The Gold is in the Grind

The imaginary deadlines we place on our healing and creativity are keeping us stuck.

It occurred to me today that I set up this Substack page in January of 2022 and essentially haven’t looked at it since. The email updates from the platform dinged my inbox every week and I’d delete them with shame, content with my excuses to postpone writing once again. I’m busy. Sure. I’m overwhelmed. Always. However, today it hit a bit differently. What exactly was I waiting for? I set up this outlet in good faith, trusting that there was a reason I felt the need to create a space for my writing beyond Instagram and sure that it would, at the very least, give me some much needed room for self-expression. Days and months passed though, and every time I received the reminder that I had a blank page awaiting some sort of creative blessing I stacked another full plate onto the guilt table.

Today I made a different choice. I thought, “Why not open it up? See what happens.” Well, what happened is that once I got over the initial overwhelm of profile editing and photo adding and setting updating I realized I might have something to say. Maybe having something to say led to where we are now, so without further ado, let’s get on with it.

You see, the truth is that this resistance to beginning is what keeps us stuck in the “before” of everything. We find it impossible to look at the day at hand without peeking ahead ten or ten million steps to the hypothetical outcome. When the thought, “Maybe I should quit drinking,” first entered my brain I did the same spiral-style analytics. It was near impossible for me to get to the starting because all I could think about was the finishing, the “after.” It wasn’t until several months, and terrible days, later that I woke up ready to simply face the task at hand-don’t drink today. So that day, February 26th, 2020, I started the quitting. Today I’m just over three and a half year sober. In the beginning, everyday was a lot like that first one. I’d wake up, choose to keep quitting, and go to bed, still very much choosing to keep quitting. It was a daily practice and required planning and brain power and logistics and sleep. So much sleep. After a few months it became more natural and now, after a few years, its just who I am-a woman who doesn’t drink alcohol.

When my mother died in December of 2021 I found myself at yet another starting point. I had to face life as a motherless daughter and the reality of the new club I found myself in was heavier than I could carry. I spent days in bed, staring at the ceiling, replaying the heartbreaking scenes by her hospital bed, wondering if I’d done anything right. I felt immobilized with fear. The gravity of the rest of a lifetime without her felt insurmountable and the grief made me feel like I was stranded on an island somewhere no one would ever think to look, a castaway forever. I was facing another battle within myself, “How can I get through this?” Turns out, no one ever gets through this. There is no end, no finish. There is only the decision to start. Once again, day by day, month by month, I used the tools I’d adopted in sobriety to begin piecing together this new life, the one without her. At some point I got out of the bed. Then, at some point later, I went back to work and started eating again. Eventually, I found some joy in the pain, some kind of meaning started to show face and I stumbled upon a new kind of resolve. I began turning the fear into motivation and saw the whole thing from a bird’s eye view, it became a piece of who I was. Today, nearly two years later, I can confidently say that I have not arrived anywhere. I am simply still en route.

We love to place these arbitrary deadlines on our lives. We convince ourselves that a goal without a deadline is just a pipe dream and any idea worth its weight needs parameters and quantifiable progress. The truth is that our most important contributions to the world cannot be measured in days or numbers or dollars or pages. It’s all a process. The gold is in the grind. Not the kind of grind that causes burnout or decision fatigue or a rundown immune system, but the kind of grind that is a day in day out love letter to ourselves. We never arrive anywhere, at least I haven’t. I wake up everyday and face what I can. Some days I can’t look at my mother’s photograph, others I can’t go to a bar where the wine is flowing and everyone else seems to be drinking with carefree responsibility, and some mornings I can’t bear the thought of opening my email to find another reminder that I’m procrastinating a dream. There is no deadline on healing. To look at it as something we can accomplish is missing the point. Healing is a choice we make over and over everyday for the rest of our lives, much like grieving and making art. The key is to never stop starting. Today I put words on the page and that’s enough. Instead of waiting to arrive, what if we chose to embrace the bumpy ride and face the day at hand with curiosity? The truth is that the “before” and the “after” don’t exist, there is only the maddening, delightful, heartbreaking, breathtaking, ever-changing, “now.”