Write It Out

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Year 1 with Write It Out

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Year 1 with Write It Out

What did I write, what did you like, and what's next?

Kamela Hutzley Dolinova
Jan 6, 2023
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The sun sets on 2022, outside Boston.

I started this newsletter in 2022 on January 7, with the intention of sharing my semi-regular thoughts on trauma, creative writing, narrative, and sexuality. In some ways it’s replaced my old healing blog, which is still up at my therapy website. In other ways it has indeed been the mixed thing I intended it to be: a place where my therapist self and my writer self come together, with a healthy dose of relationship talk. I note there hasn’t been a ton here about sexuality, perhaps because while I have a bit of expertise in that area, it’s become a less compelling topic to me than the larger topic of how we humans love and connect.

The newsletter title has survived the first year, although I was mixed on it when I started. It felt simultaneously too generic and too concise, and yet over time it’s grown on me. After all, isn’t that what I’ve been doing for basically my entire life, since I could write? I got my first diary when I was ten, but I was writing stories before then. I still have reams of notebooks, chronicling my rage and pain and love and terrible poetry through the decades. And of course, I started journaling online just as soon as that possibility became a reality. (Thanks, Diaryland, and thanks Livejournal for being the birthplace of the community I still somewhat travel in.)

Thanks for reading Write It Out! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Write it out. Get the feelings, the stories, onto the page. Make sense of it by getting it out of your head, out of your body. Give your mind space, even if it’s to start perseverating on the next thing.

But first: how’d this first year go?

Numbers, in brief

I started the year off writing a post a week, but then August saw me making a temporary move to Canada, and I needed a break. Then in September I caught Covid while in Halifax, and then I started a new gig which took up considerable hours in my week. I slowed my pace to biweekly, and then to monthly as travel, life, and work sucked up my time to contribute to this space.

All told, I made 38 posts last year. I gathered up 45 subscribers, though post views hover in the 70-100 range. I haven’t promoted this space very much, and I will say that I was on a fairly steady growth curve when I was posting weekly; that seems to be a good cadence that I might try to return to.

What’s next?

I think I’d really like to make more frequent, less dense posts. Monthly, or even biweekly posts are okay, but 1. they put a lot of pressure on me for them to be deep and complex — possibly to the point where people think “oh I’ll read this later” and then just don’t. (No judgment; it happens to me all the time. You should see my Chrome tabs. Actually no, nobody needs to see that.)

I think it would be worthwhile to use a short-to-medium-length post to introduce a single concept. The dissociation post I link below is a good example. The one on trauma is, too, and in that early post I promise to do posts on other concepts from the traumasphere, but I mostly didn’t do that. I spend a lot of time in my own traumatized brain worrying about whether my concepts are complex enough, whether I’m just parroting basics “everybody knows,” and whether my writing has value. Yet I myself resonate most strongly with writers about trauma who keep it simple. Imposter syndrome continues to be real, but I’m trying to give it less and less power.

I’d also like to turn on the chat function this year and see if we can get some conversation going. I love writing about this stuff, but I’d also love to hear from you about it. Getting our stories out is so important, but being seen and known in others’ stories may be even more so.

Your favorite posts

I’m not that interested in doing a huge metrics breakdown, but Substack has a handy menu in the dashboard that sorts my posts by “top.” According to that list, here were your top five faves:

5. Expanding my sliding scale as social justice

A piece about what sliding scales are, who they’re for, and how to empower clients to use them.

Write It Out
Making my sliding scale more...slide-y
As I’ve discussed here a little in the past, mental health care access is a massive social justice issue. As a middle-class white cis woman who does therapy outside of the traditional mental health care system, I’m frequently aware of the ways that many people who could really use my help, can’t get it. I don’t accept health insurance, so it’s not possi…
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a year ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

4. Debunking the idea that trauma generates creativity

The short version? Trauma actually tends to stunt creativity and growth. The people who make incredible art out of their horrible experiences? Are spectacular exceptions. Imagine what they could have done if they hadn’t been subject to horrors.

Write It Out
The myth of the suffering artist
“Believing you have to be unhappy in order to be creative is like believing you have to be shot in the foot in order to be able to run.” -Samantha Lake [Content warning for mentions of suicide.] Ever heard of the 27 Club? The organization has no set meeting location, no mission statement; indeed, it doesn’t even truly exist. But it does …
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a year ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

3. Noticing where I am, and where I’ve been.

An autobiographical post spanning 20 years, written as I recognized that I was staying in the Halifax neighborhood called the North End, exactly 20 years after I left the North End of Boston.

Write It Out
From one North End to another
Hey everyone. It’s been a few weeks, and so this is a long one. I’m embarking on my effort to write a bit more personally here, in the spirit of the title of this newsletter. Writing it out has always been one of my chief processing tools, particularly when I have a lot going on emotionally. So here goes; buckle up for a long one…
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9 months ago · 3 likes · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

2. Positioning myself within queer community.

A tribute to Pride, for those of us who only ever skirted the margins of the margins. Or: a big gay post about my youthful struggles as a f*g hag and proto-queer.

Write It Out
Happy Pride
It was 1990, and I was a gawky 14-year-old starting my sophomore year in an agonizing suburb of New Jersey, when I met my first gay friend. I didn’t know anything about queer people at that time, except the one thing the adults in my life made sure to instill in me at this most sex-crazed of ages: I mustn’t have sex, because if I did, even once, I would…
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a year ago · 4 likes · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

1. Passionately pledging to talk about it.

The post that took weeks to write — an exploration of how the old writing advice, “show, don’t tell,” should be reversed if you want to avoid inflicting your traumatic habits on someone.

Write It Out
Tell don't show
"I've decided to waste my life In a new way, to forget whoever Touched a hair on my head, because It doesn't matter what came to pass, Only that it passed, because we repeat Ourselves, we repeat ourselves." from "May Day," by Phillis Levin Sometime last year, a beloved fellow trauma survivor shared this wisdom with me: that in order to stop the passage…
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a year ago · 3 likes · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

Honorable mentions

There are a few posts that didn’t get quite as much airplay, but that I’m pretty proud of, mostly from earlier in the year. Particularly if you’re new here, I hope you’ll check them out!

How to apologize:

Write It Out
The three-step of repair
I want to talk about relationship repair in this newsletter, but first, I’m sorry I missed the newsletter two weeks ago. Between the holiday, travel, and a whole lot else I needed to get done, I just didn’t have it in me to put one together. I’d like to think that nobody missed it too much, but I’d equally like to think that at least somebody did. And s…
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a year ago · 1 like · 2 comments · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

The concept of trauma is up a lot lately. What exactly does it mean?

Write It Out
The conversation around trauma
The other day, I saw someone speculating on social media about how to reach a person who was interacting in some difficult ways. A commenter suggested looking into the possibility of trauma, “simply because it’s so common.” The comment, made casually, underlined what I consider a tragedy of the modern age. Which is to say: we are living in a traumatized…
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a year ago · 1 like · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

Dissociation gets a bad rap. How it works as part of a healthy nervous system.

Write It Out
Dissociation and its discontents
[Content warning: mention of severe dissociative episodes, suicidality, childhood trauma, drug overdose, and alcohol.] “It’s a dissociative technique, to be sure,” my therapist said to me after offering the image of a parade passing noisily by during an EMDR session. “But dissociation gets a bad rap…
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a year ago · 1 like · Kamela Hutzley Dolinova

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Elizabeth Hunter
Jan 6

I've very much enjoyed your writing over the past year and found it inspiring a lot of reflection. I look forward to seeing where you go in 2023!

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