the question the whole month should be asking and pondering on. This essay begins with the work of a client of mine — a Black woman writer who reminded me what it looks like to refuse every condition this month was built on… and to write free anyway.

Back in January, I read a manuscript that really left an impression on me.

It was a high stakes murder mystery — set at an HBCU, steeped in Black Greek life and full of the kind of cultural specificity that doesn’t happen by accident. The kind that only comes when a writer trusts herself enough to put it there. But what touched me so deeply was the grief. One of the characters had been carrying something for twenty years. Not explaining it, not performing it for those around her, just holding it in the way that grief lives in a body. In the panic that comes without warning. In the dream that keeps returning. In the way recognition moves through muscle before it ever reaches the mind.

My client knew that grief. She had put it on the page with a precision that only comes from having carried something a long time.

And then, she kept going. Scene after scene, chapter after chapter. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t flatten out. Didn’t reach for the safe version of the story. She stayed in it all the way to the end.

I finished the manuscript assessment, wrote the editorial letter, sent it back to her and sat with something I don’t always get to feel as an editor.

A Black woman writer who didn’t leave herself out of her own work.

I want you to hold that image for a second. Because we don’t often talk about what it actually looks like when a Black woman writer stays on the page — fully, without apology, without translation.

It looks like an HBCU setting that isn’t explained for an outsider. The Black Greek life dynamics (cuz yes, there’s a difference), the sorority and fraternity history, the specific texture of that world. She trusted that it could just be there. She didn’t slow down to make sure everyone could follow. She wrote it like it was the only world the story knew, because it was.

It looks like grief that doesn’t get summarized. The character didn’t sit down and think about her trauma in organized paragraphs. Her body remembered before her mind did. That’s how it actually works. That’s also how a writer who isn’t performing safety or palatability writes it — as a lived thing happening in real time on the page as opposed to a mere concept.

It looks like relationships that don’t resolve cleanly. The women who failed their sorority sister twenty years ago showed up at the end. They weren’t redeemed or forgiven on a schedule. In fact, they weren’t redeemed or forgiven at all. They were just present. Everything was still complicated. They were still accountable. That complexity stayed intact because the writer didn’t reach for the easier ending.

In my editorial letter, I wrote:

Zahra had been sitting with that grief for 20 years; now it’s their turn to sit with their part in it.

This is what writing true looks like. And I want to name it specifically because the alternative — writing quiet — is so common, so normalized, that most writers can’t feel the distance between the two anymore.

There’s a particular feeling that comes over a draft when a writer has started writing for someone who isn’t her.

The prose tightens in certain places. Dialect gets smoothed out. The sentences that should have heat come out lukewarm instead. Not careless, but managed. The interiority that was so specific in the first chapter starts to reach for something more general by chapter three. More universal, which is a word that has done tremendous damage to Black writers and deserves its own essay entirely.

The writer still shows up. The story is still there. But you can feel the place where she made herself smaller.

Most of the time, the writer doesn’t know she did it. She may have felt something while she was writing. A constriction. A sense of herself getting a little quieter than she meant to be. Maybe it happened at the first sentence — the moment before she committed to the dialect, the cadence, the cultural specificity that was so alive in her head. Maybe it happened during revision, when she read it back and heard herself sounding “too much” and didn’t have language for what too much really meant or whose voice was saying it.

But she’d been taught — by workshops, by craft books, by every writing program that talks about universal appeal without ever asking whose universality we mean — to push through that feeling. To treat it like self-doubt. Like weakness. Like the enemy of a finished draft.

So she pushed through.

And what came out the other side was a draft that was technically and grammatically sound, but spiritually smaller than the writer who made it.

That’s the performance wound doing exactly what it was designed to do. It doesn’t announce itself. It just teaches you to call constriction discipline, and then it waits.

Zora Neale Hurston knew this feeling.

She also refused it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God was written in seven weeks in 1936, in a Haiti boarding house, and it is one of the most fully inhabited novels in literature despite the poor reception it initially received. Zora didn’t translate Black Southern vernacular for a white readership. She didn’t make her characters’ interiority more palatable or their speech more legible to people outside the culture. She wrote Black people’s interior lives the way Black people live them during that time — with specificity, with humor, with spiritual complexity, with the full register of a language that doesn’t need to apologize for itself.

The literary establishment of her time called it folklore. Called it dialect fiction. And questioned whether it was serious literature. Richard Wright, another Black writer, said it had no theme, no message, no protest.

She was reviewed dismissively, underpaid and largely forgotten by the literary mainstream while she was still alive. She died in 1960, in poverty, in a welfare home in Florida. Her grave went unmarked for over a decade. Alice Walker found it in 1973 and put a headstone there herself.

Think about what it took to maintain that level of refusal across an entire writing career while watching what it cost her. Zora knew the performance that was being asked of her. She had been educated, decorated and celebrated in certain rooms — and she still chose the fullness of the work over the safety of palatability.

I want you to sit with that timeline. The decades between Zora’s refusal and the manuscript I read back in January. Decades of Black women writers navigating the same wound, the same standardized reader, the same institutional pressure to manage their voice for rooms that were never built for them.

The performance wound is not a personal failing. It is a survival strategy with a very long institutional memory behind it.

Here is what I want you to understand about the wound.

It doesn’t require you to be a bad writer. It doesn’t require someone who doesn’t love her culture or her language or her people. It doesn’t even require a conscious choice.

All writers want their work to be read. That’s not a compromise. That’s not being a sellout. That’s the whole point of making something — you want it to meet somebody. But somewhere in the machinery of traditional writing education, wanting to be read got collapsed into writing for the people who decide what gets read. And for Black women writers, that has almost always meant writing for a readership that was never us, inside institutions that were never built for us, toward a standard of universality that was never universal.

The writer whose manuscript I read and assessed didn’t fall into that collapse. She wrote true — all the way through, all the way to the end — and it made everything land harder. The grief hit because she didn’t soften it. The relationships had complexity because she didn’t resolve them cleanly. The setting had specificity because she trusted it enough to leave it specific.

What does that feel like from the inside? I think it feels like staying in the room when everything in your training is telling you to step back. Like committing to the sentence you first heard in your head instead of the safer version that followed. Like trusting that the reader who needs your work will find it — and writing for them, not for the white reader publishing taught you to keep in mind.

My client wrote for the story. Not for the white reader we as Black writers are trained to center. And that is an act of resistance that most writing workshops will never name as such — but it is. Every time a Black woman writer chooses her own language over the managed version, stays in the body of a character instead of summarizing the feeling, leaves the cultural specificity intact instead of translating it — she is doing something Zora did all throughout her writing career that still hasn’t become unremarkable.

It should be unremarkable by now.

It isn’t.

So I’ll ask you directly: when you sit down to write, who are you writing for?

Not who you say you’re writing for. Who you’re actually writing for when you smooth that sentence out. When you take the dialect back out. When you read the paragraph back and decide it’s too much — too specific, too loud, too Black, too you.

Who told you that was too much?

And are you still letting them sit in the room while you write?

If the performance wound is what’s been running your first drafts, this is where you begin.

Write From the Wound is seven days of going underneath what’s been making you write small, so you can find out what you actually sound like on the page.

Write From the Wound → $47. Seven days. Your voice was never the problem.

with love from the waters,

High Priestess Lakeisha

In this piece, we name what trained it.

I don’t remember the first time I softened my voice on the page. If I had to guess, it was probably back in high school.

That’s the thing about internalized oppression — it doesn’t feel like oppression. It feels like rigor. Like discipline. Like being good at writing.

You don’t just wake up one day and realize you’ve been policing yourself. That’s not how it works. You get interrupted. You do a writing exercise that forces you to notice what you delete before anyone tells you to. You trace it back. You remember the moment someone told you the way you wrote something was wrong — and you decided authenticity wasn’t enough. Approval was safer.

And from there, the policing becomes automatic.

Writing sentences, then deleting them before anyone sees. Using a cultural reference, then explaining it even though your community doesn’t need the translation. Code-switching automatically, your hands moving faster than your conscious mind.

You learn what gets rewarded: performance of whiteness.

And what gets punished: authentic Blackness.

The really insidious part? There’s no white English professor marking up your work anymore. No editor telling you to “tone it down.” No workshop facilitator calling your voice “unprofessional.”

You’re doing it to yourself.

The price of approval is erasure. And once you’ve paid it enough times, you don’t even need external pressure to keep paying.

White-dominated publishing has spent centuries systematically working to steal pieces of Black and Brown writers — our voices, our authority, our right to exist on the page without translation.

And because it’s so ingrained, we don’t even notice it happening anymore. The publishing industry no longer has to work as hard as when the plan was implemented centuries ago.

We’ve internalized the theft, which was the plan all along.

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What They Took: A Non-Exhaustive List

They took our language.

Ebonics isn’t “incorrect or broken English.” It’s a legitimate linguistic system with consistent grammar rules, developed through creativity and survival. But writing workshops call it “unprofessional.” Editors (not me) “clean it up.” Teachers mark it wrong.

So we code-switch on the page without even thinking about it. We translate ourselves before anyone asks us to. We erase the way we actually think and speak to make our writing “acceptable.”

They took our specificity.

White stories about white people in white suburbs are called “universal.” Our stories about Black communities, Brown families, cultural traditions — those are called “niche.”

As if whiteness is somehow the baseline human experience and everything else is other. As if our specificity is a limitation instead of exactly where our power lives.

So we try to write broadly. We add white characters for “relatability.” We explain cultural references Black readers already understand. We perform “universality” which really just means: accessible to whiteness.

They took our authority.

How many times have you been called (or called yourself) an “aspiring writer”2 when other writers with equal or less experience call themselves “authors”?

How many times have editors and agents questioned whether your lived experience is “authentic enough” or “marketable enough”?

How many times have you been told your perspective is “too political” when white writers get to write politics as if it’s just craft?

They took our authentic voice and called it “unprofessional.”

