Sarah asked for this episode. She's a listener who wrote to me and asked for something to help with writer's block. She was feeling self-doubt and lack of confidence. She wanted, and I'm quoting her directly, to reconnect with a playful and joyful creativity. And then she said, no more stuckness. And I underlined that in my notes. Because I know stuckness. I feel it every time I try to write one of these episodes. I really want them to be good. My goal is that everyone falls asleep by the halfway point. And that every word is a gleaming jewel of narrative perfection. But I only have a certain amount of time. So I have to give myself permission to be imperfect. Otherwise, I wouldn't write anything. It's fear, I think. I think that's what most blocks are. It doesn't matter if you're a writer or an artist or someone trying to bring any kind of project to life. Fear that what we make won't be good enough. Fear of failing. Fear of finding out that we have no talent. What could be worse? So instead we wait. We plan to start tomorrow. And then tomorrow, the same fear is sitting there. And so we plan to start after that instead. But a sleep podcast, one like this, it's actually the perfect place to work on that fear. Because as you drift towards sleep, your brain moves through a threshold state. And that's that soft, blurry place between being fully awake and fully asleep. You know that feeling. It's when your thoughts become looser and the edges of things soften. Time stops meaning very much. And in that state, the critical part of your mind, the part that's been telling you that what you make isn't good enough. That part needs you to be alert and tense and self-conscious to do its job. But in the threshold, you are none of those things. So it goes quiet. It just can't help itself. And in that quietness, suggestions go deeper. They don't get argued with or picked apart or dismissed. So when I tell you tonight that the process matters more than the product and that imperfection is not just acceptable but necessary. That the beginning, that clumsy, uncertain, imperfect beginning, it's always worth more than waiting for perfection. In that soft, quiet state, some part of you will hear that differently than you've ever heard it before. Not as advice, but as something you already know. But before we begin, please make sure that you are somewhere safe to fall asleep. Preferably that's your comfortable bed and not anywhere you need to stay alert. And so now, let's help you get settled for the next part. It works best if you're lying on your back. And if that's comfortable for you, take a moment to shift into that position now. Let your arms rest at your sides or on your stomach, whatever feels natural to you. And if lying on your back doesn't work for your body tonight, that's okay. Just find whatever position allows you to breathe deeply and fully. And when you're ready, when you're completely relaxed, I'd like you to place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach and just rest them there. And then take a breath in slowly and see if you can feel your stomach rising first before your chest. Breathe in and let your stomach push up against your hand and then breathe out slowly, letting everything fall. Let's do that a few more times. Breathe in, feeling your stomach rise, and then breathe out. Make it a long, slow breath. Again, breathe in and breathe out. And just let each exhale be a little longer than your inhale. And then let your breathing return to its natural pace. Just enjoy being here and being still in the dark and in the quiet. You may notice that your heart rate is already beginning to slow and your body is already responding to that by relaxing even further. And if you haven't yet, you can let your hands rest now wherever they fall and just notice what's happening. Your body getting heavier, not all at once, but just gradually, the way it always does when you stop fighting it. Your legs are sinking a little further into the mattress. Your arms are resting where they fell and there's no particular reason to move them. The muscles across your shoulders are softening, releasing the day. And your face is smoothing out. All those little tiny muscles around your eyes and around your mouth are softening. And everywhere that your body is in contact with the bed, there is a warmth and that warmth is spreading, moving through you, working its way into the places that have been holding on the longest. And as you rest here, as your eyes close and your body starts to truly relax, and that breath still moving in and out, I want you to follow my words now. You don't have to concentrate hard or hold on to every sentence. Even if your mind wanders, that's fine. If your eyes feel heavy, let them close. Your subconscious is still listening, even when the rest of you is drifting. And that's exactly where we want to be. That quiet place just below the surface where this kind of work can happen. So just give my words permission to guide you and trust that some part of you is following, even when it doesn't feel like it. And now we're going to find you the most perfect place to write. Let's imagine a library, not a public one. This one is private, the kind you might see in a movie. Dark wood shelves filled with books that have been read and put back. There's a desk somewhere in the shadows, a globe on a side table. And right in the center of it is an armchair. The armchair is a deep plum color, a bolstered and aged velvet. The kind of chair that you don't sit on. You sink into it. It holds you. The fire is a few feet in front of you. Close enough that you can feel the warmth on your face and on your hands. And every now and then it pops or a log shifts and saddles into a soft collapse of embers. Rain is hitting the window behind you. Hard and cold. But in here, you are warm. Someone has tucked a soft blanket around you. And you've pulled it up a little so it covers your chest and your arms. On the mantel above the fire, a clock is ticking quietly. It's late, later than you meant to stay up. And your eyes are already a little heavy. But you wanted to write a letter before you slept. In your lap, there's a notebook, spiral bound so it opens flat. And the paper takes ink beautifully. And the pen in your hand has some weight to it. It fits nicely in your grip. The ink is dark, a deep, true black. And it flows easily. The pen moves across the page and the words follow. Almost as if the writing is happening by itself. Before you begin writing, you need to know that no one is ever going to read it. This letter is not going anywhere. It will not be judged or graded or shown to anyone. There is no right way to write it. There's no wrong way either. The only thing this letter has to do is exist. You are writing it because the process of writing it is the only important thing. And you can write anything you like. You could write about what it felt like to be a child in your body. Not watching yourself from the outside, the way we tend to do as adults. But fully inside your own skin. You remember running downhill. Your legs going faster than you meant them to. The ground coming up hard and uneven. And the specific feeling of your arms going out for balance and not quite helping. That edge between running and falling that felt so good, you kept going anyway. Maybe you were laughing. You had grass stains probably on both knees. Right about that. Right about the skin palms