LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Nichelle Tramble Spellman!
Why trust the bad news more than the good?
Dear Lovelets,
HELLOOOOOO from my heart to yours, and from your hearts to mine, and from all of our hearts to everyone’s hearts. I’m so happy we are all here!
Thank you to a Lovelet named Trish, for what she wrote last week about this community:
“I think in these tough times this is the one place I can go and know that without a doubt I can find safety, strength in love, compassion for each other, and humanity. A place I can go to see fresh, artistic, free speech. And it is such a gift to log in each week and learn about another like-minded soul in Liz’s guest writers. I just love that this is a place to discover amazing people doing amazing things across the world without all the crazy algorithm chatter we are getting on other platforms. Thank you, thank you to everyone who is keeping this going. It gives me so much hope for the future.”
Oh Trish, honeyhead, me too. It gives me hope, too.
I love being part of this mass awakening into Unconditional Love.
And I want to pull back the curtain this week and show you a bit of our process here at Love LLC. When my beloved friend Margaret and I decided to begin this project over two years ago, we made the decision to keep as much of the material as possible above the paywall. We wanted to make sure that the heart of what is being done here would be accessible to anyone who wants and needs it.
Specifically, I made the choice to keep everything that I write, and my videos, free to all. And after my piece, we put up our paywall as a safeguard not only for our guest writers — because it is so vulnerable to write a letter from love and share it with strangers — but also for our subscribers who want to take part. We envisioned a safe, protected place to share letters or thoughts about the process, all without fear of trolls or abuse.
And it works. It never stops astonishing me that at our yearly subscription rate, 96 cents a week is enough of a barrier to keep the haters away.
“Nobody pays to hate,” I was told when I came to Substack, and it turns out to be true!
So, for all of you who are paid subscribers, we want to say: THANK YOU. Your contribution keeps our precious special guests safe, and gives all your fellow Lovelets a secure space to share their most vulnerable feelings.
And for those of you who are still reading above the paywall, just know that I see you and I love you, too! Thank you for being part of this community. You don’t have to pay anything to be here with us, or to belong to our hearts. I want to always keep it that way. You don’t have to write your own letters from love to be part of this community. And if you do write letters, you don’t have to share them with anyone — ever.
In short, you don’t have to do anything to belong here.
Let there be one place in this world where your tired soul doesn’t have to do anything to belong.
So, now: on to our newsletter!
Please give a warm welcome to this week’s special guest — my dear old friend, the novelist and screenwriter Nichelle Tramble Spellman, who is so precious to me, and who is also one of the best storytellers I have ever met. (I wish we could make Nichelle tell the story about how, after her kind and loving mother died, Nichelle found switchblades hidden in every single one of her purses — but that’s a story for another day, and we don’t have that kind of time. SO MANY SWITCHBLADES, THOUGH!)
Nichelle — we are so delighted you joined us this week, and with such a tender letter to the little girl you once were. I love you with all my heart.
Let’s keep going.
Love,
Your Lizzy
PS A reminder that I will be at the Barbican in London on March 2 for a talk/Q&A about ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER, and I will be leading a weekend creativity workshop in Amsterdam on March 14-15. If you are planning to attend either event and want to meet other Lovelets, you can find each other in the London and Amsterdam meetup chats!
If you’d like to write your own letter from love but don’t know how, let us hold your hand. And if you’d like to share your letter with us, just leave it in the comments section below. To do so, you must have a paid subscription to Letters From Love. We have found that this safeguards our kind, like-hearted community and the intimate work we do together.
Dear Love, what would you have me know about celebrating my accomplishments?
I see you shrink, little shrinky-dink figurine standing uncomfortably in the oven of our gaze right now. I see you pull back from me, as you never do when you are in pain or in distress. I have been there with you, for you, whenever you have been in the deepest remorse, shame, regret, overwhelm, despair, and even anger in your life. Why will you not let me be with you, for you, in your glory?
Glory!
You wince at that word.
But honey, let me say it again. Your glory. I love you in your glory, just as much as I love you in your suffering.
Why are you allowed to suffer, but not allowed to shine?
Let me put this another way — why, when you do something wrong, do you pride yourself in taking complete and total responsibility for it, for “owning it,” as you like to say? Why do you never let yourself off the hook for your mistakes, still ruminating over them decades later, still testing yourself to be sure that you have made proper amends, asking others for forgiveness, wearing your errors like an iron cloak you never take off but bravely BEAR . . . but when you have accomplished something, you push the glory of it away from you as though you are a demure dieter at a banquet, saying, no thank you, I won’t even have a bite of the tiramisu?
Why does this letter make you more uncomfortable than any you have ever written?