Too direct. Too emotional. Too angry. Too joyful. Too raw. Too honest.

All those “too much” criticisms? They’re not about writing craft. They’re about controlling what we’re allowed to say and how we’re allowed to say it.

So we soften our edges. We moderate our emotions. We perform the kind of “professionalism” that really just means: palatable to white comfort.

They took our right to complexity.

Black characters who are flawed — because what human isn’t — get called “stereotypes.” Black characters who are successful get called “unrealistic.” Black joy is “not grounded in the reality of systemic oppression.” Black rage is “making it all about race.”

We can’t win. So we perform a kind of sanitized, non-threatening Blackness that proves we’re “one of the good ones.” That makes white readers comfortable. That never challenges anything, including our own thinking.

And in the process, we lose our full humanity on the page.

They took our capacity for opacity.

The right to NOT be fully legible to white readers. The right to write for our community first without translating every reference. The right to have inner lives and cultural practices that don’t need white approval or understanding.

Fred Moten and other Black studies scholars talk about opacity as boundary, as protection, as sovereignty.

But white publishing wants us transparent. Explained. Accessible. Digestible.

So we perform clarity that’s really just code for: we’ve made it easy for white readers to consume us without doing any work to understand our context.

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How the Theft Happens

The truth: most of this doesn’t happen through explicit feedback anymore.

You’ve internalized it so completely that you police yourself before anyone else sees your work.

You write a sentence in your natural voice. Your hands move to soften it before you even consciously register what you’re doing.

That’s how colonization works. Eventually, you don’t need external censors. You’ve become your own.

The high school English teachers who marked up my essays and book reports? They’re not in the room anymore.

The instructors of the courses I took and studied my ass off to become a professional editor? They’re not in the room anymore either.

I no longer hear their voices when editing the writing of others. But sometimes I still hear them when I write. I still catch my hands moving to “fix” sentences that don’t need fixing. I still have to consciously choose not to translate.

Like many other writers, I learned early what gets rewarded: performance of whiteness.

And what gets punished: authentic Blackness.

The theft isn’t just what they took. It’s how they trained us to keep stealing from ourselves.

What It Cost Us

Every time I changed my lived experience, I practiced erasure.

Every time I explained a cultural reference Black readers already knew, I centered whiteness.

Every time I softened a sharp truth to make white readers comfortable, I betrayed my own voice.

And I’m not alone in this. Which is why I’m so committed to my work.

Every Black and Brown writer I’ve had conversations with has stories like mine. The feedback that was really racism. The “advice” that was really assimilation. The ways we learned our authentic selves weren’t acceptable.

The cost isn’t individual. It’s collective.

We’ve lost entire generations of voices who were silenced not necessarily by explicit gatekeeping, but by exhaustion. By the constant code-switching. The grinding effort of trying to make ourselves acceptable to systems that weren’t designed for us.

We’ve lost the books that would have been written if we didn’t have to spend so much energy performing palatability.

We’ve lost the radical truth-telling that happens when writers feel free to center their own communities instead of translating for white comfort.

We’ve lost the full complexity of our humanity because we learned early that complexity makes people uncomfortable, and discomfort means it’s less likely we get published.

The cost cannot be calculated.

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Strategic Theft of Our Liberation

What Spirit wants you to know: what was taken can be reclaimed.

Not by asking permission. Not by proving we deserve it. Not by making ourselves more acceptable.

By stealing it back.

Yes, you read that correctly. By stealing our shit back.

Strategic theft of our own liberation.

I’m stealing back my voice — the one they told me was unprofessional (especially to be calling myself an editor and writing guide).

I’m stealing back my authority — the one they tried to gatekeep behind their approval.

I’m stealing back my right to opacity — the one they demanded I sacrifice for “universal” appeal.

I’m stealing back my language, my specificity, my complexity, my authentic expression.

And I’m on a mission to teach you to do the same. We finna get our lick back.

What We Take Back

We take back our language.

Ebonics in our narration, not just dialogue. Code-switching as a narrative device showing cultural navigation and range. Our actual voices without apology or translation.

We take back our specificity as strength.

Writing for Black readers first. Period. Not explaining shit that don’t need to be explained. Knowing that cultural references are for us, not them.

We take back our authority.

Calling ourselves writers without qualification. Standing firm in our lived experience as expertise. Refusing to prove we deserve to be here.

We take back our authentic voice.

Sharp when it needs to be sharp. Soft when it wants to be soft. Angry, joyful, complex, messy, human — without moderating for white comfort.

We take back our complexity.

Flawed characters who are fully human. Black joy without justification. Black rage without apology. The full range of our experience without sanitizing it.

We take back our right to opacity.

Writing that centers us. Boundaries around what we share and what we protect. Sovereignty over our own stories. Writing from liberation instead of survival.

This is what liberation looks like.

Not waiting for the system to change — cuz it won’t. Not asking for permission — cuz it won’t be given. Not performing until we’re acceptable — cuz we’ll never be.

So we say we’re taking it back.

Language.
Specificity.
Authority.
Opacity.

But are you? For real?

Reclaiming something in theory is easy.

Reclaiming it on the page is where the fear shows up.

If you’re still translating your cultural references before anyone asked you to…

If you’re still softening direct statements so they sound “fair”…

If you’re still explaining your anger so it feels reasonable…

You haven’t taken it back.

You’ve simply renamed the protection.

That’s the part that’s hard to admit.

White publishing trained the reflex.

But you’re the one revising the sentence.

So before you celebrate reclamation, ask yourself:

Where am I still editing for approval I claim I don’t care about?

Where am I still making my work digestible for readers who are not centered here?

And what would this paragraph look like if I stopped doing that?

Not to make it louder or meaner.

But to show — to myself — that I’m uninterested in being understood by everyone.

This is the work.

Not naming the system. That’s public info at this point.

The work is refusing to keep cooperating with it.

The next time your hand hovers over delete, pause.

Ask yourself:

Is this craft?

Or is this compliance?

If this struck a nerve, if you recognized your own hands hovering over delete, that’s not coincidence. That’s the Worthiness Wound asking to be witnessed.

Write From the Wound is a self-paced 7-day shadow work journey built for this moment. Real tools and practices for teaching your nervous system it’s safe to stop complying.

It’s $47, and you gain access immediately after joining. And it will ask you to be honest in ways this essay only introduced.

If you’re ready: JOIN HERE

If you’re not ready yet, download The 3 Wounds Blocking Your Writing. It’s free and it’s where the excavation begins: SIGN UP HERE

Writers soften their sharpest lines — not because the writing is weak, but because the nervous system is protecting against a critique that was once real.

Today we move from awareness to practice.

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“Myself.”

“My community.”

“Whoever needs it.”

But the real answer doesn’t live in the mouth. It lives in the body.

I read manuscripts every week. And in almost every opening, I see the same pattern.

Note: By manuscripts, I mean anything you’re drafting with intention — novels, yes, but also essays, articles, personal narratives, even poetry. Anywhere you’re putting your truth on the page and someone will read it. The protection shows up the same way regardless of form.

The sharpest sentence being softened.

The boldest claim being explained.

The most honest line being trimmed or removed altogether.

The writing isn’t weak. That’s rarely the case.

The writer is protecting themselves.

The reader you’re writing for isn’t some abstract future audience.

They’re internalized.

They’re the workshop instructor who said, “Make it more universal.”

The publishing standard that rewarded distance over specificity.

The English classroom where clarity meant conformity.

The white-centered writing education that framed certain voices as “too much.”

The critique was real.

It happened in a specific moment — maybe once, maybe repeatedly — and the body registered it as a threat.

Someone in authority told you (directly or indirectly) that your authentic voice was wrong. Too direct. Too angry. Too specific. Too much.

The consequences were real.

Lower grades. Rejection letters. Workshop silence. Being told your work “isn’t quite ready yet” without explanation of what would make it ready.

And your nervous system adapted.

Because the nervous system’s job is survival, not art.

It learned: honesty has a cost. Specificity creates risk. Boldness invites critique.

And it developed a solution: soften before someone else demands it.

This isn’t happening on a conscious level. This isn’t a choice the writer is making while drafting.

This is protection playing out on the page.

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Here’s what this protection looks like in the actual writing.

The opening loses tension.

Instead of starting with the sharpest truth, the work eases in with context. Background. Setup. The real hook appears in chapter 3 instead of chapter 1.

The voice becomes slightly explanatory.

The narrator starts justifying claims before making them. Adding qualifiers. Building cases for assertions that don’t need defending.

“I think...” “It seems...” “Perhaps...” “In some ways...”

Specificity gives way to qualification.

The cultural detail that would make the scene vivid gets generalized. The AAVE dialogue gets “cleaned up.” The specific reference that Black readers would recognize immediately gets removed because “everybody won’t get it.”

The urgency dissipates.

The forward momentum slows. The reader starts skimming instead of leaning in. The writer wonders why the pacing feels off even though nothing technically wrong is happening.

This isn’t because the writer lacks craft skills.

It’s because their nervous system intervened before the page could fully speak.

I can usually see this within five pages of any manuscript.

The moment where the writer started protecting themselves instead of creating fully.

Once you recognize it, you can’t unsee it.

This isn’t about bravery.

Let me be clear: writers don’t soften their lines because they’re insecure or afraid or not committed enough to their work.

They soften them because they’ve internalized a reader whose approval once mattered.

That reader may not even be in the room anymore.

The workshop ended years ago. The classroom is long closed. The rejection came from an editor who’s moved on to other manuscripts.

But their echo is still present.

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between past threat and present safety.

It remembers: boldness = danger. Softness = survival.

So even when you’re alone at your desk, writing for yourself, the protection mechanism activates.

You write a sharp sentence.

Then immediately — before you consciously decide to — you soften it.

This happens in the micro-moment between impulse and execution.

The thought: “She destroyed everything we built.”

The protection: “She seemed to destroy…”

The thought: “White people fear Black authority.”

