Creative Life Midwife

Inspiring Artistic Rebirth

Life After: My Vulnerable Sharing Five Years Ago leads to more Self-Compassion Now

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One of the most important aspects of this blog series is rediscovering the experiences from five years ago from a space of deep compassion. I’ve realized how detached I have been from this experience, perhaps because it is frightening to remember and so many other “more important” things have happened since then. More on that tomorrow.

For now, this is what I said to my friends near and far on October 29, 2019 –

I’m recovering at home, slowly and surely. The most inconsistent part of this process is my mood.

Vulnerability alert: Since I’ve been home, I’ve been afraid of a lot of random things. Lately I’ve been afraid when my hands are cold. When Sepsis descended and death came close, that was what I felt, so very cold – and the nurse (at least how I remember it) wrapped my hands in heated sheets.

Sometimes I’m afraid of falling asleep.

I’m sometimes afraid of eating and even get worried about my medicines. And yes, I talked to my doctor about this.

My senses have also become really acute. My sense of smell is what I imagine is animal like, my hearing fine tuned.

Five years ago, I was recovering from a near death experience. This is how I looked - not horrible, but I can see the sadness and worry in my eyes.

Today I wrote using my computer for the first time. I don’t know what was scaring me about that, but my resistance is high. I think a part of me has another part of me convinced if I start writing some of what happened, the emotions will be too much. Considering I have an irrational fear of choking that got worse in the hospital, it makes sense because when I cry hard I often choke or vomit.

Nonetheless, I am grateful:

I am grateful I spoke with Samuel last night. We talked mostly about his Japanese class. I miss that kid. He’s the best. I’m also excited the UNLV esports team is doing a mental health fund raiser. They get it.

I am grateful Emma is doing well in her first run as a director. Her work is a part of the Bakersfield College One Act festival this Friday & Saturday. She cast her play thoughtfully and the actors are working hard. I love hearing all about it. I’ll be there Friday! It’s only $5! Show your support!

I am grateful for naps.

I am grateful for lemonade and cranberry juice.

I am grateful for fluffy textures and soft pillows.

I am grateful for people who think critically and read facts.

I am grateful for Greta Gerwig. Can’t wait for “Little Women”!!

I am grateful for prayers…. so grateful.

I am grateful for my daughter Queenta Atem on her birthday – God bless this woman!

I am grateful for Moth storytelling videos.

Most importantly, five-years-later me adds: I am so grateful I chose to survive and have experienced so much wonder and joy since I earnestly wrote the words above.

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 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

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🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Where did my creativity and urge to write go?

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Writing and creativity are like breath to me.

The fact I left next to zero evidence of creativity between September 24 and March 27 says a lot about how I was feeling physically after my near death experience and how that impacted my inner muse.

My whole body became dark, gloomy and sad.

It felt like all my strength was gone – and normally writing and creativity save me – but when there is no strength left…. this is where I sat for days, weeks and months.

The pandemic was looming and only my son’s return for Thanksgiving helped me to begin feeling slightly right, in flickers of moments that didn’t last very long.

Ironically, I didn’t remember much of this. It is as if everything became blurry, including my memory.

I’m grateful those days are passed.

This is the anniversary of the day I left the hospital. Finally.

🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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Goals Then & Surpassing in Surprising Ways

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This was the day five years ago I learned the cause of my time in ICU.

I learned why I went from about to be discharged to being rushed to a higher level of care.

It started after I took my shower in preparation for going home. Things didn’t go well when I got out of the shower and my still wet self was back in the bed, shivering wildly, with someone I vaguely recognized as the charge nurse was rushing to take my vital signs, including the device to take my blood oxygen levels.

I sort of recalled them not being able to be read because my temperature was fluctuating erratically, but nothing was really making sense at that point.

I remember the charge nurse kindly gave me a heated sheet and I heard her talking to the nurse about what had happened and then I felt myself being pushed underwater.

The memory of being pushed underwater wasn’t actually happening but from my perspective I was underwater. I was looking up at the surface of the water which was arching over me from both sides. It was reminding me of when I went on a strange water experience in the Atlantic Ocean at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

I was at the end of my first trimester of my pregnancy with Marlena, my daughter who was stillborn. I was doing things that seemed slightly strange and unlike me, especially things that made me scared, because I didn’t want fear to be a legacy I passed inadvertently to my daughter.