of your hands. The way you look at the damage and feel almost proud of it. Right about how tired you were at the end of a summer day. You could write about swimming underwater. The way sound changes the moment your ears go under. And the whole world becomes muffled and unreachable. Just a low rush of water. And the feeling of your own body, slow and weightless. The way you could open your eyes and everything looked slightly unreal. Blurred light coming down from the surface. And your own hands in front of you, looking like someone else's. Write about staying under as long as you could. That game you played with yourself. The pressure in your chest. Building slowly and then the burst back up into noise and light and air. You could write about dancing alone. The song you put on when the house is empty. And you turn it up louder than you normally would. And the way certain songs do something to you that you can't quite explain. Not just that you like them, but that they get inside of you somehow. Or you could write about how you once went online to see how many other people loved your favorite movie. When you've watched so many times, you know what's coming. And you watch it anyway. And the warm feeling of finding a whole thread of strangers who feel exactly the same about that movie. People who noticed the small moment in it that you noticed. Who quoted the same line. Write about how that felt. That small, happy sense of not being alone in it. You could write about smell. The air after rain. That clean ozone smell. Freshness. The mineral sharpness of it. Or the smell of someone you love. Which is almost impossible to describe. But completely impossible to forget. The smell of your favorite person's hair. Or the warm cotton smell of their shirt. Or that deeper thing underneath. The smell that is just them. Write about that. Or write about very good chocolate. The kind that costs more than it should. The way it smells before you've even unwrapped it. Dark and slightly bitter. Write the most terrible romance novel you can imagine. Give your hero a strong chin. And brooding eyes. And some kind of troubled past he refuses to discuss. Give your heroine long, loose, wavy hair. That is always falling across her dark and liquid eyes. And a temper she really ought to work on. Let them clash. Let them misunderstand each other. In ways that could be resolved with a single conversation. But won't be. Not for at least 200 pages. Or reverse the roles entirely. Or write yourself in. As the villain. Coolly magnificent. With excellent taste in everything. Or write yourself in as the comic relief. The one everyone secretly loves the most. No one is ever going to read this. So let yourself enjoy it. You could write about biting into a ripe peach in the back seat of a car on a summer afternoon. The kind of peach that is so ripe it gives slightly under your fingers before you've even bitten into it. And when you do, the juice runs immediately down your chin and onto your hand. And you're in your shorts. And your skin is slightly flushed from too much sun that day. And the peach on that specific afternoon, it tastes like the absolute height of summer. Like the thing summer has been building toward all along. And write about how no amount of money, or status, or achievement can replicate that exact feeling. About how it costs nothing. Now, it is everything. You could write about putting on a sweater straight from the dryer when it's still holding all that warmth. Smelling so clean. Now you stood there for a moment in the kitchen with your arms folded across your chest. Just staying inside that warmth. About taking your shoes off at the end of a hard day. About the first cold morning of autumn when you stepped outside and the air smelled completely different. And there were leaves on the pavement that weren't there yesterday. You could write about the taste of that overly sweet cough syrup that you got every time you were sick when you were a kid. It was comforting. And you associate it with cool hands on your forehead and being allowed to stay home and watch game shows while everyone else was in school.You could write about the scar you have and how you got it and about the laugh that comes out of you when something is genuinely funny. Now it's very different from your polite and a little bit fake laugh. You could write about the last time someone made you laugh, that real laugh that made your stomach hurt and you couldn't speak and every time you thought you recovered one of you started again.Write about who that was, write about what you were laughing about. Now the two of you probably couldn't explain it to anyone else. Now the thing itself probably wasn't that funny but you just couldn't stop.You could write about your hands. Now they've changed over the years. Now the veins are a little bit more visible and now the skin is a little different. Now you looked at them one day and you saw someone else's hands. Maybe a parent. Write about that. Write about all the things those hands did, the things they made and held and reached for and let go of. You could write about what you know now, that you didn't know when you were younger, that most people are doing their best and finding it hard and that the people who seem to have everything sorted out are mostly just better and not showing how hard it is. Write about being more forgiving now of other people and of yourself and how you didn't used to like certain things about yourself and how along the way you just stopped caring about the freckles, the weird feet and the way you feel things too much sometimes.Whatever brought you here tonight, whether you're a writer or an artist or someone with a project that's been sitting untouched for too long. The block is not what you think it is. It's usually fear.Fear that what you make won't be good enough. Fear that if you try and it doesn't work, that says something about who you are. And the solution is always far simpler than we imagine. It's simply permission. Permission to make something imperfect. Permission to be in the process rather than focused on the product.Because it is the process that is the beautiful thing, not the finished work, the pen moving across the page, the brush finding the canvas, the early messy draft that no one sees. That is the gift. Your life has been rich and interesting and full of things worth saying and all of it belongs to you and only you and no one else can make the thing that you can make because no one else has been living your life.But now your body is so heavy. The heaviness that only comes at the very end of a long day. You can feel it in your legs.A heavy warmth spreading all the way down to your feet. And your breathing has slowed without you asking it to. Each breath out is longer than the breath in.And your heart rate is dropping with every exhale. Your thoughts are losing their edges. You know how this feels.The moment when a thought starts and doesn't quite finish. When the mind stops trying to be useful and just begins to drift. You're there now or nearly there.Sleep is the most natural thing there is. Your body knows exactly how to do this and it's doing it right now without any effort from you. Without anything left to figure out or fix or finish.There is nothing left to do tonight. Nothing to solve. Nothing to begin. Let your eyes stay closed. Let your thoughts go wherever it is they go and let the darkness behind your eyes be enough.