The protection: “Some people seem uncomfortable with…”

The softening happens so fast you don’t even notice you’re doing it.

Until someone like me reads your opening pages and asks: where’s the sentence you wrote first, before you made it safer? This often results in a confused look. The reason I can ask this so naturally is because I’ve caught myself doing this on many occasions.

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Here’s what I’ve learned from reading hundreds of opening chapters:

Every writer is writing for two audiences simultaneously.

The stated reader: The actual person who will hold this book. Your community. The people who need this story or argument or truth.

The internalized reader: The voice of critique that taught you to protect. The writing workshop. The classroom. The publishing standard. The white gaze.

And in most manuscripts, the internalized reader is running the show.

It’s not that you want them to.

It’s simply because protection doesn’t ask for permission.

The nervous system sees a potential threat and responds before your conscious mind can say “chill out, that reader isn’t relevant anymore.”

You think you’re writing for yourself.

But the opening pages reveal you’re writing for approval you don’t even want.

This is the pattern I see every single week.

And once you see it in your own work, everything shifts.

Before you revise your next paragraph, ask yourself:

Whose critique am I anticipating in this sentence?

Not whose approval do you want.

Whose criticism are you preemptively defending against?

Is that voice still relevant?

Is that person still in your life? Do they still hold power over your work? Are they even part of your intended audience?

Or is it an echo?

A voice from the past that your nervous system still treats as a present-day threat.

Most of the time, when I ask writers this question, they realize:

The reader they’re protecting themselves from either doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant anymore.

The consequence they’re avoiding is no longer real.

The approval they’re seeking is from someone whose opinion they don’t actually respect or care about.

The protection is habitual, not necessary.

And habits can be changed.

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When you write for the internalized critic instead of your actual reader, your opening loses the very thing that would make someone want to read further.

The tension.

The specificity.

The honest voice that says: I see something you might not have seen, and I’m going to show it to you directly.

That’s what opening pages are supposed to do.

Not ease the reader in gently.

Not explain why they should care.

Not prove you’re qualified to say this.

Hook them with the truth you’re brave enough to state plainly.

But you can’t write that opening if you’re protecting yourself from a reader who doesn’t matter.

You have to know who you’re actually writing for.

Not in theory.

In your nervous system.

Because the body doesn’t lie.

The mouth can say “I’m writing for my community.”

But the page reveals: you’re writing for the workshop instructor who dismissed your first chapter.

And that’s the work.

Not just craft revision.

Nervous system retraining. Shadow work. Healing.

Learning to write from a place of safety instead of protection.

Understanding that the readers who need your work — who will recognize themselves in your specificity, who will feel seen by your boldness — they’re not the ones who taught you to soften.

The people who benefit from your authentic voice are not the people who punished it.

Once you internalize that, your opening pages change.

This is what I mean when I say most writing problems aren’t simply craft problems.

You can study story structure. Master pacing. Nail voice and dialogue and scene work.

But if your nervous system is protecting you from an imaginary threat, there ain’t a craft book in the world that can save the opening.

Because the protection will show up before the craft does. Every. Single. Time.

This is shadow work for writers.

Excavating the internalized voices that shape your choices before you consciously make them.

Identifying whose approval you’re seeking (and whether you even want it).

Recognizing where the softening happens — and why.

Then rewriting without the protection.

Not recklessly.

Not without craft or care.

But without preemptive self-censorship.

Without your nervous system intervening to save you from consequences that aren’t real anymore.

That’s what creates opening pages that actually land.

Not perfect craft.

Craft in service of truth instead of protection.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself — if you can feel the places where you’ve softened before someone else could criticize — you’re already halfway there.

Awareness is the first layer.

Seeing the pattern changes how you write going forward.

But integration requires practice.

Learning to write without the internalized critic takes more than intellectual understanding.

It takes excavation.

That’s what Write From the Wound is for.

Seven days of identifying the voices you’re protecting yourself from. The inherited patterns that shaped your relationship to boldness. The nervous system responses that activate before you consciously choose.

Then learning to write without them.

Not by force. Not by trying harder.

By understanding where the protection came from — and choosing something different.

This is the work beneath the work.

The shadow work that makes craft actually usable.

Because you can’t write your sharpest truth if your body is protecting you from consequences that aren’t real anymore.

Write From the Wound is seven days of excavating what’s really blocking your voice.

Daily emails with tools for nervous system awareness, pattern recognition and rewriting without protection.

The cost is $27 until Feb 17th. Then the price increases to $47.

Starts immediately when you join.

This isn’t craft advice.

This is the work that makes craft advice actually land.

Join here: Write From the Wound

Your opening pages are waiting for you to write them without the internalized critic.

Let’s excavate what’s in the way.

To kill your darlings.

To write tight.

To use active voice.

To avoid adverbs.

These sound like neutral writing principles. They’re not.

Craft rules were developed primarily by white writers analyzing white literature for white readers. Then they got dressed up as universal laws — objective standards that separate “good” writing from “bad.”

What they don’t tell you is:

For Black and Brown writers, these “neutral” craft rules become weapons. They get used to police your voice, dismiss your perspective and force you to translate your truth into something more palatable for white comfort.

This is craft in the context of oppression.

And until you understand which rules actually serve your work and which ones are just gatekeeping dressed up as pedagogy, you’ll keep questioning yourself instead of the system.

How “Good Craft” Became Code for “White Craft”

Let’s be clear about where craft advice comes from.

The writing workshops. The MFA programs. The craft books that get assigned as required reading. The editors who decide what’s “publishable.”

Overwhelmingly white spaces. Overwhelmingly white voices.

They studied their own literature - Hemingway, Carver, Strunk & White - and declared the patterns they found to be universal principles.

“Good writing is concise.”

“Good dialogue is sparse.”

“Good prose is invisible.”

But what they were really saying is: “White middle-class American literary aesthetics are the standard. Everything else is deviation.”

So when you show up with:

• AAVE that’s grammatically consistent but doesn’t follow Standard English

• Cultural references that don’t need translation for Black readers

• Storytelling rhythms from oral traditions, not written ones

• Rage that doesn’t perform measured response

• Joy that doesn’t center white comfort

You get told your craft needs work.

It’s not because your craft is weak — in many cases it isn’t. It’s because your craft doesn’t conform.

The Specific Ways Craft Advice Weaponizes

Let me be specific about how this plays out.

“Show Don’t Tell”

What it means in white craft spaces: Create vivid scenes. Let readers draw their own conclusions. Trust the audience.

How it weaponizes against Black writers: Your anger needs to be more subtle. Your pain can’t be stated directly. Your rage must be shown through “complex” character development, not named outright.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

White writer writes:

“She watched her son’s teacher call on every white student twice before acknowledging him. She gripped the edge of her chair.”

Feedback: “Beautiful restraint. The tension is palpable.”

Black writer writes:

“She watched her son’s teacher call on every white student twice without acknowledging him. Even though his hand was the first to go up with each question. This was her son’s first experience with racism - and he didn’t even know it. And they’ll tell you you’re imagining it.”

Feedback: “Too on the nose. Show us how she feels instead of telling us it’s racism. Trust your readers to understand.”

The double standard: White writers get praised for subtlety. Black writers get told we’re not subtle enough - but only when we name racism directly. The “show don’t tell” rule becomes a weapon to keep us from calling the thing what it is.

Toni Morrison told. James Baldwin told. Audre Lorde told.

They showed too. But they refused to hide truth behind craft “rules” designed to make people comfortable.

“Kill Your Darlings”

What it means in white craft spaces: Cut anything you love that doesn’t serve the story. Don’t be precious about beautiful sentences.

How it weaponizes against Black writers: Cut the cultural references. Remove the AAVE dialogue. Delete the grandmother’s wisdom that white readers won’t understand. Trim anything “too specific” to Black experience.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

White writer writes:

“’You’re being unconscionable,’ her mother said, which reminded her of that summer at the Cape, when Dad had used the same word about the neighbors’ poorly maintained garden.”

Feedback: “Love the layered memory and the vocabulary - very literary.”

Black writer writes:

“’You ain’t got the sense God gave a goose,’ her grandmother said, which reminded her of summers in South Carolina, when Big Mama would say the same thing about anybody acting brand new.”

Feedback: “I don’t understand this dialect. Can you make the grandmother’s dialogue more accessible? And ‘acting brand new’ needs explanation — not all readers will understand what that means.”

The double standard: White writers get to keep their darlings - the Cape, unconscionable, poorly maintained gardens. Black writers get told our darlings (AAVE, Big Mama, acting brand new, South Carolina summers) need to be cut or translated.

Your darlings become code for “anything that centers Blackness.”

Zora Neale Hurston kept her darlings. Every piece of Eatonville, Florida. Every “Ah” and “chile” and proverb. And they tried to tell her it wasn’t literary enough. Emphasis on tried.

“Write Tight”

What it means in white craft spaces: Remove unnecessary words. Make every sentence earn its place. Economy of language.

How it weaponizes against Black writers: Your prose is too lyrical. Too rhythmic. Too much repetition. It needs to be “cleaned up.”

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

White writer writes:

“The light filtered through the trees, dappled and golden, the way it always did in September, the way it had that first summer, the way it would again.”

Feedback: “Beautiful use of repetition for rhythm.”

Black writer writes:

“The music was in her body. In her bones. In the way her grandmother used to hum while braiding her hair. In the way her daughter hummed now, the same song, the same rhythm, the same knowing.”

Feedback: “This feels repetitive. Tighten it up - you’re saying the same thing multiple times. Cut it down to one clear sentence.”

The double standard: White writers using repetition for rhythm = literary technique. Black writers using repetition for rhythm = needs to be cleaned up.

Jesmyn Ward writes “loose” by white standards. Long, flowing, repetitive sentences rooted in oral tradition. She won two National Book Awards. Her “excessive” prose is mastery of a different aesthetic.

“Active Voice Over Passive”

What it means in white craft spaces: Put your characters in action. Make them agents of their own stories.

