Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

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Mindy: We are here with Melanie Smith, who is a former actress who was on Seinfeld as well as As the World Turns, and she has moved on to write a book called Unfinished Business, which I was particularly interested in because it deals with past traumas, especially dealing with your own behavioral patterns and overcoming your own long held beliefs that have been holding you back. And one of the things that I specifically really like about this book is that it is kind of aimed toward an audience that is a little bit older. So 40 to 65. People who are just kind of carrying around their baggage that we've been building up for our entire lives. So let's just start, Melanie, with you telling us a little bit about yourself and how your career transformed from acting into becoming a writer and a life coach.

Melanie: I was out in Hollywood completing a series with actually my best girlfriend, Nancy McKeon. I was offered a new series, but my son at that point was about four years old, and I really felt, at that point, that I wasn't being a great mom or a great actress. Because when I was with my son, I was thinking about my work, and when I was at work, I was thinking about my son. And I finally just said, "I think I need to retire and be a mom." People said, “How did you make that decision?” But it really wasn't. It was a very deep commitment to my child. But prior to that, I had been doing so much work on myself and on my inner emotional life and my past and the work that I was doing and the teachers that I was studying with and the practices that I was activating in my own life became so profoundly meaningful that in some ways I was getting more joy from that work than I was from the acting. When I decided to leave the field of acting and raise my son, it was just a natural transition for me to open a wellness center, which I'm very, very proud of. It became one of the top three in the United States. We worked with people in all different parts of the world and actually all different parts of the globe educating them and how to live their best life and how to evolve spiritually, emotionally, physiologically, biologically, intellectually. And that was just this natural transition. And once that came into my life and became tremendously successful, and at the same time, I got to have my son with me all the time. It just was a natural evolution. I don't know. It was pretty seamless, pretty seamless.

Mindy: I can't imagine the pressures of the entertainment industry on the film and TV end. Obviously I'm a writer, so I operate in a different field. As a female, when you're a writer, looks centric isn't quite as much of an obstacle. Aging isn't quite as much of an obstacle. But I can't imagine having to balance the hustle of being in the entertainment industry, also being a female. Trying to be a mother, and some of the stress and the fallout and just the emotional turmoil of that. One of the things that Unfinished Business talks about a lot is past trauma and healing past trauma. We carry around so much. It's amazing to me. I'm a big fan of therapy. I've... I think last summer I was probably going once a week. It was just where I was. It's amazing to me the things that you don't realize you're carrying around with you. I had a great childhood. You know, idyllic. I think about my childhood and just really doing really well right up until adulthood when I went through a divorce and all of those things. It's amazing the things that you don't realize, even if they're not necessarily traumatic, but things that you don't realize affecting you and shaping you when you're young.

Melanie: It's really fascinating that you said that about having an idyllic childhood. One of the things most of us think... That our childhood, because it wasn't overtly traumatic, that nothing happened to us. But we have to understand that chronic traumas, not just acute traumas... But let's say we had an incredible family life, but our father was disappointed in us every single time we brought a B home, but didn't shine a light on the fact that we were masterful artists. We may have had families that were very, very close, but maybe siblings were pitted against each other. Not in a negative way,.in a fun way. But we don't know the way the internal makings of a child take things personally, right? So, if you have one sibling that's incredible at sports, one sibling, that's incredible at science, say, but the parents really do honor academics over athleticism. You see how there's an imbalance and there's an emotional and a slight dripping of trauma that happens on a daily basis where they feel like they're not winning in that arena of their life. Also, you may have a child that has an incredibly close relationship with both parents, but is being traumatized at school on some level. Maybe the kids are teasing them. Maybe they feel alienated just because naturally they don't belong in the community that they're evolving in. 

So when we go back, and this is part of the work in the book. When we look back on our life, we're not just looking at the big broad strokes. We want to look at the messaging we got, and not only with words but with modeling. So, for example, you may have a mother or a father that behaves in a particular way, and I've had this in both sexes where either the mother was diminished in her role or the father was diminished in his role. And you can take some of that on behaviorally yourself into your own personal belief system and that may make you act towards any goal you want in life to be more diminished. So we want to investigate everything that's occurred in our childhood. That's why we look at it all, and we take full inventory of our life. Trauma, heartbreak, loss, and grief is not just caused by the great events in our life. It is caused by even the slow dripping of anything that might trigger, overwhelm, or freeze the nervous system.

Mindy: Yes, it's almost like a repetitive motion injury.

