There Are Hidden Messages In Your Blog or Substack Writing
Why I Read Your Writing Instead of Asking Questions: The Archive Method Explained
When I tell people that I analyze a person’s existing writing to understand how health and creativity intersect in their lives, they often look confused. "Do they fill out a questionnaire? Do you do an interview?”
I understand the confusion. Most assessments, coaching programs, and even research studies rely on direct questioning. Ask someone what they think, feel, or experience, then work with their conscious responses. It's the foundation of nearly every helping profession.
But I've discovered something powerful: what people write when they're not trying to answer my questions often reveals far more than what they say when they are.
This approach forms the foundation of my Creative Health Blueprints, where I analyze your existing archive to uncover the hidden connections between your wellbeing and your art. While I also offer interviews and will continue doing so (many people find even the process of those conversations healing), this archive method represents something different entirely. Something that gets at truths we might not even know we know.
The Problem with Asking Direct Questions
Traditional assessment methods assume people have conscious access to their patterns, motivations, and experiences. Fill out this form. Rate your anxiety from one to ten. Describe your creative process. Tell me about your challenges.
These approaches aren't wrong, but they're incomplete. Contemporary psychology, particularly work emerging from feminist, trauma-informed, and disability justice frameworks, has shown us that much of our experience exists below the threshold of conscious awareness.
Dr. Judith Herman's groundbreaking work on trauma demonstrates how our bodies and creative expressions often hold truths that our conscious minds struggle to articulate. Meanwhile, scholars like Audre Lorde have long argued that marginalized people especially develop sophisticated strategies for survival and expression that operate outside traditional therapeutic language.
When I ask someone directly, "How does anxiety affect your creative process?" I'm assuming they've noticed the connection, can articulate it clearly, and feel safe sharing it with a relative stranger. That's a lot of assumptions.
But when I read two years of their newsletter archive, I might notice that every time they mention feeling overwhelmed, the next piece they publish shifts to a completely different medium or tone. The pattern is clear and consistent, but they've never consciously connected these dots.
What Archives Actually Reveal
Your creative archive is a record of your authentic self over time. Not the self you present in therapy or coaching sessions, but the self that shows up when you're trying to connect with your audience, process your experiences, or simply create something meaningful.
This authenticity emerges because creative work serves a different function than assessment responses. When you're writing a blog post, newsletter, or social media update, you're not trying to give the "right" answer to someone else's question. You're expressing something true for you in that moment.
Dr. bell hooks wrote extensively about how creative expression allows marginalized people to speak truths that formal academic or therapeutic discourse often silences. Your archive contains these unfiltered truths.
Consider what happens when I read through someone's Substack and notice:
They consistently mention sleep struggles followed by creative breakthroughs
Their color palette shifts dramatically during certain seasons
They avoid writing about family except in very specific contexts
Their productivity language becomes increasingly harsh over time
They describe creative projects as "escapes" but also as "work"
These patterns tell stories about how creativity and wellbeing intersect in their specific life. Stories they might not consciously recognize, and therefore couldn't share in an interview.
The Neuroscience of Unguarded Expression
Recent neuroscience research supports what many BIPOC and feminist scholars have long understood: our authentic selves emerge most clearly when we feel psychologically safe and aren't performing for evaluation.
When you're creating content for your audience, your nervous system is in a different state than when you're answering assessment questions. You're drawing from implicit memory, processing emotions through metaphor and story, allowing associations to surface naturally.
Dr. Dan Siegel's work on neuroplasticity shows how creative expression activates different neural networks than analytical self-reporting. The right hemisphere processes emotional and somatic information through images, rhythms, and felt sense, while the left hemisphere tries to organize experience into logical, verbally accessible narratives. I’ve recently been loving Martha Beck’s exploration of how right brain creativity is the opposite of anxiety. This is fascinating stuff!
Archives capture both hemispheres at work. I can see not just what someone thinks about their creative process, but how they actually move through it emotionally and somatically.
The Ethics of Reading Differently
Some people worry about privacy when I propose reading their published work. "Won't you see things I didn't mean to share?"
Yes, exactly. That's the point.
But this isn't about catching people in contradictions or exposing hidden pathology. It's about witnessing the sophisticated strategies you've already developed, the wisdom you've already embodied, the patterns you've already created.