How it weaponizes against Black writers: Your characters are too passive. They need more agency. Why don’t they just fight back?

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

White writer writes:

“She let her boss take credit for her work again. She hated herself for it, but she needed this job.”

Feedback: “Good internal conflict. We see her trapped by economic necessity.”

Black writer writes:

“She let her boss take credit for her work again. In the meeting, she’d felt her face arrange itself into something neutral. She’d learned that expression from her mother, who’d learned it from her mother - the art of swallowing rage to survive another day.”

Feedback: “Why doesn’t she speak up? This character feels too passive. Give her more agency - have her confront the boss or start looking for another job. Readers need to see her take action.”

The double standard: White characters can be trapped by circumstance and get praised for complexity. Black characters in the same situation get called passive - because the advice doesn’t account for the reality that our passivity is often survival strategy. We live this shit every day.

When your character lives under surveillance, under threat, under systems designed to punish resistance — passive voice might be the most truthful rendering.

White craft advice assumes your characters have the privilege of action. That agency is always available, which we know isn’t always true for us.

“Avoid Adverbs”

What it means in white craft spaces: Strong verbs don’t need modification. Adverbs are crutches for weak writing.

How it weaponizes against Black writers: This one’s just arbitrary as hell.

Here’s what this looks like in practice:

White writer writes:

“She left quickly.”

Feedback: “Avoid adverbs. Try: She fled / She bolted / She rushed out.”

Black writer writes:

“She left quickly.”

Feedback: “Avoid adverbs. Try: She fled / She bolted / She rushed out.”

The deal with this one: It’s the same feedback for everyone, but it’s still bullshit. This rule exists because Stephen King said so in a craft book. That’s it. It’s preference dressed up as law.

Some languages and oral traditions use adverbs naturally for rhythm and emphasis. They’re not crutches — they’re choices.

Use adverbs when they serve your work. Ignore this rule when it doesn’t.

The Pattern: Policing Disguised as Pedagogy

See the pattern?

The same techniques get praised in white writers and criticized in Black writers.

Repetition for rhythm = literary when they do it, excessive when we do it.

Cultural specificity = rich detail when they do it, inaccessible when we do it.

Naming racism directly = trusting readers when they do it, being “too on the nose” when we do it.

Strategic passivity = complex character when they do it, lack of agency when we do it.

This isn’t a violation of craft principles. This is refusing to assimilate.

The Way I See It

Here’s what I’ve learned since starting my editorial business back in the days of covid:

Good craft serves your vision. Not their comfort.

Craft is a tool. Tools have purposes. The question shouldn’t be “am I following the rules?” The question should be: “Does this choice serve what I’m trying to create?”

Sometimes tight prose serves your vision. Sometimes expansive, rhythmic language does.

Sometimes showing through scene is powerful. Sometimes telling directly is more honest.

Sometimes active voice creates agency. Sometimes passive voice reveals truth about power.

The tool (craft) isn’t the problem. It’s the assumption that white aesthetic preferences are universal laws — that’s the problem.

How to Use Craft Without Being Used By It

So what do you do with craft advice now that you know it’s often weaponized?

1. Ask: Who is this rule serving?

Every craft rule serves someone’s aesthetic preference. Whose preference is it? Does it align with your vision or contradict it?

“Show don’t tell” serves readers who trust metaphor more than directness. If your work requires directness — tell.

2. Look at who breaks the rules successfully — and learn from them

Toni Morrison “told” constantly. Her narrators offered direct commentary.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote “loose” lyrical prose full of dialect.

James Baldwin’s essays are full of “unnecessary” repetition for rhythm.

Jesmyn Ward writes long, flowing sentences that white minimalists would cut.

They’re considered masters because their “rule-breaking” served their vision.

3. Trust your instincts about your own work

If a craft rule makes your work feel less true, less yours, less alive — question it.

Your gut knows when you’re assimilating vs. when you’re refining.

One feels like shrinking. The other feels like clarity.

4. Get feedback from people who understand context

I’m a professional editor, y’all. Hear me when I say this: not every reader can give you useful craft feedback.

Useful feedback names specific craft elements and explains how they’re working (or not working) in service of your vision.

“This feels off” = not useful

“The pacing slows here because you’re using three paragraphs of backstory right when tension is building” = useful

“I didn’t connect with this character” = not useful

“This character’s actions contradict their stated motivation in chapter two, which breaks trust” = useful

“This dialogue feels unrealistic” = not useful

“This code-switching feels inconsistent - she uses AAVE with her family but not with her Black coworkers, and I’m not clear if that’s characterization or an oversight” = useful

But here’s what happens way too often:

Readers — regardless of race — who’ve internalized white craft standards as “correct” will give you feedback that’s actually just opinion dressed up as craft advice:

“The cultural references are distracting” = I don’t understand them, so cut them

“The dialogue needs cleaning up” = make the AAVE more palatable for me

“This character needs more agency” = I don’t understand strategic passivity as survival

“You’re being too direct about racism” = this makes me uncomfortable

Even Black readers can give harmful feedback if they’re measuring your work against white standards.

If they learned craft in white workshops, read white craft books, internalized that “tight” means Carver and “literary” means minimalism - they might tell you your work needs fixing when your work is fine.

Find readers who:

• Understand craft elements by name (pacing, tension, arc, stakes)

• Can separate personal preference from craft effectiveness

• Recognize different aesthetic traditions as valid (not just deviations from white norms)

• Ask “does this serve the writer’s vision?” instead of “would I write it this way?”

• Understand that your “rule-breaking” might be mastery of a different tradition

The best feedback helps you refine your vision — not replace it with theirs.

5. Separate craft from gatekeeping

Some craft advice is genuinely useful: structure, pacing, character development, narrative arc.

Some craft advice is gatekeeping: “proper” grammar (meaning white), “accessible” language (meaning translated), “universal” themes (meaning white-centered).

Learn to tell the difference.

The Shadow Work Connection

Understanding which craft rules serve you and which ones are oppression in disguise?

That’s shadow work.

You’ve internalized voices:

• The writing workshop that told you your dialogue “wasn’t quite right” (because it was AAVE)

• The teacher who praised “clean” prose (code for white aesthetic)

• The editor who wanted you to “develop” the character more

• The feedback that made you question your instincts

These voices live in your body now.

Every time you sit down to write, you’re filtering your choices through their standards. Questioning your authentic voice. Second-guessing your craft decisions.

It’s not because your craft is weak. Of course, there will always be room for improvement.

It’s because you’ve been taught to distrust yourself.

Shadow work excavates those internalized voices. Helps you separate:

• What’s actually serving my vision

• What’s gatekeeping I internalized as truth

• What’s my authentic craft vs. What’s performance for white approval

This is the work Write From the Wound does.

Seven days of excavating inherited blocks. White gaze wounds. Nervous system survival responses. All the conditioning that makes you question your craft when your craft is fine - it’s the context that’s oppressive.

JOIN WRITE FROM THE WOUND

Liberation Through Craft Mastery

Here’s what I want you to understand:

Mastering craft doesn’t mean following rules.

It means knowing craft deeply enough to make conscious choices about when to follow conventions and when to break them.

It means trusting your instincts about what your work needs.

It means refusing to shrink your voice to fit aesthetic preferences.

It means using craft to serve your vision — not performing craft to earn approval.

The greatest Black writers didn’t follow white craft rules. They mastered craft on their own terms. They created work so powerful it forced the “rules” to expand.

You can do the same.

But first, you have to excavate which “rules” you’ve internalized. Which voices are blocking you. Which craft advice is actually gatekeeping.

That’s the shadow work.

Join Write From the Wound

If you read this and felt something shift — recognition, rage, relief — this work is for you. And I invite you to join us.

Write From the Wound is a 7-day shadow work journey specifically for Black and Brown writers ready to excavate what’s really blocking them.

Not craft books that assume white aesthetic is neutral.

Not workshops that police your voice.

Not advice that makes you question your instincts.

It’s a deep excavation of:

• Inherited silence from ancestors who couldn’t speak

• White gaze wounds that make you perform instead of create

• Nervous system blocks that traditional advice doesn’t talk about

• Internalized “rules” you learned to survive — not to thrive

What you get:

Immediate access:

• Welcome Guide (how to prepare)

• Tarot/Oracle Basics (demystifying the tools)

• Complete Resource Library (books, teachers, practices)

Starting January 19:

• 7 daily emails with teaching, prompts, practices, rituals

• Tools for working with resistance, ancestral patterns, craft gatekeeping

• Framework for building a liberation practice that serves YOUR vision

Presale price ($17) ends Sunday, Jan 18

Regular price ($27) starts Monday, Jan 19

You have 5 days to join at presale price.

Everyone starts the journey January 19 together.

JOIN WRITE FROM THE WOUND

Stop questioning your craft when the context is what’s broken.

Start excavating what your true blocks are.

The underworld is waiting.

With love and fire,

Lakeisha, High Priestess of The Story Temple

Write From the Wound is a 7-day email journey created by Lakeisha, High Priestess of The Story Temple. I’m an editor, teacher and practitioner who works at the crossroads of craft, culture and spirituality. I teach Black and Brown writers to write from liberation, not performance.

Questions? Drop a comment down below.

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Most Black writers I talk to say they want to write their truth.

But whenever I mention shadow work, they get quiet. Or defensive. Or they change the subject entirely.

I hear the same responses:

“That’s for witches.”

“I don’t mess with tarot, that’s demonic.”

“I only read Black authors.”

“Shadow work? Why, when I’m already dealing with enough trauma?”

“Why would I dig up more pain when racism exists?”

I get it. I really do.

These aren’t rejections of shadow work. They’re protective responses to very real wounds.

But they’re also keeping you blocked.

After years of working with writers, doing my own deep excavation work for personal/spiritual reasons, and building my entire creative practice around this intersection of craft and spirituality, I’ve learned the following:

Shadow work isn’t optional for Black writers trying to tell their truth. It’s essential.

