Painting: Healing Energy by Michelle Minero

BY FRANCESCA LEWIS
Lesbian.com

Now that the holidays are over and we’re all full of egg nogg and self-reflection, we turn our thoughts to the coming year. We want to change – to be happier, more productive – but we’re full of self-doubt and have a hard time believing any of these changes are truly possible.

To help kick start the year with a positive, self-compassionate attitude, mother-daughter team Michelle and Emelina Minero run a yearly writing challenge, called the 31 Day Self-Love Writing Challenge. Michelle, a therapist who specializes in eating disorder recovery, and Emelina, a queer writer/editor, created the Love Warrior Community together, an online community that uses creative expression to help people foster self-acceptance, body acceptance, self-awareness, emotional awareness, and self-love. Inspired by this community, and by Michelle’s book Self-Love Diet: The Only Diet That Works, they created the yearly writing challenge. The 31 Day Self-Love Writing Challenge has grown over the past four years, from a small project between mother, daughter and a friend, to a community of over 100 participants.

I asked Emelina to tell me more about the community, the challenge and how it has helped not only the participants, but Emelina herself.

What is the Love Warrior community all about?

The Love Warrior Community is an aggregate of inspiring, empowering, and body positive media that we curate and create and that anyone can contribute to. More than positive content, we encourage people to reflect on their self-love journey and to create or build upon their self-love practice through Self-Love Diet writing prompts and writing templates, like body love letters, body forgiveness letters, and self-love letters. Our motto is, “Love Yourself. Love Your Body. Love the World.” We believe that when you love yourself, you have the power to impact and change the world.

You created this project with your mom – what’s it like working on this with her?

It’s wonderful working with my mom, and it’s wonderful to work on something with her that positively impacts so many people. It’s surreal to realize the impact that you have on the world. We’ve had people tell us that they’ve stopped cutting, that they’ve let go of the shame around their mental diagnoses, that they’ve lessened or stopped their eating disorder behaviors, that their relationship with their partner has become stronger and that they’ve gotten more in touch with their emotions, that they love and accept themselves more.

Self-love resonates with everyone differently. We each have our own unique self-love journey. As a therapist who specializes in eating disorder recovery, my mom’s self-love journey has been tied to body image and the eating disorder recovery community. Mine has been connected to the LGBT community and the larger mental health community.

Tell me a little about the 31 Day Self-Love Writing Challenge and what’s different this year.

Each year, we share a Self-Love Diet writing prompt every day throughout January. People can publish their writing on the Love Warrior Community or share it on the public Facebook event page, which has become this supportive forum throughout the whole month where people share their self-love journey, witness others’, and support each other.

What’s different this year is that instead of a public Facebook event page, we’re creating two private Facebook groups – one for mental health professionals and one for the general public. Last year some people told us that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing their writing on a public space. The groups will continue year-round after the 31-Day Self-Love Diet Writing Challenge with weekly writing prompts.

Also new this year on January 9th, we’ll be hosting a free webinar called “Embodying Gratitude”, where we’ll guide participants through creating a personalized gratitude list, recalling specific memories and experiences that bring them joy and comfort, deepening their awareness of emotions in their body, self-soothing and creating the emotions that they want to feel. The first eight people who join will be able to participate in a live workshop.

On January 23, we’re also hosting an in-person workshop in Oakland, CA at Qulture Collective. It’s tentatively titled, “Go Into the Darkness: An Emotional Exploration” where we’ll explore how to become aware of, feel, express, and learn from the darker emotions, like fear, anger, and depression.

Do you take part in the challenge? What do you get out of it?

I participate in the challenge every year. Over the past 6 years of self-love writing, I’ve let go of my fear around my sexual orientation, and I’ve let go of my shame around my neurodiversities. A really big gift of my Self-Love Diet practice is my relationship with my thoughts and emotions. I have bipolar two disorder and paranoia, and through exploring my relationship with those aspects of myself through a self-love lens, I let go of the fear, the shame, and the struggle. I used to think that those parts of me were a hinderance, but now I view them just like any other part of me, beautiful, and part of my normal. When I do cycle, it can be difficult, but I view each of those experiences as a gift and a learning opportunity to further practice my Self-Love Diet tools, coping skills, and to further explore myself. Every moment in life is an opportunity to offer myself unconditional love.

[This interview has been edited for length]

To find out more about the 31 Day Self-Love Writing challenge, check out the Love Warrior blog: http://www.lovewarriorcommunity.com/31-day-self-love-diet-writing-challenge/

The post Love Warrior Community Expands Their Yearly Self-Love Writing Challenge first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY CINDY ZELMAN

This past March, the winter was tough in New England with four feet of snow in a matter of weeks and with my anxiety revving up in my body like a race car ready to crash and burn. I have a history of panic problems, so regular life stressors can hit me hard physically and produce rampant anxiety in my body. During one March weekend, it took all the strength I could muster to get on an MBTA train to ride into Boston to see friends from around the country at a writing conference being held in town. This conference should have been a wonderful time-of-my-life experience, but truly, it was hard for me. I didn’t enjoy myself.

