Last Saturday, I went with a few friends to watch the Yankees defend New York against the Red Sox. The night was filled with High Noons, screaming fans, and a seven-year-old kid ripping his shirt off every time the Yankees did something amazing. (And yes, I ended the sentence that way because I couldn’t figure out if the correct wording here was “scored” or “made a run.”)

The crowd was loud all night; cops were pulled away to break up fights in the bleachers, and there was collective booing whenever a Red Sox fan dared to leave their seat. Everyone seemed to be dressed in uniform: the same caps, the same Pinstripe Pils, the same chicken buckets. Above us, the moon was full, and every so often, the subway flashed through a gap in the bleachers— a reminder that the rest of New York was still moving around us.

Somewhere in all of this, I felt an unexpected swell of pride for my city.

I grew up in the Bronx until I was about seven, but my relationship with the borough goes back much further. My dad is from there, as was his mom, and her mom— my great-grandmother, who helped raise me. When I was a kid, I played on the same front patio in Morris Park as my dad did. I walked the same path to the laundromat with my grandma and watched the same house light up every Christmas Eve. Even after we moved to Manhattan, then to Westchester, the Bronx stayed with me.

Our idea of home doesn’t always stay the same, even when part of it stays with us. We grow up. We move. We find new neighborhoods, new cities, new people. Sometimes the place we call home changes entirely. But that doesn’t mean the places that came before stop mattering. Pieces of them remain with us— in the traditions we keep, the foods we crave, the songs we know by heart, and the things we find ourselves inexplicably rooting for.

I think that’s why Saturday night became this week’s writing prompt. The friends I was with all had different connections to the Yankees. Some of them were from New Jersey and had inherited their fathers’ love of the game; others were from cities far away and had adopted the Yankees as their own. And then there was our one Red Sox fan, from New England but now living in New York, who had stayed loyal to her team. She was, technically, on the wrong side, but somehow, the night wouldn’t have been complete without her.

Because rooting for a home team isn’t always about where you live.

Sometimes it’s about where you come from. Sometimes it’s about where you’ve chosen to belong. Other times, it’s about the people who raised you, the places that shaped you, or a version of yourself you don’t want to forget.

We don’t always realize how much we love a place, a tradition, a song, or a team until we see someone else love it, too. Seeing our own affection reflected back at us suddenly makes it visible.

A crowd can do that. For a few hours, thousands of people with seemingly nothing in common can stand shoulder to shoulder and decide that, at least for tonight, this is ours.

So this week, I’m thinking about what it means to root for home. Not necessarily the place you live now, or even a sports team, but whatever has made you feel like you belong.

Today’s Topic: Rooting for the Home Team

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Write It Out

1. What does home mean to you?

2. Write about a time you were surrounded by strangers but felt, somehow, that you were among your people. What created that feeling?

3. Write about a time you loved something more because someone else loved it, too.

4. Write a love letter to something mundane about your hometown: a bus route, grocery store, traffic pattern, local restaurant, park bench, neighborhood bar, or street you've walked a thousand times.

5. Home isn't always where we were born. Write about a place you chose to belong to. When did it stop feeling like somewhere you lived and start feeling like somewhere that was yours?

Listen While You Write

1. “New York, New York”; Frank Sinatra

2. “Empire State of Mind”; Alicia Keys & JAY-Z

3. “Northern Attitude”; Noah Kahan

4. “Rivers and Roads”; The Head And The Heart

5. “LA MuDANZA”; Bad Bunny

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Invite Yourself Into Someone Else’s Home

1. Do the Right Thing

   

2. Brooklyn

   

3. Moonstruck

   

4. Little Miss Sunshine

   

5. The Sandlot

   

   If you respond to a prompt, listen to one of these songs, or have a movie night, leave a comment below and share a little bit of it!

