Jacob Nordby
Don’t Change, You’re Already Enough
I walked by a mirror and caught the glance of my own eyes. The words that came from my lips without warning surprised me. “I love you.” It stopped me.
Category: Jacob Nordby
Jacob Nordby
Restoring Yourself: the life-giving cure for creative pneumonia
Using my metaphor of physical pneumonia as a comparison, many people are living their lives barely able to take a breath, creatively speaking.
Anxiety, pressures of socialization, fear of rejection, and reactions triggered by unresolved traumas fill the lungs of their creative body. This leaves them lethargic, full of self-doubt, lacking the sense of purpose or self-worth to move toward what they would love to create in life. Furthermore, many people believe that they lack the needed talent to produce something “rare, original, and valuable” with their lives.
Jacob Nordby
The Unlikely Magic of Being Honest (with yourself)
The conversation with my friend years ago was one of many red flags that eventually made me realize how long I had been lying to myself and how much it was costing me—and others. The results of learning a different way were astonishing…
Jacob Nordby
2 Kinds of Creative Practice (and why you need both)
I used to think of my creative practice as the time I would devote to a project. You know, spending time each day to work on a book, in my case. For you, it might be any expression of your creativity and I’ll talk a little more about this later. It turns out that there’s more to it…
This belief turned out to be only part of what it means to develop a creative practice—and it often left me drained, stuck, and frustrated when I kept hammering away at “the product.”
Jacob Nordby
How not to f*ck up at journaling (like I did at first)
I want to let myself be a cautionary tale because I’ve been sharing the life-changing benefits of using your journal for self-discovery, healing, and transformation. You should know that I didn’t always do it right. I pretty much fucked it up and wondered why I wasn’t getting the value from it that all the books and experts said I would.
Jacob Nordby
Neil Gaiman reads “A Christmas Carol”
This has all the best elements for me. Neil Gaiman is in the pantheon of my literary deities–I don’t know of another living writer who embodies storytelling skill as masterfully as he does.
His reading of A Christmas Carol takes me back to childhood. I grew up without television and movies, so it was a very big deal for my brothers and sisters and me to gather around the radio on Christmas Eve and try to tune into a broadcast of the old Campbell’s Soup dramatized version of Dickens’s famous old tale.
Jacob Nordby
How Jaxon Became Immortal
I really don’t know how to write this story now, because it’s about a small stray cat who was not well when he came in from the cold and it’s not a surprise that he didn’t make it, not really. We hoped that he would flourish with good food and warmth and love, you know? We imagined him sleek and complacent as The Cat Himself, lounging in the sunshine on the back of the couch someday if we could give him what he needed.
Jacob Nordby
Tales of Jaxon S Feral – The Last Chapter
I feel strange writing this cat story today. Yesterday, the news was full of horrible stories about how humans in Texas and Ohio killed lots of people. I don’t watch or read news, but those headlines were unavoidable. If you were alive in America on August 4, 2019 and had an Internet connection, you know what I’m talking about.