Disability justice scholars like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha emphasize how marginalized communities have always created their own healing practices, often without formal recognition. Your archive contains evidence of your existing creative health strategies.
When I notice that someone consistently uses fiber arts language to describe emotional regulation, or that their writing becomes more lyrical during periods of grief, I'm not diagnosing problems. I'm identifying strengths and adaptive responses that deserve recognition and support.
This approach honors what feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan calls "different voices" in understanding human experience. Instead of imposing external frameworks, I'm learning the frameworks you've already developed.
What Traditional Methods Miss
Direct questioning often captures what people think they should say rather than what they actually experience. This is especially true for people whose experiences don't fit dominant cultural narratives about creativity, productivity, or wellness.
If someone has internalized ableist ideas about what "real" artists do, they might report struggling with "laziness" when they actually have perfectly understandable energy patterns that need accommodation, not correction.
If someone from a marginalized background has learned that their survival strategies aren't valued in mainstream wellness culture, they might not recognize the sophisticated ways they've already integrated creativity and healing.
Archives bypass these filters. They show me what you actually do, not what you think you should do.
Ready to see what your writing reveals about you?
The Pattern Recognition Process
Reading archives requires a different kind of attention than most assessment methods. I'm not looking for specific answers to predetermined questions. Instead, I'm tracking themes, metaphors, timing, energy, and evolution across your body of work.
I notice when your language changes. When you return to certain topics. How you describe time, space, relationships, and your body. What you include and what remains conspicuously absent.
This mirrors what trauma-informed practitioners call "listening for the story behind the story." Your archive contains multiple layered narratives about how creativity functions in your life.
Archives also reveal how broader social and cultural forces shape individual creative experiences. I can often see the impact of seasonal depression, political events, family dynamics, or economic stress in patterns of content, timing, and tone.
Understanding these broader contexts helps me offer insights that honor the complexity of your actual life rather than assuming your creative challenges exist in a vacuum.
The Healing in Being Witnessed
Many people tell me the most powerful part of receiving their Creative Health Blueprint isn't the recommendations or insights. It's seeing their own wisdom reflected back to them.
"I had no idea I was already doing so many things right."
"You saw patterns I couldn't see myself."
"Reading your analysis helped me understand my own resilience."
This reflects what trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem calls "witnessing without fixing." Sometimes the most healing thing isn't getting advice about what to change, but getting recognition for what you've already survived and created.
Your archive contains evidence of your creativity, adaptability, and strength. Reading it through this lens often reveals a story of resilience that challenges internalized narratives of creative inadequacy or health-related shame.
The Limits and Strengths
The archive method isn't perfect. It can only work with what you've chosen to share publicly. It reflects your relationship with your audience, not just your relationship with your creativity. And it captures you across specific time periods, not your entire creative journey.
But these limitations also create unique strengths. Your published work represents the self you feel safe sharing with the world. Understanding how creativity and wellbeing show up in that version of yourself provides actionable insights for sustainable creative practice.
Plus, patterns that appear even in carefully curated public work often run very deep. If I can see them in your newsletter, they're probably significant forces in your creative life.
A Different Kind of Assessment
Reading your archive isn't faster or easier than asking direct questions. It requires hours of careful attention, pattern tracking, and synthesis. But it offers something that traditional assessment methods often miss: a view of your creative self as it actually exists in the world.
Not your aspirational creative self. Not your theoretical creative self. Your actual creative self, with all its adaptive strategies, seasonal rhythms, protective patterns, and hard-won wisdom.
This approach honors what many feminist and liberation psychology scholars have argued and something about which I agree wholeheartedly: that people are already experts on their own experience. My job isn't to diagnose what's wrong with your creativity, but to help you see what's already working and how it might work even better.
When I read your writing, I'm not looking for problems to solve. I'm looking for the sophisticated creative health system you've already built, often without realizing it. And then I'm reflecting that system back to you in ways that support its continued evolution.
That's why I read instead of ask. Because sometimes the most profound insights come not from answering someone else's questions, but from having someone truly see the answers you've already been living.
Your health and art already intersect. I’d love to help you understand how.
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Well researched. Thank you.
Given I live with disability and have twins with disabilities, I’m gonna come back and review your resources
Thank you. Excellent piece.
So thoughtful and insightful! Thank you for sharing this essay!