I was signed up for a writing retreat with the TMI organization for the following weekend to be held in the Catskill Mountains, a nearly four-hour drive from my home. How would I manage that when I could barely manage 30 minutes into Boston?

The TMI Project is a monologue and memoir writing and performance workshop. TMI is short for “Too Much Information,” and nothing could be more apt for someone like me who loves to tell stories about myself. I’ve been lucky enough to participate in their weekend retreats for women where for more than 48 hours we focus on telling the stories of our lives. And at the end of the workshops, we perform our pieces in front of an audience. Even those who swear they will never do the performance component of the workshop out of shyness or privacy end up wanting to perform. Performance is cathartic.

In workshop (via TmiProject.org)

Motivation plays a role in my anxiety, and I am always highly motivated to participate in TMI. So despite my anxiety about the winter, I leapt into my car that weekend and headed straight to the The Lifebridge Sanctuary in Rosendale, New York. I arrived at the same moment as workshop leaders Eva Tenuto and Sari Botton. I felt a little embarrassed that I was the first one there. You know, overeager, like for a date. Yet, as I stood in the driveway partway up a mountain, I was greeted warmly by Eva and Sari. This was my third workshop with them and with TMI, and as always, I immediately felt part of a family. Here, I knew, I would be free to be myself.

The workshops with TMI waste no time, and this workshop was no different. We had an opening gathering in which Eva and Sari spelled out the goals and the expectations. We had a great dinner, expertly prepared, with salmon and vegetables. We then headed upstairs to the glorious room with the panoramic view of the Catskills. We began to write and share our personal stories on a Friday night. For someone like me, that’s heaven.

Only my therapist knows the special moment I experienced at this workshop, but I will now tell the rest of you. During the Saturday afternoon writing session I looked at the faces of Eva and Sari amazed once more by their ability to listen and to help anyone shape a story into a monologue; and then I turned my head to see my workshop mates — eleven women of diverse ages, shapes, colors, ethnic backgrounds, family histories, sexual orientations, personal stories and sometimes traumas. Finally, I looked out the windows at the beautiful Catskill Mountains, not all that far off in the distance, holding us all safe within their splendor.

TMI participants.

I thought, Look at you, Cindy, that you have reached this point in your life as a person and as a writer, where you can sit here in this beautiful place with these women and tell a story about your life to perform in front of an audience. For an agoraphobic, panic-disordered, relatively solitary human being, this was quite a moment of peace and connection.

But the peace I felt was not just about me and how far I’d come in my life. It was also about the amazing experience of being part of TMI. Leaders set the tone and Sari and Eva have honed the atmosphere of safety, connection, creativity, humor, authenticity and fun, to an art.

At TMI, I get to be a writer, a lesbian, a woman who grew up in a dysfunctional family, and a woman who is angry that she is the caretaker of her elderly mother. I get to be humorous, sarcastic, sad or poignant. And I get to be part of a group of women, who in a very short time, come to bond and care for one another. That’s what an open and supportive storytelling workshop will do.

For the first time, TMI is coming to Provincetown for Women’s Week, culminating in a public performance at The Sage Inn. There are still spots available if you’re interested in the workshop being held from October 16th through 20th, and of course, we hope to gather a large audience for the show. To get a better idea of what the workshop is all about, explore the TMI Project website at http://tmiproject.org/TMI/. Included are some great videos of some of the performances. I hope to see you in PTOWN to say hello!

Cindy Zelman is a writer based in Boston, whose blog, “The Early Draft,” explores a variety of topics, including lesbianism, writing, agoraphobia, and humor.

The post ‘Too Much Information’ is coming to PTOWN first appeared on Lesbian.com.

It’s not fun to be rejected. Can’t get any companies to bite on your job pitch? Not fun. Can’t get that girl you’re crushing on to text you back? Not fun. Can’t get your parents to accept your sexuality? Not fun. Can’t get the love of your life to love you back? Not fun. But it’s always a comfort to know that some of the world’s most famous and successful lesbians have dealt with their share of rejection too. Like ol’ Gertrude Stein, for example. Painter, poet, novelist, art collector, playwright, eschewer of linear literature and conventional narrative wisdom. She’s one of the most celebrated minds of 19th and 20th centuries. But in 1912, a distinguished London publisher sent her the most scathing rejection letter I’ve ever seen. Not only did he tell her that her manuscript wouldn’t sell; he mocked her experimental style of writing mercilessly.

Read more at AfterEllen.com

AfterEllen is the pop culture site that plays for your team.

The post Cheer up: Even Gertrude Stein faced rejection first appeared on Lesbian.com.