Melanie: Yeah. There you go. Like wearing you down. That's exactly right.

Mindy: I worked in a public school for 14 years, and I never want to be a teenager again. Man. It's like some people talk about high school being, you know, the best years of their lives or how wonderful it is. And I enjoyed high school, but I never want to do that again. And in particular that terrible transition of middle school/junior high, I think, is just a terrible, terrible time to be alive. We all have to go through it. But you were talking about the things that we don't necessarily recognize as being traumatic. And of course, there are those recurring events, beliefs, or modeling, like you were saying, that we come up against. As an adult, I can look back and I can tell you a just defining moment for me as a human being, but also... I don't believe that our personalities can change, but certainly my viewpoints changed greatly when I got a bad haircut in sixth grade. 

You know, I grew up in a very small town, very rural. I'm from Ohio, and I was just a kid that was confident, and I got good grades. And I was athletic, and I had friends. And my parents were social. So, you know, I was clicking all those boxes, and I was a cute kid. Like everything was fine. My life was really good. I had a high opinion of myself, like in a confidence way, but I also, looking back, needed probably to be knocked down a peg or two. And I got a really bad haircut, really bad haircut, in sixth grade, and it was just this cross-section of everything went horrible. I had just turned 13. All of a sudden I had boobs, which at 13 was not cool. No one else had them, and the boys were terrified. And I was tall. I just... Everything blew up. Like I had the body of like an adult in sixth grade. I had chopped my hair off really short, and I suddenly had horrible, horrible acne. On the social scale of small towns? Tumbled. Tumbled so far. It was really interesting and changed me dramatically. I think I would be a less kind, less empathetic person if that had not happened to me. I ended up at, you know, near the bottom of the social scale all of a sudden because people didn't really know what to do with me. You know, had to climb my way back out of it over the next like six years, and it changed me greatly. And I'm really happy that it happened because I think I probably could have become a fairly insufferable person if I hadn't been on the other end of the social scale, especially in junior high. So those years, those those terrible, terrible years. What are your thoughts on those?

Melanie: Well, I think that's such a great point. You know, we are wired as humans for survival and acceptance. And in the book, I also talk about what I call AACTs, right? Acceptance and approval creates tricks. So we, by nature, adopt masks and AACTs so that we will be accepted into our tribe. If our tribe rejects us, we die. That's the way the brain is wired, right? So I don't know if you remember the movie Mean Girls? 

Mindy: Yep.

Melanie: Right? Amy Adams character, you know, starts to get heavy, right? And she's in a panic of terror because her AACT was the pretty one. I addressed this in the book because our AACTs are not who we are. If we truly are tethered inside of ourselves. Bad haircut. Bad skin. We all went through it, right? Something happened to us as we evolved. Some people got pretty all of a sudden. It worked in reverse, right? So one of the things that I address in the book is, yes, it is the awarenesses and the shifting of our existence and how we're treated by our tribe and what evolves from that and what AACTs we take on. But it is also how do we learn to love ourselves just as we are, no matter the condition or the circumstance? When we start to identify why we are the way we are, we start to remember the original self. You know, again, I'll give you a simple example. A young person that has a dream of becoming a singer or an actor or a fine artist, but the mother and the father are both doctors. And that person reduces a spiritual journey of purpose and calling on the earth so that they can fit into the tribe. I'll go to school and be a doctor. I won't follow my soul's calling. That is also an injury to the soul. And these are the things that this book is trying to unearth. Who are you originally? What is it that took you off course, right? I talk about reflection and refraction. What is it that marred the smoothness of our soul journey and made our light start to fragment and shoot in directions not intended? That, too, is traumatic. It isn't just these big PTSD events. 

We are trying to know ourselves at the deepest level so that we can design the life that is truly in alignment with who we are authentically. I have people come to me all the time in my practice who are incredibly successful, top 1%, and they will say, "But I am not happy." Because they're not really on their journey. They became successful at something they fought hard for, but it isn't really in alignment with who they were born to be. That, too, is traumatic. That is a heartbreak. That is a loss. So... And you said something earlier, when you talk about being an actress and juggling how you look and how you present yourself to the world and balancing it with family and balancing it with being responsible to your schedule, etc. One of the things that people don't understand in a world where everyone is looking at you, you are so locked in to your identity and your image that as that starts changing, that also becomes a loss issue. When great beauties or leading men start to get old and age, they struggle emotionally. Because who will I be if I don't have that? Will I still be loved? Will I still be accepted? Or am I going to be rejected? So even the things that are great rewards in life can flip and turn into great losses. Great losses can turn into wins. And this book is really to help you diagnose the way you're existing, how close it is to your authenticity, and what it will take to get you on the specific rails so that you move beautifully, smoothly, and rapidly in the life towards your calling and purpose.

