Rewriting Our Stories, Together

On the power of creative community to transform our personal stories

Today we’re pleased to present a heartfelt essay that was years in the making. Foster contributor Indigo Habel, writer of Becoming Ensouled, describes his path to finding the right kind of people to be in community with, and how it revived his relationship to his own creativity.

Our Foundations Cohort kicks off this Monday, 6/3, and we still have a few spots available! Join us and learn to write from a more embodied, emotionally-rich place, navigate more directly to truths worth sharing, and move beyond resistance to publish courageously and find your people.

To Trust in Timing

The invitation arrived just before dawn.  

“Foster.” 

Each time I reread the name, a strange sensation ran through me, as if a message had been tucked away between its syllables. This online writing community, one I had never heard of before, was waiting at the bottom of a writing newsletter I usually scrolled past. But today, I opened it. And now, a doorway to something glimmered before me. 

As I kept reading about this global community of eclectic creatives called Foster, I navigated to the web page about their philosophy. They said that writing was never meant to be a lone pursuit; that it was most transformative when practiced together, in community. It was exactly what I had been looking for, but never quite knew how to describe. And now, an opportunity had arrived.  

But the joy sparked by that realization was short-lived. Doubts darted through my mind. 

“What if this is more than I’m ready for right now?”

“What if my writing isn’t good enough for this?” 

“What if I don’t know what to write about?”

I recognized the voice behind these questions as an old and familiar one. It was a voice, easily mistaken for my own present-moment thoughts, that would swell forward and crash through my mind whenever it was time to show up, especially creatively, in front of others. It was the voice of My Story. A Story rooted deep in my psyche that, after almost two decades of education and conditioning, declared: “The only safe place to express your authentic creative self is quietly, and in private.”

Good luck reasoning with a Story like that.   

This Story, its roots woven through the fabric of my being, felt like a part of who I was. Like something that, no matter what, just was. It had become a foundational law of reality, for me. 

And it was starting to piss me off. 

I wondered, then, if a community like Foster might be the exact thing I was missing. As someone who usually defaulted to figuring things out on their own, I had never really put much weight on the value of being part of a larger, regular community that was aligned with my values—let alone for such a personal, hard-to-define reason. But if I were to do the previously unthinkable and join a community like this, I reasoned, I might not have to make sense of My Story alone anymore. 

That thought felt pretty great. It felt like freedom. 

I applied to join Foster. 

To Discover the Others

Right after closing the screen, I expected to immediately regret my decision. Just applying felt like a big swing for me. I waited for the physical sensation that would confirm my worried mind’s worst fear: that I was not ready for what I was taking on. 

But something else happened instead. 

I felt lighter. More expansive. This strange new feeling was almost like a signal just up ahead, reminding me, “This is what it feels like when you’re on track.” 

In March 2023, I officially joined the Foster community as a contributor. 

Immediately, I felt an alignment with the people there. With the kinds of people there. Not only were they creative, they were self-aware, curious, and thoughtful. They were the kinds of people who looked deeply at life and its possibilities. I had built connections like that with a handful of people in my life, but I had never found an entire community of people I felt so closely in sync with before. 

I never realized, until that moment, how much finding the right kind of community actually mattered to me. Or perhaps I just hadn’t been paying much attention to the part of me it mattered to. 

But now, my entire being exhaled a relieved breath. Yes. 

Now that I was a contributor at Foster, I wouldn’t just be growing new connections and editing other writers’ work from month to month, I would also have the opportunity to join the community’s upcoming writing cohort, called “Season 3: The Artisan’s Way.” 

But, as I soon learned, the cohort wasn’t just about writing. Really, it was about supporting writers through a process of guided self-discovery, self-expression, and self-realization. In my experience, those three holistic terms were usually reserved for the various healing professions, but rarely used in connection with writing programs. I was intrigued.   

My Story—still an opinionated passenger—wasn’t a big fan of that. Not the self-discovery. Not the self-realization. And self-expression? Publicly? It was having none of it. 

But back when I joined Foster, I was also making a sacred commitment to myself: My Story could no longer be the one steering my life because, as long as it was, I would never be able to venture far. So, despite the mental noise, I pushed on. 

And Season 3 was the next logical step. There, my Story would have nowhere to hide. 

To Face an Old Story

As Season 3 began, all thirty-ish writers in the cohort agreed, together over Zoom, to publish something once the month was up. It didn’t matter how much it was, just that it was deeply true for them.

I knew what I wanted to write about: how this Story of mine had first taken root. 

At first, I was totally overwhelmed. Why had I just committed to writing an essay about my entire life? But as awful as it felt, I couldn’t unlatch my imagination from the idea. I had to figure it out. 

I began traveling back into my past, following different threads through my history. 

As I honed in on one particular experience back in elementary school that had moved the needle on how I relate to my creativity, a surprising well of emotions bubbled up. 

First came anger. Anger at my teachers for condemning my unruly imagination when it dared to pull my focus away from their lessons, and then showing no interest in teaching me a way to channel it productively. 

Then came sadness. Sadness that I had increasingly lost touch with my creativity over the years. And, after a point, that I started putting more energy into hiding it than sharing it. 

And, at last, came compassion. Compassion for my younger self who, finding himself moored in environments that felt senseless and unsupportive in the ways that mattered most, forged a tool strong enough to insulate him from the discomfort. And compassion also for the teachers who likely knew no better than to repeat the same dynamics they learned from those who once shaped their minds.

As I revisited my past with new eyes, it began to shift. Its sharp edges softened. 

Long ago, My Story insulated me so that I could survive in a world that often sees creativity as elective rather than imperative. And while it left me disconnected from my own creative flow, it was also the thing that gave me the energy I needed to push through the discomfort and succeed in a world that made little sense to me. 

Even when it meant ignoring what was true, and worth validating, about my experience. 

But the world My Story had been created for—along with all the instincts, desires, and fears it instilled in me—was a world that no longer existed. It was a past reality I had been dragging along with me, forcing into each present moment. 

I thanked My Story for the purpose it once served, and published my first essay on Substack. 

To Write a New Story

Stories take time to grow into their power. 

They take sustained creative effort to be understood. 

And they take devotion—often the devotion of many—to be transformed. 

We aren’t separate from the stories we tell. And eventually, we become them. 

Carl Jung once said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.” He was right. My Story had become my Fate. Because as long as I embodied it—however resentfully—I was feeding it. 

But there was a way through.  

Despite the fear, I had become more curious about the possibilities of creative community than of the known safety of creative isolation. And in that new open space, there was nothing for My Story to rebel against. But there was plenty to learn and, just maybe, to finally understand. 

Looking back, it’s no wonder that I was so resistant to ever seeking out community. After all, it was in community that My Story had first taken root. How perfect that healing would be found in the exact thing I had most avoided. By reclaiming community and rewriting the story of what it could be, I disrupted the story of what it had been. 

And it was through a single resonant word that I found my path forward. Then, like a key finding its lock, a new door opened.

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Foster is a unique community of practice where writers get the support they need to stay consistent, go deeper into their work, and write the stories only they can tell. Join us!