And the reasons we avoid it are the exact reasons we need it most.

What Shadow Work Is (And Why Many Are Afraid of It)

Let’s start here: shadow work is not demonic.

Point blank, period.

Shadow work is the practice of looking at what’s been hidden from your conscious awareness. The parts of yourself you learned to suppress. The truths you were taught not to speak. The wounds you were told to smile through.

Whoever said shadow work was about summoning demons is foolish and close-minded. Shadow work is about meeting the parts of yourself that were demonized.

For Black and Brown writers specifically, shadow work is about excavating what survival taught you to bury. It’s about finding your voice underneath all the code-switching, the assimilation, the “twice as good to get half as much” conditioning that said your authentic self wasn’t acceptable and/or less than.

Shadow work is how you stop writing for the white gaze and start writing from your actual truth.

But as a Black woman who is also a writer and editor, I know why this feels dangerous.

For Black folks, looking inward has been weaponized against us:

“You’re too sensitive.”

“Just think positive.”

“Work on yourself and racism won’t affect you.”

“Once you open that door, you won’t be able to close it.”

That last statement is actually very true, but not in the way people who say it mean for it to be. The rest of it is bullshit, and not what I’m talking about.

Liberation-focused shadow work acknowledges this truth: some of what you buried isn’t YOUR shadow — it’s survival adaptation.

Some of what got called “shadow” — your rage, your grief, your full authentic expression — is actually your real self that oppression tried to kill.

Shadow work helps you separate:

• What’s mine to heal

• What was done to me

• What I learned to protect myself

And for writers, shadow work answers the questions nobody else will:

• Why do you freeze when you sit down to write?

• Why does your body tense up when you open that document?

• Why do you start projects with passion then abandon them when it gets hard or right before they’re done?

• Why does every piece of feedback feel like an attack?

• Why can’t you find your voice no matter how many craft books you read?

Your resistance isn’t laziness. Your writer’s block isn’t a discipline problem.

It’s information your body is trying to give you. And shadow work helps you see it and listen.

The “I Only Read Black Authors” Stance

Okay so… I’m about to say something that might piss some of you off.

The “I only read Black authors” mindset keeps you blocked.

I understand the impulse. I really do.

After centuries of white authors being centered, white stories being called “universal,” white perspectives being treated as the main perspective — wanting to exclusively consume Black creativity makes sense.

However, I’ve learned that limiting yourself to only Black authors means missing out on crucial knowledge that could transform your work and overall creative life.

Examples:

Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score is — in my honest opinion — required reading on trauma and the body. It’s essential for understanding why your nervous system shuts down when you try to write. Especially for those writing memoir and it’s very vulnerable and tender.

Deb Dana’s work on polyvagal theory explains the science behind why your body goes into fight, flight or freeze mode when you sit down to create.

Peter Levine’s somatic practices help you regulate your nervous system BEFORE you write — which is the difference between pushing through resistance and actually having energy for your work.

None of these authors are Black. But the knowledge they’ve shared is essential.

Make no mistake, we also need Resmaa Menakem’s work on racialized trauma. We need Joy DeGruy’s words on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. We need Black authors writing from and for our experience.

It’s not either/or. It’s both/and.

The closed mindset — “I won’t learn from anyone white” — is scarcity thinking dressed up as political consciousness.

White people understand this. At my big age (I’ll be 43 in a few days), I have never heard a white person say “I won’t learn from anyone Black.” That’s because they study us and our work. We need to learn to do the same.

Knowledge is knowledge. Medicine is medicine.

Eat the meat, spit out the bones.

We take what serves and leave the rest.

So… what actually serves liberation? Reading broadly. Learning from everyone. Filtering what you’re learning through your own discernment. Building your practice and knowledge bank from multiple sources of wisdom — including your own intuition and ancestral knowing.

Our ancestors didn’t survive by limiting their knowledge sources. They used what they had, took what worked and adapted it to serve them.

We can do the same.

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The Specific Blocks Black Writers Carry

These are the patterns that show up again and again when I work with Black and Brown writers. The blocks that no amount of “just write more” advice will fix.

Block #1: Inherited Silence

Your ancestors couldn’t always speak their truth.

There was a time when literacy was illegal. Being too articulate meant danger. Visibility got people killed.

They swallowed their stories to keep you (and themselves) alive.

That ancestral trauma was passed down to you. And your body remembers.

So when you sit down to write, you’re not just dealing with YOUR fear of visibility, YOUR fear of being judged, YOUR imposter syndrome.

You’re dealing with generations of “don’t tell, don’t speak, stay quiet to stay safe.”

Your resistance is ancestral wisdom trying to protect you.

The problem is: you’re not living in your great-great-grandmother’s reality. But your nervous system doesn’t understand that.

Shadow work helps you witness that inherited silence with compassion, then gently show your body: we’re safe enough to speak now.

Block #2: The White Gaze Wound

You’ve been taught:

• Your voice isn’t “professional enough”

• Your stories are “too niche”

• Your perspective needs to be understood by everyone aka white readers

• Your authentic expression is “too much”

You code-switch on the page without even noticing anymore.

You explain cultural references Black readers already know.

You soften your rage so you’re not “the angry Black writer.”

You perform respectability in your characters, your language, your themes.

You’re not writing. You’re performing.

And you’re exhausted. We all are.

Shadow work excavates WHO you’re performing for and WHO you truly are underneath all that conditioning.

It helps you answer: What would I write if I stopped caring about whether white readers would understand?

Block #3: Productivity Culture Trauma

The advice is always the same:

“Write every day.”

“Set a word count goal.”

“Discipline over inspiration.”

“Just sit in the chair and write.”

And when that doesn’t work for you — when you can’t maintain that pace, when your body resists, when life happens (because life be life’ing) — you’re told you’re not disciplined enough. Not committed enough. Not a “real” writer.

That’s straight-up gaslighting.

Those systems weren’t designed for people navigating:

• Racialized trauma in their bodies

• Code-switching exhaustion from existing in white spaces

• Economic precarity requiring multiple jobs

• Nervous systems in survival mode from historical and ongoing danger

• Family obligations that white individualism doesn’t account for

You can’t “productivity hack” your way through systemic oppression. Don’t let these so-called “gurus” lie to you.

Shadow work helps you build a practice for YOUR actual life — honoring your body’s rhythms, your nervous system’s needs and your real circumstances.

Block #4: The “Strong Black Woman/Man” Insult

You’ve been told:

• Your pain doesn’t matter in certain circumstances

• Your exhaustion is weakness

• Your need for rest is laziness

• You should be able to handle everything AND crank out a novel every six months

That’s a lie designed to work you to death.

Shadow work names that conditioning as a wound, not a truth.

It gives you permission to be human — to need rest, to feel pain, to require support, to have limits.

And being human is what makes powerful writing possible.

You can’t write truth while exhausted from being superwoman/man.

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Shadow Work Is Spiritual Practice

Shadow work isn’t therapy. Though therapy helps too.

Shadow work is about relationship:

• With your ancestors

• With your body’s wisdom

• With the parts of yourself you buried

• With your creative spirit

• With your higher self

It’s ritual work that may include:

• Lighting candles before writing to create sacred space.

• Pulling tarot or oracle cards to bypass overthinking and access intuition.

• Ancestral connection practices that ground you in lineage.

• Somatic practices that help your body feel safe enough to create.

It’s reclaiming what was stolen:

Our ancestors used divination. They practiced rituals. They trusted their intuition. They worked with the elements, with their ancestors, with the unseen and the Divine.

White Christianity called those practices evil to disconnect us from our power. This is still true today. We are seeing this in real time.

Shadow work is returning to our inheritance - the spiritual practices that sustained our people for millennia.

The truth they don’t want you to know: When you do shadow work, you’re not just healing yourself. You’re breaking patterns for everyone who comes after you.

Your liberation creates space for younger writers to be free too.

This is collective work, not just personal healing.

What Happens When You Shy Away From Shadow Work

You continue to stay blocked. Simple as that.

• You experience writer’s block that no amount of “discipline” will fix.

• Constantly self-sabotaging right before success.

• Starting and abandoning projects repeatedly.

• Imposter syndrome that you can’t understand.

You keep performing:

• Writing for white approval instead of your truth.

• Code-switching until you forget your real voice.

• Explaining what doesn’t need explanation.

• Making yourself smaller so others are comfortable.

You burn out:

• Forcing yourself into productivity systems that don’t work for you.

• Grinding until exhaustion.

• Wondering why you dread writing when you used to love it.

And most importantly:

• You don’t tell the stories that need telling.

• The ones your ancestors couldn’t tell.

• The ones that break the silence.

• The ones that free your people.

• The ones that are YOUR medicine to give.

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The Both/And Truth

It often frustrates me how people are unable to accept that two things can be true at the same time.

You can honor your ancestors AND learn from teachers outside your culture.

You can center Black readers AND recognize that valuable knowledge exists everywhere.

You can be politically conscious AND avoid scarcity mindset around learning.

You can do shadow work AND maintain your cultural groundedness.

You can look at your wounds AND remember your power.

The liberation we’re after isn’t found in closed systems.

It’s found in radical openness filtered through fierce discernment.

Take what serves. Leave the rest.

But don’t limit yourself before you even look.

Write From the Wound: A 7-Day Shadow Work Journey

My ancestors passed their stories to me, in my bones, in my nervous system, in the way my body tenses when I speak truth. And I know I’m not the only one carrying this.

This is what I’ve been working on, and I’m now able to share it with you. I co-created this offering with my ancestors because writing is memory and writing is somatic. You can’t separate the craft from the body that creates it.

Seven days of shadow work specifically designed for Black and Brown writers who are done performing and ready to write from their truth.