Mindy: You mentioned PTSD and...

Melanie: Yes.

Mindy: I think it is really interesting to talk about that subject because I think the term really entered the common lexicon in connection to veterans and...

Melanie: Yes.

Mindy: People that had been to war. People who had been severely injured, lost limbs. And I think that's how most of the population came to be aware of PTSD in the first place. And so we think of PTSD as being a singular event or something truly horrific. And I believe in the DSM, in order to actually be diagnosed with PTSD, you have to have either witnessed a death or been close to death yourself is one of the requirements. I think there are others singular events, but also quite horrific.

Melanie: They're pretty gruesome.

Mindy: They are. Absolutely. And because that is the general familiarity with PTSD, I think people that suffer in similar ways don't even recognize their own trauma. So one of the things that I have familiarized myself with lately is CPTSD, complex PTSD, which is not in the DSM. So it's not a recognized diagnosis. But would you like to talk a little bit about CPTSD and how a person can kind of give the weight that is due to their own traumas?

Melanie: Well, that's a really wonderful point because now what's happening in the world of trauma study is we are looking at different forms of trauma. So I don't know if you've heard there is the big T trauma, right? And then there's the small T trauma. And then there's complex trauma, right? So when we look at children's exposure to small events that are cumulative, we're talking about a complex trauma. When we look at Big T trauma, which is PTSD and then small T trauma, which is what I talk a lot about in the book, which I believe includes heartbreak, loss, and grief. I'm sure you've read the ACE studies and how many childhood events have impacted most all of us. Complex trauma. I like to think of it almost like how moss gathers. 

And by the way, I do want to make a note here. Trauma is not just what has happened to you. Trauma can also be caused by what hasn't happened to you. If you are growing up in a household where you never have a parent home. I talk in the book about one of my clients who, when they were nine years and younger, had to take responsibility for everything that occurred in the house. If something broke, she had to figure out how to fix it. If she needed repairs, she'd have to try to find the money and wait for the repair man and miss school. So these are also things that beneficially never happen to her. She didn't have the support of a parent. She didn't have somebody who protected her. She didn't have somebody who balanced her world. She didn't have somebody who helped her with her homework. Now, in that vacuum of that growth as a child, she didn't have something else to compare it to. Like, oh, they have that or they have this. But in her vacuum, there were things that were missing from her development. That is trauma. That is complex trauma. When we look at the events that happen to children, even parents that can be loving, but maybe somebody consistently has a temper or the parents didn't talk to one another and made the children feel very alienated. So these are all things that can add to complex trauma, and we don't look at them as trauma the way we used to. 

That's why the new definition of trauma and the new definitions of trauma and the leading experts on trauma now that really investigate the population. They're not just making a top down diagnosis. They evaluate the population. They are in the ecosystem. They are starting to recognize that what we see from trauma is people who are traumatized imprint their past in the moment. So if you are in your present moment, and I like to use this as an example... You are in the middle of a discussion with your spouse and all of a sudden you set yourself on fire. You're so upset, and you storm out of the room. You're not walking out on your spouse. You're walking out on your past. You don't want to feel the way you felt in the state of overwhelm. So you leave the situation. In the book, I talk about when that, what I call charge, arises, and you have hot thoughts and your energy system is going crazy. Instead of just storming out and keeping yourself heated, you sit with it and you wonder, "What am I feeling? What is below the surface here? What do I believe about myself? About the situation? What am I afraid of happening here? What have I lost control of here?" And as you start using the symptoms of the wounding, because by the way, trauma is the Greek word for wound. When you examine the wounding, you then can examine what it will take to heal. When you just storm out and just sort of wait for it to pass or hold on to the anger as a sense of power or hold on to the pain as a flag of identity. You want to figure out what was the origin and what am I really afraid of? Am I afraid of death? Am I afraid of shame? Am I afraid of abandonment? You have to get down deep into the internal knowledge that your body holds. It's there. So when we think about complex, it's a lot more complicated than, in a way, not in remedying it but in identifying it. If you saw somebody shot in front of you, you know what happened. But if every day you came home and your mother forced you to look you in her eyes or your father forced you to direct him in a certain way and behave a certain way, those are chronic small T traumas.

