We recently connected with Maverick Malone and have shared our conversation below.

Maverick, appreciate you joining us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Risk is a word that used to follow me around like a ghost. Every time I would be presented with an opportunity for growth or something that would push me out of my comfort zone, she would materialize from the back of my brain and quietly ask, “Now? Is this a good time?” I would always swat her away but the more I did, the deeper I was digging my own grave. If I didn’t change, I was destined to stay the same as I had always been: disconnected, lost, and afraid. At 18, I wrote a poem about how I wished I had a spider’s resilience, that even when her web is shred, she rebuilds; she spins a new one. It was essentially about how much I wanted to taste the word “risk” and do something big and different. I had a lot of growing to do but couldn’t bring myself to do it – that is, until I took the greatest risk of all that changed the entire trajectory of my life.

In 2021, I became the spider, shred that initial web, and started spinning a new one. I mustered the strength to tell my then-husband (14 years into our relationship and 6 years into our marriage) that I wanted a divorce. I just couldn’t do it anymore, for a myriad of reasons, but the CliffsNotes version is that I felt a huge part of me was missing, and I wanted so much more for my life beyond the archetypes of being just a mother and wife, because that is all I saw myself as. I left my dreams to die many years prior, but they had returned with a beautiful vengeance. They were coming for me, and they were hungry. I was given a second chance to have all the things I always wanted for myself: connection, purpose, fulfillment, and most of all – my own love, something I had denied myself for decades.

I have always known I was destined to be a writer and when my passion for words returned, I knew that was the very thing that would save me. I chronicled my entire journey through poetry during that divorce. It reconnected me to myself and taught me how to love all of the aspects of me I had abandoned or tamped down over time. While much of the past two years can be summed up in the small word “risk,” the biggest – even more so than the divorce and choosing to make my way in this world on my own – is that of publishing that story in my first book of poetry, Pressed Petals. It takes incredible strength to not only chase a dream, but to take action to make it happen. In publishing that story and hopefully helping others feel seen, heard, and connected through my words, I feel like I am contributing to making the world a better place in my own special, unique way. As I heal, I am helping others as well. I often say vulnerability is a superpower. Not everyone can essentially rip their heart out of their chest and open themselves up to criticism and judgment when said heart is published in a book, but I have learned too much along this journey to keep those lessons and that story to myself. I’ve been silent long enough. So if taking that risk – one of incredible vulnerability and using my voice – can help someone else in need, that is exactly what I intend to keep doing.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I have always been an artist. Even as a young child, I was drawing, writing stories and making cut-and-paste magazines with binding stitched from my sewing machine. For me, creativity just comes naturally, like breathing. Writing, especially, is so much more than just words on a page or a screen. It’s time travel, magic, healing. I’m an artist at heart – words are just the medium I use.

I believe art is not only beauty – it is bravery. I think at our core, especially as artists, all we want is to be seen and understood. Not for validation, but simply to feel human, like we belong, that we are capable of connecting on a deeper level with another soul. Writing and poetry are necessary for so many of us. It is how we communicate far beyond language and shapes arranged on a page. It’s a secret code we want everyone to be able to speak and understand through the only way each of us knows how to do, in our own unique and individual perspective. It’s a purification of sorts for the artist and a unification for the reader or observer. It’s love between complete strangers that may never meet.

As I grew up and moved through many personal challenges, writing was the one thing that always held me the most. It is how I process big emotions and explore life. People would often point out that I excelled at writing but the dream of making a career from it was not encouraged or supported growing up. I was influenced to pursue something more “lucrative” – something that would support me financially; something that would pay the bills, put food on the table, and provide me with a stable and comfortable life. This destroyed me on the inside, and I adopted some extremely limiting beliefs about myself, my needs, and my worthiness. I essentially compromised my own authenticity for the sake of other people, and because I had not yet learned to listen to my inner-knowing, I let every other voice drown out my own.