When I was flung off that strange ride, this is the same sight I saw.

Once again, I wasn’t scared, I was curious and fascinated.

In those early days I didn’t dare speak or write any of this because… the person who got the increased legacy of fear was myself.

This WAS the day 5 years ago when I requested to be off the far-too-sweet liquid diet I had been on. It was probably because I started refusing to consume anything that they finally agreed.

In my notes from that day here is some of what I was saying, which definitely showed by spunky, “everything will be ok and I will live to write about it” attitude.

I managed to get myself off a clear liquid diet (too darned sweet) to a regular liquid diet. I’ve learned my Dr doesn’t like to leap frog from clear to puréed… I mean that is too much. I suggested the BRAT diet but he just looked at me like I was the brat.

My big goal today is to sit for a few minutes in a chair.

My most exciting moment of all for today and entire month is seeing Emma perform at Kern Shakespeare Festival through the magic of live-streaming and the generosity of Arian And Brian – both have been such strong support for Emma and is so appreciated by this Mama. 

And then these words: 

So strange for a usually deep breathing person to not be able to breathe. 

Many of my lab results numbers are better. Some are not. 

My big goal today is to sit for a few minutes in a chair.

Little did I know that two years from that date I would be walking on the Appalachian Trail, something I did during childhood with my father and returned to when I moved back to New Jersey after decades away.

That is a long way from a goal of sitting for a few minutes in a chair in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Bakersfield, California.

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🌟 Creative Life Coach & Muse Cultivator

 🎨 | Award-Winning Writer/Actor/Storyteller

🌱 | Empowering Your Second Act

🎉| New Courses/Programs Coming soon!

🎁   Your presence here makes me feel grateful. 

✍🏻I am a writer first, writing & creativity coach, multi passionate creative next. Writing has always been my anchor art and to her I always return. Thankfully, with great love.

🎯 My aim is to create content here that inspires and instructs – if there is ever a topic you would like for me to explore, please reach out and tell me. My ultimate goal is to create posts, videos and more that speak to your desires as well as mine because where these two intersect, our collaborative, joyful energy ignites into a fire of love, light and passionate creativity.

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My Vision is Bigger than This Bump in the Road

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I almost hit a wall and allowed it to stop me.

Note: I almost hit a wall and allowed it to stop me.

I didn’t let it stop me.

I am here, writing. I made a video. I am on course, on track, doing this. I am doing this. 

How did I begin my work in Transformational Creativity?

I began being a creative life coach, facilitating transformational programs, working with individuals to have breakthroughs in their own creative life while I continue with my multi-creative work?

The easiest way for me to narrow down the story returns me to my near-death experience in October 2019. The wall I speak of now – my health crisis – may be rooted in that continuing saga. The biggest challenge with my health is I don’t know what is causing my problem – is it more Valley Fever? Is it a benign tumor? Is it some form of cancer? I can read the CT report – which points out all into possibilities. In the past, when I hit a wall regarding my health I would stay stuck in the worry.

This time I am not, I will not get stuck in worry.

That is a big one for me.

My goal to work with people as a partner in their transformation and expanding that vision into co-creating a changed world is huge. I am not going anywhere. I am continuing on the path I started forging two decades ago.

Even if this health snag becomes larger than I want it to be, I have a team to help me through it and my work will continue. That says it all.

My work will continue because my vision is bigger than this bump in the road.

Julie Jordan Scott is the Creator of the Radical Joy of Consistency Course which helps people practice consistency and completion daily in order to experience a more incredible life experience. She came to this conclusion after almost dying and coming back to true and expanded healing by writing 377 consecutive haiku… and a lot more along her way to building that streak! To find out more about this program, visit this link, here.


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How to Create a Simple Intention that Will Change Your Life for the Better Even During these Uncertain Times

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I confessed to you in yesterday’s blog post I had one of the largest blocks of my lifetime last Fall after having a near-death experience. It wasn’t only the almost dying that shut down my creative will to make things, it was the unsupported recovery.

In the perfect world, I would have had numerous caretakers hovering nearby ready and able to be at my beck and call but in reality it was Emma and me… and since I never trained Emma to “adult” – my mom never trained me, I just became an adult from about age eleven and increasing as I grew older – so there I sat in my corner recliner doing nothing except walking to the restroom back to my chair and walking to the kitchen and making myself not to terribly healthy meals and back to my chairs and at the end of the day, I would either sleep in the chair or wander to my bedroom.