Mindy: They are, and you mentioned having a reaction. Like, if you're fighting with a spouse and all of a sudden you become overwhelmed, and you either blow up or storm out. Trauma reactions are very interesting. I am a person who has just always been told that I have a bad temper and, I mean, I'll own it. I do. But I've always been told that I have a bad temper. I wouldn't say that I fulfill it then because it was said to me, but I definitely do have a temper and I can react with anger to things. But something that I came to recognize as an adult was that it wasn't necessarily a personality trait. It was often a trauma reaction. So...

Melanie: That's right.

Mindy: We talk about fight or flight, and recently I've been seeing people add freeze to that, which I'm thankful for because that is...

Melanie: And there's also fawn, by the way.

Mindy: Yes. And fawning. Absolutely. If you could talk a little bit about those four trauma reactions, I think that would be wonderful. Because I think a lot of us probably have those little triggers that set us off and we may have identified it as a negative personality trait when it's actually a trauma reaction.

Melanie: It is, and so the difference between those four... Most people have heard of fight or flight. That's in our language for quite a long time. You know, fight is when you aggressively move towards what is occurring. Flight is when you run away from it, right? Those are pretty basic. Freeze is when your system actually shuts down. It paralyzes itself. That is the reaction. It is a very clever reaction, right, by our mind and our nervous system to protect us. And then there's fawn, which is almost a blacking out. We collapse into the self. We actually drop fully, whether it's an emotional or physiological reaction. 

Now, one of the things that's so incredible about the new wisdom on this, which was pioneered really by Dr. Peter Levine, one of my first teachers, and then really brought to the forefront even more boldly by another one of my teachers, Bessel van der Kolk. Body Keeps the Score is his book, and it's quite brilliant. But one of the things that we understand now is when we freeze or when we fawn, that energy gets frozen in the body. That energy becomes an imprint in our body. And so when it is reactivated in the moment, we actually go back to the past. Our body relives what happened. Now, what's interesting about it is our body doesn't remember what happened. A tiger comes towards you, and you freeze. And that gets frozen. The next time something happens to you, you don't think, "Oh, I'm thinking that's from the tiger that came at me a long time ago." Your body doesn't remember. It just reacts. One of the stories I love that's so beautiful by the Buddha is he talks about the first arrow and the second arrow, and how the second arrow is far more painful than the first arrow. Life is filled with first arrows. The second arrow is how we react to any future arrows that come toward us. If we are still stuck in the emotionality, the pain, the memory, and the energy of the first arrow, the second arrow is more painful because we're braced in the terror of it. So when we have experienced trauma and we freeze or we fawn, and that energy is still trapped in us, every time something... You know, trigger warnings, right?

Mindy: Yeah.

Melanie: That's the new buzzword. Every time we're triggered, that is the past that is imprinted in the present. You know that you have trauma there, and the key to healing from it is not avoiding life. It's releasing the energy that is trapped in the body. And Peter Levine started studying animals to understand why is it that they're traumatized all the time and they show no trauma in their future endeavors? Well, that's because they complete the energy. As humans, we don't. That's the key is starting to understand where the problem is to begin with. I always say to my clients... I won't say, what's the problem? I'll say, What's the pain? Because it does start with pain. And by the way, pretty good idea to try to avoid pain, right? You're not a dummy. It's actually really smart. But we also have to be able to complete that reaction to it. So the next time something presents itself, it presents as the first arrow, not the second arrow.

Mindy: When it comes to those four trauma reactions. The fawning one. Is that something in your experience that tends to appear more in women?

Melanie: No, I think it appears across the board. I think there's just as many men that fawn because it's not an intellectual decision. It's not like, "Oh, I'm macho. I'm not going to fawn. I'm going to freeze or fight, right?" It's really what your nervous system decides and your mind collaborating decide to do in the moment to protect itself. It's very involuntary. They've done studies on situations, shootings, so on and so forth. And they've studied people that were in the group. Why were some traumatized and why were some saddened or broken hearted or emotionally responded to the situation? The ones who were traumatized froze or fawned. The other ones moved into action. So when we freeze or fawn, we tell ourselves, in a subconscious way, we don't know how to manage what's coming at us. When we flee or we fight, we move into action to try to complete it. We feel more empowered.

Mindy: Hm. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of the fight or flight as being action. Freeze or fawn being inaction. But yeah, they absolutely are, aren't they?