Day 1: The Wound Beneath the Block Understanding resistance as information, not laziness or a lack of discipline

Day 2: The Inherited Stories Connecting with the ancestral silence you carry and why you’re the one being called to break it

Day 3: The White Gaze Wound Naming how white publishing taught you to perform, and choosing to write for your community first

Day 4: The Nervous System Truth Learning why your body says “danger” when you try to write, and how to create safety

Day 5: The Identity Excavation Discovering who you are as a writer when you’re not performing for anyone

Day 6: The Liberation Practice Building a sustainable daily practice that honors your actual life, not productivity culture’s bullshit

Day 7: Integration & The Path Forward How to keep doing this work after the seven days end

This offering is:

• Self-paced (go at the pace your nervous system can handle)

• Practical (prompts, practices, rituals you can use immediately)

• Grounded in both writing craft AND spirituality

• Designed specifically for Black and Brown writers

• Anti-capitalist in approach (rest is built in, not something you earn)

This offering isn’t:

• Therapy (though it’s therapeutic)

• A quick fix (real transformation takes time)

• About toxic positivity (we’re naming what’s real)

• For everyone (only for people ready to look)

Investment: $47 | Click here to learn more

Will You Join Me?

If you’re tired of being blocked.

If you’re done performing for approval.

If you’re ready to write from your actual truth instead of who you think you should be.

If you want to stop grinding yourself down and build a practice that honors your humanity.

If you’re ready to tell the stories your ancestors couldn’t tell.

This is for you.

Your stories need you free, not bound by anyone’s limitations, including your own protective ones.

Write From the Wound is a self-paced 7-day course. I’m Lakeisha, High Priestess of The Story Temple. I help Black and Brown writers heal what’s blocking them, master their craft and navigate white publishing without silencing their voices.

Now it’s time to practice it. To apply it. To build mastery while protecting our voices.

Welcome to what 2026 has to offer — the year we write free.

The Gift of 2025

The Elemental Writing Mysteries (EWM) gave us language for what makes writing work across all genres.

• Air governs vision and conceptual clarity.

• Fire creates momentum and transformation.

• Water flows through authentic emotion and connection.

• Earth provides structure and technical foundation.

But as I moved through teaching the curriculum, something became clear to me.

I wasn’t simply teaching craft theory. I was watching Black writers navigate a publishing industry that’s somehow changed everything while at the same time changing nothing. It was still white-dominated, still policing our voices, still demanding assimilation. I was seeing in real time how writing culture harms Black and Brown writers. How “craft standards” mask cultural gatekeeping.

And I realized: The Story Temple needs to evolve. It needs to be more than just craft teaching. It needs to hold both systematic writing education AND the spiritual practices that grounds us. Because writing is memory. Writing is somatic. Writing is ancestral. You can’t separate craft from the body that creates it, or the culture that shapes it.

Theory alone wasn’t enough. You needed practical application. You needed context. You needed community.

And honestly? I was being led to build something bigger than a Substack publication. Something that could hold the vision forming itself through me — an institution for Black and Brown writers that teaches both craft excellence and cultural truth. A place where serious writing education meets spiritual wisdom. Where your voice doesn’t have to perform or prove.

Looking back through my journals from this year has shown me that 2026 isn’t simply the next phase of EWM’s curriculum, it’s the foundation year for what I intend to build.

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The Three Pillars of 2026

The Story Temple will offer three integrated streams of content, each serving a different purpose in your development as a writer.

Pillar 1 - Elemental Writing Practice (EWP)

Working with the four elements in your daily creative process — drafting, revising, diagnosing and refining your work. This is the shift from understanding to application. From theory to practice. From knowing what the elements are to regularly using them as tools.

Rather than dedicating an entire month to a single element, we rotate through them consistently. This rhythm teaches you to tend all elements regularly, building the awareness that creates lasting integration.

Pillar 2 - Writing While Black (WWB)

Craft education in the context of oppression. The techniques general writing blogs and workshops don’t (and in most cases won’t) teach. Navigation strategies for hostile spaces. Specialized knowledge for Black writers navigating white-dominated publishing.

Please don’t assume this is “diversity content” for the sake of being polarizing and getting views. My intention and mission is to provide systematic teaching of both craft AND the cultural context we write within.

Each essay names what you’ve been experiencing and/or things I’ve seen in my work as an editor, teaches craft techniques (code-switching, AAVE, rage as complex emotion, strategic silence) and provides tools for protecting your voice while navigating spaces that want to flatten it.

EWP teaches the craft. WWB teaches the context. Both are essential. Together they create a holistic experience – technical excellence AND cultural awareness. Not just survival. Liberation.

Pillar 3 - Reflections from the High Priestess

My personal column where I share what I’m thinking and feeling as I build this institution, navigate my domestic and creative life, and process the work. This is where you get to see the human behind the teacher. The journey behind the curriculum. The doubts alongside the certainties.

I’ll write about pricing and embodying worth. Going into the underworld for shadow work. Finding business elders. Learning to rest without guilt. What my ancestors are showing me. Navigating resistance — my own internal resistace and resistance from others who have “opinions” about what I’m creating and building. Celebrating small wins. The loneliness of building something new. The moments when the vision feels too big to grasp.

I don’t do curated inspiration for clicks and views. This is me sharing real-time processing because many people have asked me about it. Vulnerability without performance. The behind-the-scenes of institutional building.

The first Reflection drops January 4th – my birthday – which feels deeply aligned for beginning this practice of truth-telling.

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Why This? And Why Now?

First, because I was given an assignment by the Divine, and I am choosing to obey. But also, because the landscape we’re navigating isn’t getting easier.

The publishing industry grows more hostile to Black voices while claiming progress. AI threatens to flatten what makes us unique into algorithmic sameness. Writing education still polices our emotional expression, our cultural specificity and our authentic voices — just with more sophisticated language.

And more Black and Brown writers than ever are searching for education that sees them as a whole person. That teaches craft without demanding assimilation. That names the systems instead of gaslighting about “universal standards.”

My biggest takeway from the Ten-Point Program Zine Workshop hosted by is that we can’t wait for traditional institutions to change. We must build what we need ourselves.

2025 laid the theoretical foundation. 2026 builds the practical application and the community infrastructure. This is the year the Temple becomes what it’s meant to be — not just a Substack newsletter, but an institution. A place Black and Brown writers can come for craft education that honors their cultural truth. For excellence without performance. For liberation through storytelling.

Side note: The purpose of that workshop was to create our own Ten-Point Program. I created one for The Story Temple. If you’re interested in reading it, let me know in the comments.

The Cards Speak: Past, Present, Future

While revising this piece, I felt called to pull some cards to read the energy of this transition. And what came through made me sit up straighter on my medicine ball (I don’t have a desk chair).

All three cards are Swords.

Swords – the suit of Air, intellect, clarity, communication. The very element that started this entire journey. When I first sat in meditation asking why I couldn’t get a grip on my client’s writing or my own, Spirit showed me Swords. That led me to Air. Air led me to discover Fire, Water and Earth. The whole framework emerged from that initial Sword energy.

And now, as I stand at the threshold of 2026, Swords return. Full circle. The element that birthed this work is the element carrying it forward.

Past: Two of Swords

Not knowing the next step. Not seeing the path forward clearly. I knew what I’d been called to do — build this institution, teach this framework, serve Black and Brown writers. But knowing your assignment doesn’t mean having all the answers.

The Two of Swords is that moment of blindfolded uncertainty. You’re holding both swords, balancing opposing forces, unable to see which direction to move. So you look within. That was 2025 for me. Teaching the Mysteries while simultaneously listening and discovering what the Temple wanted to become.

And look – the sun on this card is the same sun that appears on the Emperor card in this deck. My masculine energy, the force beneath everything I do. Even in my uncertainty, even in the dark, the Emperor’s authority and structure were there. Building. Organizing. Creating order from chaos. I just couldn’t see it yet because I normally operate within my feminine energy.

Present: Six of Swords

Transition. Movement from one place to another. And that rainbow – the promise that where I’m going is better than where I’ve been.

Look at the bottom of this card. Dark. Heavy. The swords pointing down into what looks like heavy rain. That’s the weight I’m leaving behind — the uncertainty, the isolation of building alone, the questioning whether I could really do this and do it well.

But the metaphorical boat is moving toward light. Toward that rainbow. Toward clarity and community and the institution being fully formed. The Six of Swords says: you’re in motion now. The transition has begun. Keep moving toward the light.

This is where I am now, at the end of 2025. I’m no longer fumbling in the dark. I’m in the boat. The journey is active. The destination is visible.

Future: Son/Knight of Swords

Swift. Precise. Direct. The Knight of Swords comes in with clarity and speed, cutting through confusion with sharp truth.

This energy makes me pause. Because I don’t want to move too fast. I don’t want to rush the teachings or force quick consumption. I’ve never wanted to do that. I want the work to sink in, to integrate, to transform. You can’t get that with fast-food content.

But in this context, the Knight isn’t about rushing. He’s about precision without hesitation. He’s about speaking truth without softening it. He’s about intellectual clarity delivered with confidence.

Look at the owl – it’s in motion. Wings spread in flight, the sword held tightly in its claws. There’s no hesitation in this card. No second-guessing. Its gaze is fixated on whatever it plans to use that sword for. The decision has been made and the action follows immediately.

That’s the energy 2026 requires of me. Not speed for speed’s sake, but bold clarity. No sugarcoating. No apologizing for the vision’s size. No hedging my truths to make them more palatable. The Knight of Swords doesn’t perform or dilute. He says what needs saying and trusts that the right people will receive it.

Swift information, yes. But also precise. Clean. True. The kind of teaching that cuts through the bullshit and gets to the truth.

Clarity doesn’t come before the movement. It comes THROUGH the movement. Through the doing. Through the teaching. Through the building.

Pull Your Own Cards

I invite you to do the same. Pull a three-card spread for your writing journey in 2026.

• Past: What energy or pattern are you leaving behind?

• Present: What transition are you in right now?

• Future: What energy is calling you forward?

