Truthy Tuesday: How Sharing our Secret Fears can Strenghten our Sense of Community

{By Guest Maven, Kim Werker}

A few years ago, I started a project called Mighty Ugly. It’s about making an ugly creature that’s ugly on purpose, not as an accident that makes us frustrated or ashamed.

It’s about forcing ourselves to make something we’d otherwise consider to be a total failure, and it’s about examining the experience in an effort to push through the roadblocks we set up for ourselves when it comes to taking creative risks.

Though I lead workshops and speak on topics related to this, one of the major effects the project has had on me is that it’s given me a very specific, new context through which to relate to my community of crafters, artists, writers and creative people of all sorts (and to people who mistakenly insist they’re not creative).

Since I was a teenager, people have told me their secrets.

I’m not sure why. One of my most salient personality traits, I think, is that I’m loud and talkative – not the kinds of qualities one might look for in a confidante. I mean, I can totally keep a secret. Mum’s the word, for real. But why relative strangers assume this about me remains a mystery.

Anyway. Not long after I started talking to people about things that scare me, creatively, and about things that scare them creatively, I realized that these conversations we have involve a fairly extraordinary level of trust that’s not unlike an intimate confidence.

I trust them with my secrets and they trust me with theirs. And hopefully, at the end of the day, we all feel stronger, more capable, more powerful and excited.

I’m writing a book about the struggles we face in exploring our creativity, and as part of my book proposal I listed an exercise I hadn’t actually ever done before. So when I knew for sure I’d be writing the book, I figured I’d better make sure the exercise is worth including.

I asked the people who subscribe to my email newsletter to write me a letter. Not an email, but an actual paper letter. About a fear regarding their creativity — about making things, about making money from creative pursuits, about perfectionism, about judgment, about frustration, about failure, whatever.

And you know? People have been writing me letters. I love reading them. Some I destroy at the writer’s request. Some I write about on my blog or in the newsletter. In every case, I receive a gift of something serious and intimate to think about. And I hope that goes hand in hand with the writer feeling some sense of release or relief or shaky optimism, or even catharsis.

In crafting this exercise, though, I didn’t really think much about what my own experience of it would be. I knew I’d rely on that mystery of confidence I mentioned. I knew I’d keep people’s secrets if they wanted me to. But what I didn’t anticipate is that I’d feel overwhelmed by a desire to gather all the letter-writers together.

I just want to spend a day in their company. And I want them to spend time with each other. Not so they can talk about what they wrote. But just because they wrote. Just because they’re all inclined to take a few minutes and think about something uncomfortable, and write it down, and send it to me. A relative stranger.

I didn’t anticipate that such a private exercise would make me think about how our secrets – the ones we keep in fear or shame or misery, the ones we keep for others – affect our community. Not in a bad way – I have nothing against secrets. But isn’t it comforting to properly know that everyone has them? My growing understanding of this makes me want to just love everyone. And that means gathering everyone up so we can hang together.

Together, with the understanding that we each have secrets – some that we’ll share with a stranger, some that we’ll share with a group, and some that we’ll keep – hopefully we’ll keep them more comfortably, knowing we’re not alone.

Who knew such a private exercise would make me think so much about community. What do you think?

Kim Werker is an editor, writer, speaker, crafter, and author. Through Mighty Ugly, she facilitates workshops for crafters, artists, businesspeople and ordinary citizens on battling our inclination to stifle our own creativity and creative exploration. She is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Holocene, a new digital magazine for crafters, makers and curious people. She lives in Vancouver, Canada, with a grown-up, a toddler and a mutt. Say hi to @kpwerker.

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