I had friends swing by and take me places, doing the best they could, but no one really knew what my life was like inside my house.

I wasn’t about to tell them because that would make me a creative failure, a wannabe, a nothing. After almost dying, I felt so lackluster that being “a-nothing” was where I hovered the most.

I would look at the computer, but wouldn’t use it. I wouldn’t go on the internet and scroll, I would look at the turned-off screen, not interacting with the keys or watching videos or anything.

I would hold my notebook in my lap, but I wouldn’t move my pencils or pens or crayons.

In retrospect, there were two necessities that were far from my experience. I needed an intention and I needed someone to give me a bit of a believing push.

I needed someone to say “I believe in you. Your work is important to the world! It’s time to love and live an inspiring question because you love the people in this world and sister, they love you, too.”

I existed through November and early December, normally exciting times for me. I slowly started feeling better.

It wasn’t until a December sunrise shortly before I went to visit my daughter Katherine and her husband, Donald, that my creative will started to move through me with any sort of consistency.

What made this shift happen? I decided to live and love a question while keeping my heart open to the forward flow of intention:

“What is it that I used to do that made me feel better that might make me feel better now?

Some possibilities that rose up were good, but I couldn’t do them without the help of others. I love karaoke, but my lungs and voice didn’t feel ready. I knew my recovery would take at least six months. I would adore being on stage again, but same challenge – PLUS I would need to have a director who really wanted to cast me. I couldn’t imagine that happening anytime soon.

I chose writing haiku which combined writing – which I have always loved – with haiku – which was a very short poem and therefore, an easy idea to put into motion. 

I also knew if I failed, it wouldn’t be heartbreaking because… it is only a short poem once a day. Besides, no one would be paying very close attention. I made it even easier because I said “Must complete in the morning,” which meant I didn’t have a long time to think about how much I really didn’t WANT to write a haiku. 

I didn’t have time to think about how much I didn’t want to do anything but sit alone in a corner.

After a week which included quite a bit of family travel which is wonderful and stressful and tense, I realized my question, “What will help me feel better?” changed everything when I loved the question, was patient with myself in allowing the response to find its way to me, and I took a very small baby step every day.

Interesting to note it was that same week when I insisted I was going to visit my parents in Flagstaff sometime around my birthday, an idea and an intention I had been holding for over a year but other people’s needs and my own lack of planning continued to interfere with the actual implementation of my plan.

I will forever be grateful I visited my parents in the middle of February. It was only a few weeks later a simple visit with them would be impossible due to Covid-19.

A simple question: “What would make me feel better?” and a contemplation of which activities were do-able yet also a bit of an inspiring stretch, has changed my life in ways I never expected.

It is important to make considerations as to what you are willing to…. do or be or accept or let go of in order to feel better or do better or be better. You may have to let go of your perfectionism or be willing to get up earlier or be willing to drink more water or take something out of your schedule or you might have to be willing to make people angry.

In the long run, none of those small annoyances – or what may feel wildly uncomfortable now – will compare to how great you will feel by consistently aiming for what it is that will make you feel better. You have the wisdom within you right now to determine what that is.

I believe in you. I look forward to seeing your “what’s next” with a little extra nudge of intention added to your experience.

Even with the challenges of 2020, I am more alive and more connected and more compelled to make a difference than I have been in years. Often during my visioning work, I imagine 5 or 10 or 500 or 25,000 people feeling better, too. I imagine the impact that would have on our planet.

Do you have five minutes to write in response to this prompt and others like it? It’s all waiting for you to simply say yes. Thank you for reading.

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Portrait of creative life coach and creative life midwife Julie JordanScott

Julie JordanScott, the Creative Life Midwife, is a writer, a poet performer, a Creativity Coach, A Social Media Whiz and a Mother of three. One of her greatest joys include loving people into their greatness they just aren’t quite able to realize yet. 

Julie is also one of the Founders of Bridge to the New Year. Access the visionary prompst from the mid-2020 in #Refresh2020 to reflect, connect, intend and taking passionate action to create a truly remarkable rest of 2020. 

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