Writing a book is like trying to lasso a ghost: every time you think you’ve got the shape worked out, it slips through your fingers and laughs on the way out. You sit there staring at the page, writing a bunch of bullshit that doesn’t make sense, and you wrestle with structure and chapters and moving things around like it’s some unfinished building and the architect is a cantankerous bastard.
You piece sentences together like a car mechanic rebuilding an engine with borrowed tools, used parts, and busted knuckles. You claw through thesauruses, chase half-remembered words down alleyways in your brain, thinking to yourself, “I know that word starts with an s, but what is it?” That’s the work nobody knows about—the ditch-digging labor of language, the excavation of meaning, digging through rubble for clarity you can make into something real.
And then there’s the life part—the world throws bricks at you just to see if you can still catch. You get everything running smooth, the sentences stretching out like they finally trust you, and then slam! Something hits. A crisis, a bill, a car accident, a health scare, or the kind of curveball you can’t even name, you just feel dread like the boot is about to drop. Then you have to write with one hand while the other hand holds the roof up.
You’re catching punches and dealing with the grind, the grief, and the grind again. Everyone says, “Make time to write,” like it’s some cool little hobby you can squeeze between collapsing and restarting your life. Looks good on Instagram, but “Oh yeah, sure thing.. but let me just crash my car first… I’ll be right with ya.”
I write because the alternative is stagnation, and depression because of it… and that’s a slow death for people wired the way I am. Gotta create, not consume.
But here’s what I keep telling myself under the noise: every hit that doesn’t take me out puts another layer of steel under my skin. Every setback sharpens me.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Maybe that’s the whole point—maybe the book isn’t built in spite of the chaos, but because of it. Maybe all the struggle is just the universe sanding me down until the grit shows, until the voice grows teeth, until I’m tough enough to finish this damn thing.