You don’t need to use tarot if that’s not your practice. Oracle cards work. Runes work. Even pulling three random words from a book and seeing what they tell you about your journey works.

The practice isn’t about the tools. It’s about creating space to listen. To ask. To receive guidance from whatever Source speaks to you.

What wants to emerge in your writing this year? What’s trying to be born through you?

The cards know. Your body knows. Your ancestors know.

Ask. Listen. Trust what comes through.

Then bring that energy into the Temple with you as you prepare to write free.

How to Engage

Enter as a Temple Visitor (Free)

Subscribe to receive all the teachings. The Elemental Writing Practice posts. The Writing While Black craft + context essays. Oracle transmissions. Access to The Foundation Hall with archived core teachings.

There’s no paywall on foundational education. Show up. Learn. Take what serves you. Share with other Black and Brown writers who need this.

This is how you begin.

Go Deeper (Temple Scholar - Paid)

When you’re ready for community and ongoing guidance:

Community & Support:

• Temple Scholars Circle (monthly discussion thread with direct access to me)

• Monthly Office Hours (craft Q&A through elemental lens)

• Community space with other Black writers doing this work

Reflections from the High Priestess:

• Biweekly personal column (think if it as my modified business journal)

• Intimate behind-the-scenes of building the Temple

• Real-time processing of creation, shadow work, resistance, celebration

Resources & Archive:

• Complete 2025 EWM archive (theoretical foundation + labs)

• Early access to new offerings

This tier is for writers who want community alongside curriculum. Who value processing space and ongoing guidance as they apply the teaching. Who are building sustainable practices and want support doing it.

Work With Me Directly

Beyond membership, you can work with me one-on-one:

Writer’s Essence Reading ($297 for comprehensive PDF / $497 with integration call)

Discover your elemental signature as a writer. Understand your creative design, dominant element, shadow element and how to work with your natural gifts. This is identity work, not manuscript feedback.

VIP Intensives ($1,497 for half-day sessions)

Breakthrough days for specific challenges. Creative Block Dissolution (shadow work + elemental diagnosis). Vision Clarity (crystallizing concept and premise). Both include 30 days of email support.

Manuscript Assessments ($497 for opening 10k words / $1,497-1,797 for complete manuscripts)

Full elemental diagnosis of your work. What’s strong, what needs development, strategic revision roadmap. My editorial expertise meets the framework you’re learning.

2026 is the year I’m stepping fully into my purpose. Not just writing educational content. But creating community. Not just teaching. But aiding in transformation and liberation.

2026 is the year we write free.

Questions? Thoughts? Feelings? Leave a comment below. I read and respond to everything.

Welcome home.

Lakeisha, High Priestess of The Story Temple

I genuinely love hearing from writers when they encounter and engage with my work. A couple of weekends ago, a writer sent me a message that made me stop and sit with what Spirit was revealing.

She’d just completed one of my new workbooks — a tool designed to help writers develop conceptual clarity for their projects. Her feedback wasn’t what I expected, though it was exactly what I needed to hear.

“Immediately, I was able to figure out why I’ve been starting and stopping so frequently in my work. I had been feeling untethered and it’s because I did not have this Air element to firmly connect to. This workbook forced me to get very clear on what I was writing, and it became immediately apparent to me that even the surface level concept of my work was loose.”

She continued:

“It seems that much of my imposter syndrome around writing merely stems from a lack of clarity in my work, and this workbook cleared up this block for me beautifully.”

After sitting with her words and smiling, here’s what Spirit brought to my attention: Imposter syndrome often stems from unclear work, not inadequate skill.

Read that again.

For Black and Brown writers especially, this distinction matters more than you might realize.

Subscribe now

The Misdiagnosis Problem

We’ve been taught that imposter syndrome is purely psychological. An emotional problem requiring therapy, affirmations and confidence coaching. Work on your mindset. Believe in yourself more. Stop self-sabotaging.

And yes, sometimes all of this is true. Internalized oppression is real. The voices telling us we don’t belong have deep roots.

But what if a good bit of what we’re calling imposter syndrome is actually something else entirely?

What if it’s not a confidence problem but a clarity problem?

When your work is unclear — when you can’t articulate your vision, when your concept feels nebulous, when you’re unsure what your project is really about — that creates legitimate doubt. Not the kind of doubt that comes from internalized oppression, but the kind that comes from trying to build something without a blueprint.

You question every decision because you have no framework for evaluating choices. You start and stop because you have no clear direction pulling you forward. You feel like an imposter because your work doesn’t feel grounded, and ungrounded work creates ungrounded creative identity.

When viewing it through this lens, skill has nothing to do with it. Clarity, however, has everything to do with it.

Something I’ve noticed about the publishing industry: they don’t have tools to help you develop this kind of clarity either.

What Traditional Publishing Actually Offers (And Doesn’t)

MFA programs teach craft. Developmental editors address symptoms like pacing and character development. Craft books focus on technique. All of this assumes you already have conceptual clarity — that you know what you’re building and just need help executing it better.

But what happens when the foundation itself is unclear?

Traditional approaches treat the symptoms without addressing root cause. They’ll tell you:

• Your pacing is off (but not why you can’t find the right rhythm)

• Your characters need development (but not why they feel disconnected from your larger vision)

• Your structure needs work (but not what structural framework actually serves your specific project)

They’re trying to help you paint the walls when you haven’t poured the foundation yet.

And for Black and Brown writers, this failure hits differently because our relationship to clarity work is complicated by systems that were never designed for us.

Black and Brown Writers Need Different Tools

Here’s what happens when we try to develop conceptual clarity using traditional publishing approaches:

We’re expected to think in frameworks that don’t account for our cultural contexts. Story structure models assume certain narrative traditions. “Universal themes” usually mean “what resonates with white readers.” We’re constantly expected to translate our visions into languages that weren’t built for our stories.

We don’t get developmental grace. When white writers submit unclear work, they’re more likely to receive specific guidance (this of course, is if the agent/editor is even willing to give it): “This has potential, but the concept needs strengthening. Here’s what I mean...” When we submit unclear work, we get: “This isn’t ready.” No explanation of what “ready” means. No breakdown of what needs development. Just rejection.

Traditional spaces often make clarity work harder, not easier. Even when we access MFA programs or writing coaching, we face additional barriers. Academic environments can be hostile to writers of color. Workshop feedback gets coded in racism. Mentors might not understand our cultural contexts or the stories we’re trying to tell.

We’re working from different starting points. White writers often enter literary spaces with foundational tools they absorbed through proximity to publishing. Family connections. Cultural familiarity with how “good writing” works. Access to examples that reflect their experiences. We’re building from scratch while being judged against writers who started with blueprints.

So we struggle with unclear work and internalize it as personal failing. We develop imposter syndrome because we’re trying to use tools that don’t actually address what we need, in spaces that were never designed to nurture us.

Why Clarity Gaps Feel Like Skill Gaps

This is what happens when you’re working without conceptual clarity:

Every writing session feels like starting over. You sit down to write and don’t know where to begin because you’re not clear on what you’re building toward.

You can’t evaluate feedback. Beta readers say contradictory things and you don’t know who to listen to because you have no internal compass telling you what serves your vision.

You question your creative instincts. Should you include this chapter/section? Cut that scene/example? You have no framework for making decisions, so every choice feels arbitrary and hard.

You compare yourself to other writers and feel inadequate. They seem so confident, so clear about their work. You assume they have something you lack — talent, skill, natural ability. But in truth? They just have clarity. They know what they’re building. They have a conceptual framework that guides their decisions.

Feeling “untethered” means feeling disconnected from your work. And this feeling isn’t evidence you’re not good enough.

It’s evidence you need tools that don’t exist in traditional publishing.

What I Created to Fill This Gap

The framework that writer used doesn’t exist in traditional publishing education. Not in MFA programs. Not in most developmental editing approaches. Not in the craft books lining bookstore shelves.

I created it because existing approaches to manuscript development don’t address the root cause of unclear work. They treat symptoms — fix your pacing, develop your characters, strengthen your plot — without addressing the Air element foundation that makes all of those decisions possible.

And I created it with Black and Brown writers in mind because our relationship to clarity work is different. We need frameworks that:

• Account for cultural context and diverse storytelling traditions

• Don’t assume we’re working from the same starting point as writers with generational access to literary spaces

• Address the real barriers we face (not just craft technique)

• Honor that our creative doubt often stems from systemic exclusion, not personal inadequacy

Spirit assigned me the task of creating what doesn’t exist because what does exist was never designed for us.

What Conceptual Clarity Actually Looks Like

Clarity isn’t about having everything figured out before you start writing. It’s about understanding what territory you’re exploring and why it matters.

It means you can answer questions like:

• What makes my approach to this topic unique?

• What internal framework organizes my content?

• Why does this work matter beyond surface information?

It means you have criteria for evaluating what serves your vision and what doesn’t.

It means you can explain your project in ways that make others lean in because they understand both what you’re creating and why it’s needed. Whether fiction or nonfiction.

This is a learnable skill. It’s work that can be taught, practiced and developed.

But first, you have to know that clarity is what you need.

And you have to have access to tools that actually address clarity at its root.

The Results

Let’s return to that writer’s message, because her experience reveals something I really want you to understand:

“This has given my work the body, mind and soul it has been asking me for, that I haven’t felt equipped to provide. My story now has a clear direction and I have a firm understanding of why it needs to exist.”

Notice what shifted. Not her skill level. Not her talent. Not her worthiness as a writer.

Her clarity.

And with that clarity came something else: creative confidence. The kind that doesn’t come from affirmations or mindset work, but from having solid ground beneath your feet.

When you know what you’re building and why it matters, the imposter syndrome that stemmed from unclear work dissolves. What remains might be legitimate skill gaps you can address through craft study. Or it might be internalized oppression you can work through with support.

But at least you’re no longer trying to solve an emotional problem that’s actually a structural one.