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Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about what scares me. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about the things I’ve missed out on because I’ve let my fears take over. How many choices have I second-guessed? How many locked doors have I tugged on three times just to make sure? What happens when I convince myself that I need to be cautious and careful instead of living in the moment?

Just the other night, I was on the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier when my sisters started moving around in the gondola as a joke. I tried to laugh it off, but my fear kept building. Before long, I stopped having fun, and all I could think about were the waves lapping underneath us, the rollercoaster whizzing by, and the eighteen-year-old kid operating the ride that I entrusted with my life.

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Sometimes, I should be enjoying what I’m doing, but instead I’m thinking about everything that could go wrong. I’m somewhere beautiful, but I’m wondering if I’m safe. I’m doing something exciting, but I’m imagining all of the ways it could end badly. I’m having a good time, but part of my mind is somewhere else entirely, scanning for the next thing I should be worried about.

And— don’t get me wrong— I know we can’t really eradicate fear from our lives entirely; fear exists for a reason. Sometimes that tingle on the back of our neck or sinking feeling in our stomachs can tell us when something isn’t right or safe. But sometimes, fear gets loud enough that it becomes difficult to hear anything else.

These prompts aren’t meant to help us get rid of fear. Instead, they’re an invitation to notice it. To sit with it at the table. To listen to what it’s trying to tell us without necessarily letting it make every decision. Maybe, with enough time, we can learn to let fear become less of a voice directing our lives and more of a passerby at our front door— someone we acknowledge when they arrive, but don’t have to invite to come in.

Today’s Topic: When fear gets loud, what else are we missing?

Write It Out

1. Fear doesn't only make us afraid. Sometimes it makes us cautious, distracted, withdrawn, hyperaware, or unable to enjoy something we've been looking forward to. Write about something fear has quietly taken from you.

2. Now, write about something you were afraid to do but did anyway. Don't focus on whether the fear was “rational.” Instead, describe what it felt like to carry the fear with you.

3. If your fear could speak to you, what would it say? What would it insist you do? What would it promise would happen if you didn’t listen? Then ask: Would you believe it?

4. Fear has moved into your home and refuses to leave. Describe where it sleeps, what it eats, what it complains about, and what it tells you not to do. What happens when you stop letting fear make the rules?

5. Write the same moment twice: once through the eyes of someone consumed by fear, and once through the eyes of someone who feels completely safe.

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Listen While You Write

1. “I Know the End”, Phoebe Bridgers

2. “this is me trying”, Taylor Swift

3. “Growing Sideways”, Noah Kahan

4. “Free”, Florence + the Machine

Watch Someone Else Move Through Their Fears

1. The Worst Person in the World

   

2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

   

3. The Truman Show

   

4. Good Will Hunting

If you respond to a prompt or listen to one of these songs, leave a comment below and share a little bit of it!

The movers have arrived. A locks herself into our shared bathroom, while I sit with the kids in our bedroom. As I wonder what she is doing, she emerges from the bathroom, her eyes red and puffy from crying. There is a finality in having the movers arrive to remove our belongings– five years of our life in that house, four years in our previous two apartments. We are moving to separate homes in Philadelphia, where we will begin shared custody of our two children.

Does A grieve the way that I still do? Does she still remember the day that we closed on the house? In the picture we took that day, Zayn is five months old, in his baby carrier, my belly still round in the maternity shirt and pants that I wore for far too long. We are smiling— hugely— standing next to my parents. They were so happy that I had finally found someone who would “take care of me” and raise their grandchild.

For so long, the world was just the three of us– A, me, and Zayn. Before our second child was born, before the pandemic, before my breast cancer. I have a photograph from Zayn’s first few months of life. Zayn, naked except for a diaper, limbs still spindly from the weight loss of birth, lies on our bed. A’s head is next to his miniature body. She stares at him with so much love in her eyes. Zayn is her heart, beating and breathing outside her body.

“You and Zayn are my world,” A said.