Can we sit with you in this discomfort, little one?
Can we surround you with love, the same way we do whenever you are suffering? Because yes, in what may feel like a surprising way, this question is making you suffer.
You do not want to celebrate yourself.
You do want to do a constant inventory of your character defects, looking at yourself with such rigorous honesty that it is as though you are forever standing in front of a parole board — which, like nearly all parole boards, never sets you free, as it reviews your list of shortcomings.
Accomplishments.
The word scares you, doesn’t it? Here is another way you deflect it — you say your accomplishments belong to God; you say you have just been lucky; you say are not responsible for your talents; you say that you are over-privileged; you say that you stand on the shoulders of giants; that the credit is due to others, or to fate.
But little sun-mote, you cannot have it both ways.
You can’t take complete and total responsibility for your failures, without taking any responsibility for your successes. It cannot simultaneously be true that your errors are all yours, but your accomplishments belong to anyone but you.
May we suggest something radical?
Let’s do an experiment. Let’s release your failures by diminishing them the same way you diminish and release your achievements, using the same language you have always used to push away success.
Let’s say that many people were responsible for your failures, the same way that you claim that many people were responsible for your successes. Let’s say that your failures were an accident of fate, the same way that you say your successes were an accident of fate. Let’s say, with your biggest failures, that you were just unlucky — the way you say about your biggest successes that you were just lucky. Let’s say that God had a hand behind your failures, the same way you say God had a hand behind your successes.
And for your accomplishments, what would happen if, for even five minutes, you really took in one of those achievements — if you let it sink it, if you really FELT it, the way you feel so deeply the shame of your mistakes.
Let’s pick an accomplishment right now, and celebrate it.
You pick one.
Look how your hands suddenly go still over the keyboard, because you can’t seem to let yourself do it. Baby girl, look how hard this is for you.
Please. Bring us something you are proud of, honey. Really, bring it to us.
We want to see it.
There it is. We see it, feel it, it’s crossing through your mind. Your book, THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS. It is the creation that you brought forth in the world that you love more than anything you have ever made. Let us say it, let us shine with you for a moment in this truth. The creation of that book was a joy from the beginning of its imagining through the four years of research, through the travel from Philadelphia to Amsterdam to London to Tahiti that you did to create it, through the blazing months that you sat alone in your attic and let the story build through your hands — at times barely able to breathe with the excitement of what was being born. Every word of it was a joy to write, and nobody was more enchanted by that book than you.
YOU MADE THAT.
You made something that you love. Oh honey, it is beautiful. Let us celebrate with you, the same way we grieve with you. We are not just here for the hard things, we are here for the explosions of wonder, and even the pride, the very well-earned pride, the beautiful bloom of pride — that you are allowed to have, which is one of the emotions you were taught you could never, never own.
Baby girl, we ask something of you. This is important, so lean in. We hear every word you say about yourself — you know that, right? And we have heard you for many years now, whenever you talk about THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS, or somebody else praises it, we hear you say, “I didn’t write that one. It is a better book than I am capable of writing. I don’t even remember writing it. Something was writing through me.”
Sweetheart. It isn’t true. Can we ask you to stop saying that?
You did write it, our beautiful creative and disciplined girl. Nobody else was in that attic with you. And the “something” that was writing through you, as that book emerged, was nothing less than your own talent — which belongs to you. Talent, from the Roman word for your salary, your share, your little piece of silver that’s yours. It belongs to you. And you fostered it with decades of work and study, and yes, you are allowed to feel good about it.
You are allowed to feel good about yourself, angel. Nobody ever taught you this, although you were taught to rigorously and even mercilessly sweep yourself constantly for error and mistake. You are not a mistake — nor must your life be an endless mine-sweeping operation to discover and correct all that is wrong with you. You are so many things more than just wrong. You are so many things. You have made so many things. You have made beauty out of your own beauty.
Won’t you celebrate with us?
We cheer for you, but we don’t want to be alone in our cheering.
Won’t you love and accept your accomplishments, as much as you have learned to love and accept your shortcomings?
Won’t you stand with us in amazement at who you are, how hard you work, how much you love what you have made?
Don’t leave us hanging. We want to be with you in this.
We love you so much. Please accept that love, in all its forms.
We are proud of you. Please be proud of you with us. So that we, Love, don’t have to be alone.
Prompt
This is a good one.
Inspired by Nichelle’s letter — “So take a vow to tell yourself hard truths, and celebrate your accomplishments with the same abandon with which you embrace your disappointments” — this week, we are casting aside the instinct to downplay the good. Let’s instead pose this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about celebrating my accomplishments?