What This Means For You

If your imposter syndrome feels endless — if you’ve done the coaching, read the books, repeated the affirmations, taken the craft classes, maybe even completed an MFA program, but still feel like a fraud when you sit down to write — consider this:

Maybe you don’t need more confidence work.

Maybe you need clarity work.

Maybe the doubt you feel isn’t internalized oppression telling you that you don’t belong (though that might be part of it). Maybe it’s your creative intelligence telling you that your work needs a clearer foundation.

Maybe you need tools that traditional publishing doesn’t offer because they don’t exist there.

For Black and Brown writers especially: You are not broken. You are not lacking in talent.

You might simply need tools and frameworks designed with your actual creative needs centered.

And now you know what to look for… and where to find it.

Here’s Where to Find It

The workbook that writer used is one of two I created specifically to help writers develop the kind of conceptual clarity that resolves creative doubt at its source. One for fiction, one for nonfiction.

They’re based on the Air element teaching from The Elemental Writing Mysteries — the foundational work that makes everything else possible.

Clarity work is foundational. It’s not optional. It’s not something you do after you’ve developed your craft.

It’s what makes craft development possible in the first place.

These aren’t traditional developmental tools repackaged. This is a framework created from my unique intersection of professional editing experience, spiritual practice and understanding of how Black and Brown writers actually need to work. It addresses what the industry can’t because the industry would never even consider making tools like these.

And this is only the beginning. I started with Air because clarity is where it all begins. I fully intend to develop tools for the other elements as well. Everything is connected.

If you’ve been struggling with creative doubt, starting and stopping projects, feeling disconnected from your writing — try addressing clarity at its root before assuming you need more craft classes or confidence coaching.

You might be surprised what shifts when your work finally has the body, mind and soul it’s been asking for.

Develop the clarity that resolves creative doubt.

The Air Element Workbooks (fiction and nonfiction editions) guide you through the framework that helped that writer discover her imposter syndrome stemmed from unclear work, not inadequate skill.

Learn more about the workbooks or purchase them directly:

3-Level Story Concept Workbook (fiction) | 3-Level Content Clarity Workbook (nonfiction)

With love and elemental wisdom,

Lakeisha | High Priestess of The Story Temple

I remember attending a book festival and a woman introduced herself as an “aspiring writer” while clutching a copy of a literary magazine with her published poem inside. The cognitive dissonance was interesting, but what struck me more was how automatic the self-diminishment had become.

Look up “aspiring” in any dictionary. It means having ambitions to achieve something. If you aspire to write, you’re not writing. If you’re writing — even if it’s bad, even if infrequently, even without publication — you’re not aspiring to be a writer.

You already are one.

Yet somehow, writers have convinced themselves that claiming their identity requires external permission. They apologize for their work, qualify their commitment and introduce themselves with language that invites dismissal.

It’s time to stop.

The Self-Diminishing Trap

“Aspiring writer” has become the default humble introduction for anyone who writes but hasn’t achieved some arbitrary marker of success. Published authors use it until they hit bestseller lists. Award winners use it until they quit their day jobs and write full time. Some use it even after making six figures from their writing.

These two words create a permanent state of “not quite there yet.” But enlighten me, where is “there” exactly? Publication? Payment? Recognition? Critical acclaim? The goalposts keep moving, ensuring you never feel legitimate enough to claim your actual practice.

This isn’t humility. It’s self-sabotage disguised as modesty.

Language shapes reality. What you call yourself becomes who you are in your own mind and in the perception of others. When you consistently describe yourself as someone who wants to be something rather than someone who is already doing that thing, you create internal resistance to taking yourself seriously.

And if you don’t take your work seriously, why should anyone else?

Where This Language Comes From

The “aspiring writer” identity serves several masters, none of whom have your creative interests at heart.

Industry gatekeeping: Publishing has always operated on scarcity models that benefit from keeping writers insecure. “Aspiring” becomes a polite way to categorize the “not yet worthy” — a holding cell for people whose work might threaten established hierarchies if they claimed their full authority.

Internalized capitalism: We’ve been conditioned to believe work only has value when it generates income. Creative pursuits get dismissed as hobbies until they become profitable, which means most writers spend years believing their daily practice doesn’t count as real work.

Imposter syndrome on steroids: For Black and Brown writers, there’s an additional layer of systemic exclusion. Literary spaces were — and in many cases still are — historically designed without us in mind. The message that we don’t belong gets internalized as evidence that we need extra permission to claim what others take for granted.

As a High Priestess, let me break it down for you: it’s not syndrome at all. It’s an accurate assessment of hostile systems. The solution isn’t to fake confidence until you make it. It’s to recognize that your perspective and voice matter regardless of what those systems tell you.

The Only Real Categories

Strip away the publishing industry’s elaborate hierarchy system and you’re left with simple truth: you’re either writing or you’re not.

Everything else — skill level, frequency, income, recognition — exists on separate spectrums. A beginning writer developing their voice is still a writer, not someone aspiring to become one. A seasoned writer building their reputation doesn’t become more “real” based on their Amazon rankings.

The practice makes you a writer. The commitment to that practice makes you serious about it. External validation makes you published, paid or recognized, but it doesn’t make you legitimate.

You were legitimate the moment you decided to translate your inner world into words on a page.

Why This Language Hurts You

It undermines your own confidence. You can’t advocate for your work if you don’t claim your identity. When you introduce yourself as “aspiring,” you’re telling everyone — including yourself — that your current work is just practice for the real thing that might happen someday.

It signals others to dismiss you. “Aspiring” gives people permission to treat your time as less valuable, your work as less important, your commitment as less serious. It affects how family responds when you need writing time, how potential clients evaluate your services, how other writers see your contributions to the community.

It keeps you stuck in external validation cycles. When your identity depends on other people’s approval, you spend more energy seeking permission than developing your writing craft. You make creative decisions based on what might impress agents or writing circles rather than what serves your vision.

For Black and Brown writers, this hits even harder. We already face additional barriers to recognition and publication. When we add self-diminishing language to systemic exclusion, we’re doing the gatekeepers’ work for them.

What to Say Instead

The truth is simple: “I’m a writer.”

No qualifiers needed if you write regularly. No explanations required. No asterisks about publication status or income level.

When context requires more specificity:

• “I write [genre/form]” — focuses on what you do

• “I’m developing my [specific skill]” — acknowledges growth without diminishing identity

• “I’m working on [current project]” — emphasizes active practice

Each alternative describes your work without asking permission for your identity.

Embodiment in Practice

Claiming writer identity changes how you approach everything. Writers solve problems differently than people who aspire to write someday. Writers make time for their practice because it’s central to who they are, not something they hope to become good enough to deserve.

Writers invest in their craft development. They set boundaries around their creative time. They charge appropriate rates for their services and books when they offer them. They speak about their work with authority because they understand it from the inside.

This isn’t arrogance. It’s honesty about your actual writing practice.

The Resistance You’ll Face

When you stop using “aspiring,” you may encounter pushback from multiple directions. Embodying who you truly are makes people uncomfortable, and people love to try and mold you back into what’s comfortable for them.

From other writers who use “aspiring”: Your confidence may trigger their insecurities about their own legitimacy. Expect comments about humility, realistic expectations, or “getting ahead of yourself.”

From your inner critic: It will feel presumptuous at first to claim your writer identity without external validation. I know this firsthand. That discomfort is normal. You’re rewiring years of conditioning.

From industry voices: Some gatekeepers benefit from keeping writers insecure and grateful for scraps of recognition. Your self-assurance threatens power dynamics built on scarcity and hierarchy.

The resistance proves you’re onto something important.

The Broader Stakes

This isn’t simply a matter of individual word choice. It’s deeper than that. This is about collective creative power.

When writers claim their authority, they create better work. They set higher standards. They negotiate from positions of strength rather than desperation. They build sustainable practices instead of burning out while waiting for external validation.

Here’s where I interrupt this piece to speak directly to Black and Brown writers — MY PEOPLE

I’m sure you’ve read Street War with Uniform Thugs by the amazing . If you haven’t, read it. Toward the end, she says:

Protesting in the streets is not the only way to fight this war. I would go as far as to let the “allies” protest in the streets while we protest with our pens. - Jacquie Verbal

I wholeheartedly agree with this. They want us out in the streets so they can shoot us down under the guise peacekeeping. This is why we especially need to stop this bullshit of calling ourselves “aspiring writers.”

We are writers, and there is work to be done. Stories to tell. Perspectives to share. Healing to facilitate through honest representation. The world needs our voices now, not when some arbitrary authority finally grants us permission to use them. We may never be “granted” permission. But the truth is, we don’t need it. We are the blueprint. The time has come to pick up the mantel left by our ancestors and make an impact through our words — in whatever form that might look like, be it fiction, personal or thematic essays, business books, etc. The Story Temple exists to teach you not only how to get the words out of you, but to also make them felt. And once you’re done writing, we have people like Jacquie to help you publish and send it out into the world.

The Challenge

Stop using “aspiring” immediately. Make a conscious effort. Notice how often you diminish your identity in conversation, in your bio, on social media. Practice introducing yourself as a writer without qualifiers. It will feel uncomfortable. Do it anyway.

Watch how claiming your identity changes how you approach your work and how others respond to you.

If you write, you’re a writer. Not an aspiring one. Not a wannabe. Not someone hoping to become legitimate someday.

The only thing you’re aspiring to is becoming a better writer — which is what every writer at every level is doing, from the complete beginner to the Nobel laureate.

Stop waiting for permission to claim what’s already yours.

Our communities, our stories, our collective healing — all of it depends on writers who know they’re writers. Not writers who are still asking permission to become something they already are.

The work is too important, and the time is now.

About the author: Lakeisha guides writers beyond amateur-hour advice through The Story Temple’s writing energetics framework. Whether you’re crafting novels, business books or essays that aim to shift perspectives, her four-element system reveals why some work transforms readers while other writing — no matter how well-crafted — gets ignored.

If you write to create change, not just convey information, you belong here.