After buying the house, my father had turned to A and said, “You have to stay healthy so that you can take care of Gina and Zayn.” He had entrusted her with the masculine responsibility that he saw as his own. He felt relief that I had found her, the tomboy whom he saw as my “husband.”

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Today my father feels betrayed.

We spent five years in that house. The narrow townhouse with four floors. I wonder how long I will be able to remember the placement of the furniture. Soon, it will all be part of the home that A will eventually share with someone else. I agree to let her keep our king-sized bed, as she bought the fancy Crate and Barrel headboard that matches it. My first lover after the divorce, Jay, spent only a handful of nights in my bed here in Philly, the same bed that A slept in during our last year of cohabitation, when we were already separated and sleeping in different bedrooms.

Do the impressions of our bodies remain in the memory foam mattresses, despite the change in location, the change in partners?

June 2, 2022.

It is my first night alone in my new apartment in Philly. I can’t sleep. Every noise jars me awake, the city noises of West Philly unfamiliar after five years in small-town Maryland. It is my first time living alone in nine years. Although it’s been twelve years since I left Philly, it feels like a lifetime ago. A few weeks after the move, A leaves to spend the summer in the West Bank to take photographs and collect testimonies of Palestinians displaced by the Apartheid Wall. I feel constant anxiety during those first few months, solo in a new-ish city with a two- and five-year-old. I am alone in Philly, with no friends or family to fall back on. When I contract COVID for the first time, I wear a mask, run the air purifiers, and continue to care for my two children while feverish and weak.

Twelve years prior, I had arrived in Philly from Oakland, in the midst of my Saturn return, desperately trying to finish my dissertation after receiving the unexpected job offer in Philly. Back then, I hated the cold weather and gritty streets of Philly. I longed for the redwoods and Pacific Ocean. I missed hearing Tagalog in the streets and seeing people who looked like me. Another job offer brings me back to Philly in 2022, freshly divorced with two young children, no furniture, and dozens of boxes. Four bedrooms, one garage, and nine years of building a life fill these identical brown boxes, stacked in towering piles that fill every available inch of my new apartment.

My best friend of over twenty-five years, Michelle, arrives to help me unpack. Most of the choices of where to put things are hers. I follow blindly, knowing that without her, I will sink down onto the floor and not be able to get back up. I know I have to keep going, match her pace, and put things in the donation pile, choosing ruthlessly, without sentimentality. I can’t dwell on the life I am giving away, the detritus of almost a decade together, of a family built together.

A had left me with all of this.

She chose a few key items, almost all of the furniture, and left me with the remains of our life— the Christmas tree, decorations, the sleds, the baby mattress and clothes— the evidence of our life and family together. She was starting over, and I was combing through the leftovers, figuring out what to keep and what to throw away.

This week, I’m thinking a lot about starting fresh. My youngest sister (affectionately known as my baby) is moving into her college dorm this week, my parents are becoming “empty nesters,” and I’m starting a new job.

My almost instant reaction is to cringe at all the change, as if I can feel the newness crawling from the tips of my fingers, up my arm, and into my hair. But I’m learning to pause, reflect, and channel the discomfort into something productive.

Change can evoke many different reactions from all of us, so I figured this week’s prompts should reflect that variety. (And yes, the above image DOES picture Rachel Berry finally getting to New York.)

Today’s topic: New Beginnings.

Write It Out

1. What would your younger self be surprised to know about the person you are today?

2. Write about a beginning that nobody else noticed.

3. What remains of a room after someone immediately moves out? What changes?

4. Write about a return to something you once abandoned.

5. Write about a beginning that happens in the middle of something ending.

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Listen While You Write

1. “Shake It Out”, Florence + The Machine

2. “Vienna”, Billy Joel

3. “The Garden Song”, Phoebe Bridgers

4. “Eternal Sunshine”, Ariana Grande

5. “It’s Time”, Imagine Dragons

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Binge Someone Else’s New Beginning (in film or TV)

1. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once

   

2. Real Women Have Curves

   

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

   

4. Normal People

   

5. Fleabag

   

   If you respond to a prompt or listen to one of these songs, leave a comment below and share a little bit of it!