Melanie: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Mindy: Some people will just identify... I either flight or I freeze or I fight. Can people exhibit different trauma reactions to different situations?

Melanie: 100%. You may be walking down the street, and somebody comes at you to get your wallet and you bolt. But you might be in a room with a familiar face, and they go to assault you and you freeze.

Mindy: Yeah.

Melanie: So what is the amalgam of emotions that are occurring in the moment? If you are on high alert... Right now, I'm at my house in Naples, and you know, there's alligators here. I mean, you guys, it's not a myth. They're here. And so are bears, and so are panthers, right? So, if I'm just walking out of my house, la la la, innocently, and all of a sudden I see an alligator, I might go into a freeze. But if I walk out of my house and I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's right. I have to keep my eyes open for alligators," right? I may be like, "Got it! Out of there."

Mindy: Interesting.

Melanie: So it depends on the state we're in. It depends on the amalgam of emotions that are occurring inside of us. And this is why I'm saying it is involuntary. You can't say to yourself, "Okay, I got it now. From now on, if anything traumatic happens to me, I am fleeing. Or I am fighting." You don't know. It's not up to you. You go into... And it's interesting. They've done studies on what happens when your heart rate and your blood pressure go really high. And I think Malcolm Gladwell really talks about this in... I forget which one of his books, it might be Outliers, but the fact that we go into an autistic mind. We don't stay present. We don't stay conscious. We are in our primitive reactive state, but we can go into a mind that is not our own in normal circumstances.

Mindy: Yeah, the amygdala is incredibly powerful. I had had some very odd experiences last summer. I went off of my depression medication, and I did it correctly with the tapering and everything like that. And I had been off of it for, I think 3 or 4 months, and then all of my symptoms came back and with a greater charge than usual. And I was having trauma reactions to like, I mean, everything. It was crazy. You know, I was in a lot of therapy. Dealt with things appropriately, but it was amazing to me. I am a logical, rational person, and I could talk myself a little bit out of complete and total panic. But, I knew I wasn't in any danger in certain situations where I would be triggered. It was like, you're okay. Like, you know, you're, you're... It's okay. You're not in danger. But my amygdala is like, yep, there's a tiger. Yep, there's a tiger. We got to go. You know? And it is amazing. Like you were saying, no, it's not a conscious choice. I was able to logic my amygdala down a couple of times, but that took like training and work.

Melanie: It does take training and work. It takes being able to identify the pre-triggers also. For example, oh, my fingertips are tingling. I think my nervous system is activated, and I'm about to have a reaction. And the other thing I want our listeners to realize is when we are taking medications, those medications shift the chemicals in the brain. When you come off of those medications, your brain needs anywhere from a few months to a few years to reregulate. So oftentimes when people come off of these medications, whether they're antidepressants, benzodiazepines, etc, the brain is still trying to figure out how to rebalance its own chemicals. And so oftentimes the reactivity is heightened. I had a client two years ago, I think it was, maybe a little longer. They were coming off several medications and our work together... Part of what I did with them was to remind them that their brain and their body was still recovering from replacement chemicals. About a year after we completed our work, I got a letter saying, I'm blown away by how right you were. Because now I'm off everything, and I'm having no reactions anymore. Because the brain chemicals stabilized. I do want to say this. Anybody who is on medication, please talk to your doctors about it. Do not take yourself... You know what Mindy was just saying about tapering, etcetera, is the best way to do it. And always staying in contact with your doctor, but being able to recognize that the brain and the body need to learn how to regulate itself, you know, while you're recovering.

Mindy: They absolutely do. I want to talk real quickly about trauma and emotional regulation for creatives. So this podcast is very much with a listener base made up of writers and creative people. We do tend to be emotionally driven. So if you have any insight for people that are creatives who tend to have more emotional reactions to things or even those of us that struggle. I mean, you know what it's like when you decide that you want to be in the entertainment industry, no matter what angle you're coming in, whether it's books, music, acting, professional sports. Your window of opportunity and your statistics for becoming, quote unquote, successful are slim. And that is a hard thing to balance with, like you were saying, your path and what you want and who you want to be versus true possibilities and disappointment and all of the things that come along with trying to be a successful creative individual in the world that we live in today. So do you have any insights for that?

