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Asking is the cheapest way to learn and the most expensive thing to be seen doing
In my twenties, I asked questions at work and got in trouble for it. Everyone thought I was disrupting the training, wasting the trainer’s time, jeopardizing the project. It got escalated to senior management. I almost got cut. Then the project ended and I was the only one who understood the assignment. I paid for that understanding in reputation. Most people aren’t willing to. They learned the cost before I did.
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The box is invisible from the inside
The system you know is designed to keep you managing, not thriving. And because you can’t see outside it while you’re in it, you don’t suspect the system. You suspect yourself. Then something happens – illness, exhaustion, loss, your rock bottom – and it changes your shape enough that it doesn’t fit anymore.
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Illness costs more than the time it takes
Valley fever took years I could name. It also took the version of me who would have lived them. She would have built her own systems, known her own car, learned the basic competences of running a life. I’m meeting her absence now, ten years later, every time I find another thing I quietly handed off and never reclaimed. The grief isn’t for the time. It’s for her. I keep trying to become the person she would have been by now. I have to stop. She isn’t ahead of me, she doesn’t exist.
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Every choice arrives as if it’s the first one
The tire blew this morning, and I overspent because I had no memory of the car I’ve owned for seven years. No record of where the tires came from, when they went on, what I paid, what I learned. The decision should have been easier this time. Without memory, every time is a first time.
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I want to arrive
I find myself in this loop. I want to be seen as an expert. Successful. Arrived. But my mind tells me that I’m not an expert in anything. If I want to be respected, I must be credentialed. What a funny belief that gives my power away. And even funnier – I’m not the only.
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Rules that help build the work versus rules that are just permission slips
A woman I follow keeps a five-year journal and switches ink color every month. I caught myself admiring the discipline, but then I caught what it might also be. My morning pages have rules too. Some of them are why the practice has lasted. Some of them, I’m less sure about. The page doesn’t need a system to exist. But maybe I need one to feel like I’m allowed to be writing on it.
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Form follows volume
I keep wanting to know the structure before I have the material. But the structure is downstream of the volume. Right now, the only task is to capture the words. The shape of the work becomes clear later, or it doesn’t, and either way the capturing is what makes the difference.
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The mistakes you skip in childhood you pay for as an adult
I grew up so fast I didn’t make all the mistakes I should have. I’m making them now, as an adult, and paying interest. That’s why I do my best to notice the impulse when I want to fix something for my child. The mistakes are his, not mine to fix.
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Writing is transcription, not lightning
I was waiting to feel inspired. I thought writing meant waiting for something to descend. The actual job is quieter than that. You sit down. You write what you’re already thinking. That’s it. Just your thoughts on a page.
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We invent noble reasons to walk away from what bruised us
It took my whole life to admit I might be a writer. I put it out there. The world consistently didn’t get it. I told myself I must not be one – real writers feel divinely inspired, and I never did. That story let me walk away without admitting I was walking away because it hurt.