When I was eighteen, I lived in a small town in Italy near Milan where I worked as a live-in nanny. I had just dropped out of college, directionless and restless. While my weekday afternoons were busy being the educator and entertainer for my family’s two kids, all of my other time was my own. A ten-minute walk down the road was a train station, tiny and quaint with just two green and white trains, my chariots to new adventures.

When I think back on this time in my life, I feel the pull of nostalgia not just for the adventures that I went on, but for that ritualistic pilgrimage to this station that opened up a new landscape to me.

My town was a small pocket of green farmland and yellow-orange houses lined with ornate fencing, the roof ridges straight out of a movie. My path to the trains took me through my neighborhood, the couple across the street offering a cheerful wave whenever they milled about in their yard. As I rounded the corner to the main road, I was often greeted by farm equipment rolling past me, the smell of manure and fresh graft wafting through the warm air. I’d put in my earbuds, pacing my walk to the familiar soundtrack of Phoebe Bridgers, Billy Joel, and Hozier, each note anchoring my senses in my surroundings.

All these years later, the hum of Phoebe Bridgers’ song “DVD” transports me to that pathway, religiously checking my train ticket amid panels of light cutting through the trees. When I close my eyes, the times flash across the screen at the station, my train running five minutes behind. I never minded at all. When my train arrived, I would choose a purple seat by the window, the perfect spot to watch the countryside dissolve into the bustling cities that led me to new adventures.

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The first time I took the train, my host aunt gave me a ride. She spoke the best English out of the family and became my confidant and guidebook. Quite the adventurer herself, she had spent her early 20’s backpacking around Europe. She parked the car in the small parking lot and walked me through the tunnel, plastered with graffiti, and up the stairs.

As we walked along the platform, she explained how the trains worked, a foreign language of its own to someone who had never experienced public transportation alone. My stomach was a mass of butterflies, nerves, and excitement fluttering because I was heading to see the Grand Prix in Monza. My host aunt waved cheerfully as I stepped onto the train, and the whoosh of the doors blew ice-cold air back at me, the only familiar face I knew fading into the distance as the train started up.

Stepping off of the train for the first time completely alone, I was hit with a tidal wave of fear amidst the massive influx of people who had traveled in for this race.

The bus was even more complex than the train system, and I stumbled through it with the help of the person who sold me the race tickets. However, my journey home was a colossal nightmare: I got on the wrong train just a few minutes too early, with a dead phone and a panic attack, and it took me to a station thirty minutes in the wrong direction, to a town called Lecco. I had no clue how to get back home, and without a conductor taking pity on me, I would have likely been stuck for hours all alone. Still, when I fell into my seat a sweaty mess after finally finding the right train home, I felt the safety of those bright lights envelop me in a hug, and a sense of pride in knowing that despite my fear, I made it through the unfamiliar.

Each train ride after that instilled more and more confidence in myself, and led to a deep fondness for this walk, these journeys.

Whether I was traveling to the Mediterranean Sea to drink wine by the water or to Lecco for a cappuccino steps away from the train station where I first found myself lost and afraid, the ritual of these train rides anchored me into moments of complete presence and gratitude. Gratitude for the destinations I was traveling to but also for my own strength and confidence, the blessing I granted myself when I allowed myself to believe in my fantasies and aptitude.

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Every time I walked the path to the station, I walked toward strength, adventure, and a heightened sense of peace within myself. The nostalgia for this feeling alone brings me back to reflection each time, as I long not just for my pilgrimage but for who these walks turned me into.

