At some point you either get tired of the bullshit sandwich you’re feeding yourself or you accept your lackluster dietary choices and resign yourself to a life of eating cow excrement. For me, there was a day in the not so distant past when it happened. I think I had to go through the years of excuses, some valid and some totally made up, to get to the end of myself. 

Here’s what I know: whether it’s an emergency brain surgery for my youngest son or my swooning over a newly published author who is “so much better and more educated than me, I’ll never be that caliber..” I have crafted every excuse in the book not to write my own.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

(Truly, Lidia Yuknavitch, what special breed of unicorn are you????!!!)

I’ve done play writing. Like when I was a little girl and would do play cooking - mixing dirt and water together to make mud batter, pouring it in a metal pie dish with a rubber spatula stolen from underneath my mom’s silverware drawer, and letting it bake in the hot African sun long enough to turn to a bona-fide mud pie. I’d slice into it with a butter knife and then sit there at the anticlimactic end. I was going through the motions. All that work, no payoff. 

I have journals to prove it. Pages and pages, reams of old growth forests composted down into the paper I’ve used to parse out the previous days thoughts, images, ideas, if only’s. But those journals have been a stopgap, a kind of play writing in order to avoid the big girl work of pulling up a chair for longer than feels easy and diving into a story that’s more than hard to tell. 

That’s all over now. Sure, I’ll journal when I need to. But I have turned onto a new path, one where I am intentionally pursuing the book. Recently, yet another woman I know and love and am friends with got a book deal. You know how she did it? She put her butt in the chair and worked instead of making excuses. She also has a child who is, at times, critically ill. She also has plenty of other work she needs to be doing each day. She also has a home and a family and bills and taxes and car trouble and a human body. The only difference is she didn’t buy into the lie that there was no time, no margin, no support for her work. She made the time, carved out the margin with a hand shovel, and supported herself. At 4am. 

I would have clutched my invisible pearls if I hadn’t tried every other excuse in the book by now. But I can’t argue with the fact that, at 4am, no one is awake in my house. The sky is still dark and so are these rooms. Everyone’s in REM and the heater runs steadily, promising its lulling hum will carry us at least a couple more hours before the world goes into fast forward mode. 

I’m not sure why it was different this time. But it was. And I told my wife so. “I think I’m out of excuses. I think I’m actually just tired of my own bullshit and I’m ready to show up and feel really good about the work.” 

She reminded me, without pause, those are two different things. And they need to be kept separate. 

1. Showing up 

2. Enjoying the results of showing up

She reminded me, “you actually just have to show up. At this point, it is counter-productive to also expect you will like it. It’s more a physical act of will than an emotional and artistic one. You show up, you put the butt in the chair, and then you do it again until you accomplish your goal.’ 

Then she did the most magical thing that was entirely practical. She drilled a whiteboard into our bedroom wall and began to help me fill out a schedule. She had me name what days I could sustain a writing practice at 4am. She did math with me - the length of a typical memoir, divided by that many days a week to reveal how many words I needed to get on the page each writing day. We stood looking at a wall of information that should not have been sexy but somehow felt like the most insanely mysterious magic trick had just been solved. The secret wasn’t a secret. It was just the math of consistency. (Have I mentioned how lucky I am to have married my favorite writer?)

On the board she also wrote all of the potential life things that will or might happen to throw me off course. Things like holidays or family interruptions to illness and out-of-town photography gigs. It was helpful to see how my goal allowed for me to jump right back on the path even if I had to take a brief detour. In the past, something like that has messed with my head to the point where I’ve given up. “If I can’t do it perfectly….” 

Well, nothing’s perfect. And my book won’t be either. Neither will my writing process. But it will be real.

So I started. And I just completed my first week of showing up early to write on purpose.

In my messy hair and wild eyes I see a woman, committed to the act of showing up.

In the end I will have something tangible to show for all those 4am wake up calls: “The End.” 

Almost as good: no more bullshit sandwiches.