6.6.26 | 🦋 The internal "don't" and "can't" voices that keep us small

Welcome to The Weekend Edit, a Saturday ritual from The Good Trade featuring our top 10 reads of the week and a note from one of our editors.

Happy weekend!

I’m delighted to introduce Kayti Christian, who has been part of the team here at The Good Trade for the better part of a decade. I’ve been personally enjoying her heartfelt essays for years, first as a reader and long before I joined the team.

Alongside her work as our Senior Content Strategist, she is a mother, the creator of phone notes and the co-host of the FriedEggs Podcast podcast.

There is something for all of us in her words. I have no doubt you’ll enjoy. 💛

Warmly,
Kate

Happy Saturday (and happy June!),

I’m not an astrology expert, but my social algorithm has been showing me videos about how the planets are aligned right now in a way that’s opening June softly and offering the kind of healing many of us have been waiting for. I’ll take the invitation.

Lately, I’ve been going back to old writing in search of a creativity that got lost somewhere between burnout and postpartum. My daughter turns one this month, and I’ve hardly touched my manuscript, let alone read a book, this past year. Whenever this type of creative rut happens, I turn to my “creative guides” — the women whose work has been instrumental in my own creative and spiritual transformations.

One book that’s been on my nightstand this month is Writing, Creativity, and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s been reminding me why I fell in love with writing in the first place, and there’s one passage I keep coming back to where Kidd writes about two internal voices that form in our early years: the “don’t” voice and the “can’t” voice.

…I would learn that few things disabled my creativity like the interior voices that told me I wasn’t enough. My psychoanalyst referred to them as the “don’t voice” that rises from the mother complex and the “can’t voice” from the father complex. Complexes aside, the voices are common. They can sound like this:

Don’t rock the boat. Don’t color outside the lines. Don’t call attention to yourself. Don’t risk criticism, hurt, or failure. Besides… you can’t do it. You can’t measure up. It’s beyond you. You’re lacking. You’re not enough. (26)