Thanks to the many challenging life lessons and experiences I’ve had, I was able to rediscover my purpose and reconnect to that inner voice and unearth my gemstone truth. It took me 34 years but I finally fulfilled that promise to the younger version of me when I wrote and published my first book. Now when people ask what I do, I get to say, “I’m an author!” with so much gratitude and passion. I have many stories left to share and so much joy and light I want to release into this world. Life is full of wonder and magic, and I want to experience it all and immortalize those stories in book after book. I think I have a very unique perspective on life and see it so differently than most people, and that is evident in so much of my work. I also want to be that support for others, to encourage everyone to chase their dreams because that is absolutely where the magic and love live. It is without a doubt what this world needs most.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I like to call myself an “unearther of life.” The further along on this journey I go, the more that phrase resonates. At first, it was only in relation to my poetry. I have revelations and discover things when I write, but it also applies to me as an individual. As I move through the maze of days, weeks, months, years, I realize I am here to just keep exploring, to keep digging. Now that I am self-aware of my inner world, thoughts, my purpose in life and how my own energy and human design works, I am able to see things differently. Everything is a lesson. Everything is here to teach me something. I am continually and constantly learning and unlearning.

There is light and there is shadow within us all, and as you dig, you uncover these. Some are glittering treasures we didn’t know were there, and some are quite the opposite. But the beauty of this is the awareness that allows us to determine what it is we want to do next with these because both are a gift. This is the dichotomy, the paradox. Sometimes you dig up diamonds and rubies and sometimes you dig up charred bones. The bones may not be as desirable as the others, but they are just as valuable.

My journey has brought many lessons full of both and has been rife with unlearning and deconditioning. Through this process of writing and unearthing myself through poetry, I have been discerning which beliefs are actually my own and which never belonged to me. I have learned to show up authentically. I have learned to speak up. I have learned to believe in new, beautiful things. I actually wrote a poem about this process of unlearning that sums this up for me succinctly:

I had me all wrong
–
Things I have unlearned: how to make the rib fit / how to preserve a ship in a bottle / how to slam doors and hang blackout curtains / how to stitch a mouth closed with the sharp edge of shame / how to swallow blame-flavored bullshit / how to shove a waterlogged rainbow piece into a black and white puzzle / how to blend muted colors / how to poison the Queen / how to grow roots in infertile soil / how to make sandpaper from a soft touch / how to whimper instead of growl / how to turn a man’s hands into a bear trap / how to murder the bear.

My greatest learning has been the unlearning of everything I believed, of too many vicious, lascivious things that rendered me incomplete. 11 months in and I stand to perceive, the bear never died…she still lives inside of me.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Creatives all have their own process. I believe many of us have brains that just work differently (mine especially). There is something within us that compels us to create, and I think many of us have human design types and astrology that support this. For example, I am a manifestor in human design. It is correct for me to have creative urges (and often) and I willingly chase every white rabbit down the hole. When I am in that space of creating, nothing else exists, and much like Wonderland, it often never makes sense…at least not at first.

My brain has always worked out of order. I get a lot of ideas and downloads out of nowhere for things that end up manifesting at various future points in my life. At the time I receive the insight, they are in the future and now in talking about them, in the past. It’s why one of my personal mottos is, “I dream, and I know things.” Learning that I have a defined crown and ajna in my human design chart really helped me to understand and embrace this ability and the idea that my brain works much like an antennae. Ideas, inspiration, words and wisdom don’t come from myself at all. I am merely the vessel through which they pass and have taken a liking to the task of recording them.

Early on in my journey, I would wake up at odd hours of the night with various phrases or visions sitting in my head, or suddenly have a name or an idea appear out of nowhere while driving or doing some other menial task. The name Maverick Malone (which is my legal name but not my birth name) actually appeared in my consciousness in the infancy of my divorce journey while watching a bluegrass band play and at the time, I thought it was the name of a character in a story I was meant to write. In a beautiful and metaphorical way, it kind of was. These downloads never make sense in the moment, so I shelve a lot of those thoughts, but I always write them down. I never know when the time will come to share the knowledge or wisdom I channel. I just know that at some point, clarity comes of her own volition and the Universe always lets me know when these thoughts are ready to be shared.

In fact, 2/3 of this very answer was jotted down months ago into a word document stored on my laptop. And here we are, reemerging from that wild Wonderland with a piece of the puzzle…just like magic.

Amazon link to my book: Pressed Petals

Contact Info:

• Website: www.maverickmalone.com
• Instagram: @mavmalone
• Other: email: [email protected]

Image Credits
The portrait photography is by Ava Rymer of @forrestphotography_