YALP avoidance

If I am honest, I have done next to nothing on YALP, the course which inspired this blog. I am sure I have a moodle exercise I have to do at some stage. That said, the fruits of the course have been many fold, and have included starting work on my creative self, and coming to terms with being someone who likes to write inward looking writing very, very much.

The validation for having a journey that goes inside felt very deep and real and solid. I suspect I have always in some way felt that because my natural focus was inwards, that this was for some reason wrong, and I should be more outward looking, and less heartfelt in my writing.

I don't know if this is a part of wanting to try and be an academic, that somehow I was trying to make myself fit into a box I just didn't quite make it into. Certainly inward writing and including the self in anthropology can happen, not that it seems to be widely approved of...

Something happened on the YALP course, something come together in a way that was completely unplanned and unexpected. I just accepted the journey, and it made sense. My words were a way to the divine, whatever that might mean, and only a tool. My life made sense to me in a way it had never done so before. I wish someone had given me a book on life writing as a younger woman and told me to go and knock myself out, this is how to use this side to you, and be a happy introvert. I guess we come to things as and when we are ready.

YALP gave me a lot more than just confidence in my writing preferences and a new way forward in how to use my creativity, it gave me a the seeds for a stronger more confident grounding in Quaker faith, which I am yet to really fully explore. I will let all these things unfold gently, though I might have to push myself into reading the Journal of George Fox, perhaps that will be one of my next adventures.

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