Melanie: Yeah, I do. Number one, just by nature, growing up in a culture that is so capital driven, a creative is often shamed. "Why are you doing that? Nobody... Oh, the chances. Why don't you go ahead and do this? You're such a smart blank. You're such a pretty blank. You're such a handsome blank." In my growing up, it was like be a doctor. Be an accountant. Be a lawyer, right? But what we have to remember as creatives is to untie financial reward with the act of creation. Now, those two things may ultimately come together. This is not a conversation about make it a hobby. But what it is a conversation about is as creatives, we must create for the act of creation. If we don't create... If I'm not creating, I am diminishing myself. I don't feel my best. I'm not in my own bliss. I don't have an abundance of joy. But if I'm creating and attaching myself to an outcome, whether that is approval or monetary benefits, etcetera etcetera, I'm damaging the act of creation, which in itself is traumatizing. Because truth tends to be the goal for creatives, and we want our product that comes out on the other side to be our truth. Do not tie that to whether or not someone can monetize it. Because they're separate. So if while you're a creator, you need to find other ways to support your lifestyle, that's one way to be able to balance that. So there's not pressure on the act of creation. I wrote this book because I knew it needed to be written. Even if I never got a publisher. I would use it in my practice. I use this work in my practice when I work with people every day, and I work with creatives all the time. I have literally had doctors, CEOs, teachers, on and on. College professors come to me and move into the second act of their lives because they always wanted to be an actor or an actress or a singer etcetera, right?

Mindy: Yeah.

Melanie: So this work actually has taken creatives to the next level, and gotten broken through barriers and walls and fears and beliefs and behaviors. So that you'll find that when the spirit is free and it doesn't believe anything some culture tells it as rules of society, you cannot believe the ability to manifest that all of a sudden presents. So what I will say, in our society, the creative is always being traumatized. Look what's happening right now with the writers strike and the actors strike.

Mindy: Yep.

Melanie: These people have trained their whole lives for this artistry. And now the world of venture capitalists and finance etcetera are going, "Nope. We want to take all the money. So, we're actually going to try to reduce your role in what it is that we make, and give you no credit for it." Again, shame. You've got to keep creating. Don't let anyone stop you from creating. If you need to bartend on the side or work at a job that you love or find a side hustle or use another... Let's say you're a creative, but you're also really organized, and you can help somebody else in their organization and make, you know, however many dollars an hour. And you do that and then you create the rest of your day and on your weekends until your door opens. But never diminish the purpose and the calling of creating because someone else hasn't told you they'll monetize it. Create because you're born to do it. Write because you're born to write. Tell your truth because you have a truth to tell. Someone has to hear it. And if you do it wholeheartedly and you become great at your craft, something on the other side will happen that will lift it up.

Mindy: That's wonderful. I think that a lot of people need to hear that. I know as someone that struggled for ten years to get published, and I wrote four novels that totally failed, never got representation or anything like that. It wasn't until the fifth one and ten years in trying to get a literary agent that I managed to do it. And just like you said, it was on the side. Write when you're in the doctor's waiting room. Write after... I was working full time. Write at night. Those little stolen moments is what got me through. And now I've been published for ten years. So we're just... We're hitting equilibrium.

Melanie: See, and what I will say is also trust something greater.

Mindy: Yeah.

Melanie: Just because you want the door to be open right now. If that door opened, it might have worked out worse. Maybe that piece of material wasn't as brilliant as the one that came four rounds later.

Mindy: Yep, that's absolutely right. And I say that all the time when I talk about my writing. If the first book that I ever written had been published, it would not have been a good thing. It wasn't good. It wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. I needed ten years. I had to become a better writer. There's there's no doubt about that.

Melanie: Absolutely. And, you know, we think we know, right? But I'm the best right now, right? But the truth of the matter is, and this is something else this book helps you with, is learning how to trust. That trauma, heartbreak, loss, and grief will get in the way of trust. So when you clear all that away, you know, there's this beautiful spiritual saying swaha, which means "and so it is." Where I am right now is where I am right now. I trust something greater than myself. I know that I'm not here alone, and I know that if I just keep allowing the magic that's in me to manifest outside of me, the within is the without. I will be taken on a journey. And probably a better journey than I ever could have imagined.

Mindy: That's the truth.

Melanie: Yeah.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and also where they can find Unfinished Business, which released on August 8th.

Melanie: Absolutely. So for the book, you can go to Amazon. You can go to Barnes and Noble. Any of the majors, but you can also go to Unfinished Business the book dot com and order direct from there. It'll link you to all the stores that are carrying it at Unfinished Business dot com. To find me, you can reach me at work with Melanie Smith dot com. Work with Melanie smith dot com, or you can find me on Instagram at Melanie Smith official.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.