INFP Writers, Your Book is Not Your Baby.

The Empath’s Journey, my book on highly sensitive people and emotional empaths, is out and about in the world, and it seems like a good time to reflect back on it.

One of the things that helped me complete it was figuring out which ideas about the creative process were helpful for me personally.

While there is a lot of writing advice out there (some of it conflicting) and while I admire many different kinds of writers, when it comes to my own writing, I have discovered that I need to mostly follow the ones who are most like me in one way or another.

So, in the last few years, I have collected scraps of advice about writing & creativity that feels right to me as an INFP writer and started sewing my own creative philosophy together.

One of the big ideas that really helped me in the process of writing The Empath’s Journey was articulated by Elizabeth Gilbert in this interview with Marie Forleo. In it, she dramatically drops her book on the floor and tells Marie that “a book is not a baby.”

This is the exact opposite of what we often hear about the process of writing a book or making any kind of art.

We are often caught up in the enormity of what we are undertaking, its burden, its overwhelming weight.

That feeling can paralyze us.

It can seize us up.

But remembering that “a book is not a baby,” that it’s not that important in the bigger scheme of things and that even if we mess it up a bit, it’ll be alright, can help tremendously when we are feeling like we’ll make some terrible mistake as we are writing or do it all wrong.

INFP Writers and Highly Sensitive Creatives Need to Repeat this Mantra.

A book is not a baby.

Even if we go in the wrong direction, we can rewrite and get back on track again. We can keep on course-correcting.

We can keep on writing.

In her conversation with Marie, Elizabeth Gilbert takes this quite-radical idea even a step further.

She says that not only is your book not your baby, but in fact, You are the book’s baby.

The process of writing a book shapes the person writing it.

This has definitely felt true for me. As much as I shaped the book, writing The Empath’s Journey has helped shape me.

One very interesting thing happened during the process of writing it.

I have astigmatism in one eye, which for me means that when I drive at night (which I rarely do), I see distorted lights from the headlights of other cars.

At one point, while I was right in the middle of writing the book, I got my eyes tested during a routine eye exam. To my surprise, I found that the astigmatism number (or factor?) had gone down by half.

My eyesight had improved during the process of writing the book.

This happened during a time when writing The Empath’s Journey was bringing up a lot of personal wounds. Sometimes, I was almost journaling and not really writing.

While most of the material that I journaled didn’t make it into the final book (some was just too personal and the book is about weaving personal experiences with practical tools for emotional empaths and HSPs), writing through my hurt feelings and releasing them seemed to have wiped something clean.

The process literally helped me see better.

It also taught me something important about myself as an INFP writer.

The experience of writing the book, of standing my ground to finish such a big project — feeling stuck but writing through it, resistant but writing through it, mediocre but writing through it, deciding to “be mediocre” if need be, falling, getting up, falling down again, getting up again, doing draft after draft and reworking material, and treating art like “work” — in short, just keeping on moving forward, however imperfectly, showed me something very important about myself and also about how a book gets written.

I have sometimes thought of strength as force. It’s probably because I am not a forceful person myself. Maybe, it’s also because that’s what we often see glorified around us.

But this staying the course was a kind of strength too.

It was about picking myself up one more time after I fell down and after I felt resistant, and doing that over and over again.

In the process of doing this, I learned that I have more patience than I gave myself credit for.

In the process, I learned to have more patience than what I started out with.

I learned that given a few people, a few believing mirrors (my husband, Rohit, was one of them), I could keep on working on my own, in a solitary fashion.

While I was writing the book, I was deathly afraid that I wouldn’t complete it, that maybe, the resistance would win out in the end.

I was also still growing the little creative flame inside me. I knew it could be easily extinguished by a casual cutting remark or cold indifference.

So, I only told a few people about the book while I was writing it.

While that was definitely helpful and probably one of the best decisions I have made in recent years, there were also times when it felt very hard to go it alone.

We need to have kindred spirits around us on our creative journeys as INFP writers.

During one such lonely time, I had dreams upon dreams of pregnant women in different settings (I write about this in The Empath’s Journey). In some dreams, the pregnant woman was completely on her own and getting increasingly tired.

In other dreams, the pregnant woman was surrounded by a group of other women who were helping her.

It took me forever to get the hint from my unconscious that I might find it helpful to be part of a group of like-minded people who could support me during this process of giving birth to a creative brainchild.

This was when I joined a writer’s group.

At that phase of the writing, belonging to that group was really helpful. All we did was get together to write. No feedback was given, and the writing time was strictly observed.

On one level, my book was my baby, something new I was trying to bring into this world, something I was carrying in my creative womb, something that needed midwifing.

And yet, it was wasn’t.

Combining these two different thoughts and sometimes giving the utmost importance to the book and my own needs as a creative and sometimes thinking, “It’s not that important,” as Elizabeth Gilbert had suggested, helped me complete my book.

Going back and forth between these two different ideas and letting myself play with them helped me move from thinking there was just one way of thinking that would help me.

This is something I learned to do because I was learning about Carl Jung and Jungian thought during this time (it’s a huge thread in the book). Two different aspects can both be right and have their own place, and it’s the creative tension between them that is instrumental in moving forward.

So, my book was a kind of creative baby.

It was energy coming through me. Even my unconscious, my dreams were telling me that, in poetic metaphor.

And yet, it wasn’t a baby.

It was okay if I made mistakes with it, if I tightened knots that I would then have to work hard to unravel. Nothing was final, set in stone, hopelessly lost.

It was liberating to think like this.

A book is not my baby. I am the book’s baby.

I am the clay who is shaped and formed when I let creative energy run through me. Whatever the final outcome, the process has its own rewards for me as an INFP writer.

It has its beautiful vistas. It has its moments of pure delight and ones in which I discover strength I didn’t think I had before. This is a very helpful way of thinking about the creative process.

What if you started thinking like this?

What if you didn’t feel trapped in the quicksand of inner and outer expectations but instead let yourself be changed by the creative energy coming through you? How much easier would it make the process of writing a book, painting a picture, or beginning something you’ve always dreamed of doing?

Where might your creative journey take you?