I am a writer and editor living in Kentuckiana and a graduate of The New School. I received my MFA in creative writing in 2015 and have been bopping around as a personal assistant, first reader, copywriter, content strategist and sometimes editor ever since.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written anything in this series of mental healing and for a few months I shamed myself and had this overwhelming sense of failure: I had started a project and I dropped the ball on it. Seeking validation in yourself and the work that you do is a tricky space. I believe in my writing but I shame myself for not doing the work. I shame myself even when I know I’ve been doing other work that is just as self-validating. You see, I started a new job (lol. that “new” job started now…
This is the time of the year where I start to feel a daily sense of anxiety and then I get anxious about my anxiety, i.e. “everyone sees this and I must look so childish. You are childish. Stop being childish. Everyone can see. Stop it. Stop being childish.”
When I moved back to Kentucky, I was freelancing for an NYC publishing house and that gig was about to end. They had hired someone new and I had yet to find a job in my hometown. I had just bought, on a whim, a dog off Craigslist, I was missing the pace of NYC – ya’ll don’t even know how long it takes to get a coffee in Louisville—, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing back in a place I swore I wouldn’t return to. I also couldn’t exactly remember why I had sworn never to return.
CONCEPTS is an effort to document my mental healing journey. It is a desire to understand why I felt like crying every single day when I moved back to Louisville, KY after living in Brooklyn for three years. It is an effort to understand why my relationships with my mother and my father were rapidly deteriorating; to understand why I struggled to stay employed; to understand self-sabotage and self-love and self-hate and how fucking amazing it feels when you remind yourself to just breathe.
Sam Rae Hall 