Two different walls. The same ten seconds.

My thighs are shaking.

My back is flat to the wall, knees bent at ninety degrees, and within my clear view a timer is counting down. Ten seconds left.

Every part of me wants to slide down that wall and stop.
And every part of me knows I won’t. Because I have been here before. Not on this wall. At my desk.

Writing does the same thing to me, every single day. Every writing hour, if I am honest. It asks me to outpace the writer I was the day before. Yesterday’s sentence is the bar. Today’s has to clear it.

I have since stacked a second challenge on top of that one. The healthier me. The me who works out five or six times a week, like I know I should. The me who looks at the croissant, sighs, and reaches for another piece of broccoli. Another helping of arugula. I’m striving to become the me who goes to bed a half hour earlier than I did the night before.

Two different walls. The same ten seconds.

Because that is what it comes down to, isn’t it? Not the full hour of writing, or the full hour at the gym. The ten seconds in the middle, when everything in you says stop, and you have to decide, one more time, to hang on.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what makes that possible. The hanging on only works if you believe something underneath it. You have to believe a better you is genuinely on the other side of the wall. The stronger writer. The steadier woman. Whoever she turns out to be.

Take that belief away, and the ten seconds are just pain. Nobody hangs on through pain for nothing.

My characters live on this wall too. I never quite let them off it. Every chapter asks them to become someone who can survive the next one, usually against their will, usually with something they love on the line. One story in particular has asked more of me than anything I have written. One day soon I’ll get to tell it the way it should be told.

I almost didn’t send this month’s letter.

I sat right here and thought, who cares what I think? Who needs Angela’s two cents on broccoli and word counts and going to bed early?

Then I remembered why I write anything at all. I’m a person, the same as you. And I don’t believe, not for one second, that I’m the only one tight-knuckling another ten seconds right now.

You’re probably not being prodded by a word count or a wall sit. Your wall might be quieter. It might be a conversation you keep avoiding, or a version of yourself you can see clearly but cannot quite reach yet. You know the one.

Whatever it is, I think you’re mid-hold on it right now. And the one thing I know that helps, the only thing some days, is hearing that someone else is mid-hold too.

So tell me. What is your wall this month? What are the ten seconds you keep gritting your way through?

Go ahead. Hit reply.

It doesn’t have to sound impressive. Mine is broccoli. Just tell me the true one, and I will be hanging on right there beside you.

That’s it from me this month.

Until next time . . . . let there be . . .