One trip home from the train station stays at the forefront of my memory even now. It was a sunny afternoon, the landscape even more magical than ever as the trees glistened in the sunshine after the afternoon rain. I wanted to smoke a cigarette before returning home, to take a moment for myself to observe, to breathe. I happened upon an archway of leaves that led to an alcove of trees, and there I stood, each puff of smoke dancing in front of me as I replayed the memories of the weekend in Milan. I had never felt so lucky and so strong.

Just two months prior, I had spent every night in my childhood bedroom strangled by fear and depression, screaming into my pillow, crying out for a crane to pull me out of this house, this mindset, my reality where I had no education, no direction, no freedom, no authentic connections, and no future. I had that now. I got everything I asked for, and it manifested itself in my eager footsteps, my sure sense of self, the journeys that only I could give to myself.

Nostalgia grips your heart at each subtle reminder, steadily squeezing out each memory. It’s a type of pain that you sadistically never want to let go of because with it comes the immersive memories of better times.

When I listen to these songs or look back on these pictures, my obsession with the past is a portal. Nostalgia fuels my trips back in time. It is not only a fondness for a place or a memory; it is grief for a long-gone version of yourself. Nostalgia pushes you in front of the mirror and reflects your ghost. At times, nostalgia takes over my reality, and I cannot help but slip into its warm embrace, longing to walk this path back to the train station once more, to slide into my seat, play these songs, and watch the buildings flash past on my way to a new city.

I often linger too long in these memories, clawing against my necessary return to the present, screaming for the past. Nevertheless, nostalgia cannot be an escape from reality, but a reminder of the beautiful moments that fill the jar that holds your thoughts, your character, your unique perspective on the world. So when I find myself overwhelmed by the loss of these moments from my daily life, I take a breath, pet my cat, hug my lover, and remind myself that these simple moments will soon carry a deep nostalgia with them, just as my dreamy walk in my Italian village does all these years later.

Writing ruts are the worst. I should know; I’ve been in one for the last six months.

As writers, we tend to spend so much time alone with our thoughts— trying to discover the newest and best way to explain them— that we forget we don’t have to tackle everything alone. Sometimes, instead of pushing through a writing rut on your own, it’s better to lean on the writers around you.

In an attempt to battle my own writing rut (and maybe help a few of you out of yours), Ditch Life will now put out Writing Prompt Wednesdays! Welcome to the first one :)

Today’s topic: Longing.

Write It Out

1. You wake up one morning with an intense longing for a place you've never been. Describe the place without ever naming it.

2. Write about longing for a version of your life that was never actually available to you.

3. Without using the words “want,” “miss,” “need,” or “desire", describe longing entirely through physical sensations.

4. Write about longing for a friendship that no longer exists.

5. How does it feel to miss a person or place that feels like home, but could never be?

6. What if a ghost isn't haunting a house; it’s longing for it?

Listen While You Write

1. “Purple Rain”, Prince

2. “Thoroughfare”, Ethel Cain

3. “Francesca”, Hozier

4. “All I Did Was Dream Of You”, beabadoobee ft. The Marías

5. “Epic III”, Hadestown (absolutely had to throw this one in here)

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Movies Sure to Awaken Your Longing

1. The Notebook

   

2. Before Sunrise

   

3. Frances Ha

   

If you respond to a prompt or listen to one of these songs, leave a comment below and share a little bit of it!

“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” — Brené Brown

I. the lesson

When I was twelve, I started singing lessons. My parents drove me to an elderly lady’s condo, and I made it to one recital. My voice was light and wobbly, but I had the small twinkles of talent.

Later that summer, I was at a slumber party thrown by one of my classmates. Various parents were gathered in the kitchen and living room, and kids were cycling through a karaoke machine plugged into a big flat-screen TV. A couple of girls picked out a song for me by KT Tunstall. I giggled and screeched my way through ‘Cherry Tree’. At the end, two of the dads walked past me and sneered, “Yeah, that’s not gonna be your day job.” Shocked, I backed away and ran out into the expansive Hollywood backyard. One of the girls taunted that they were producers for music shows. I found a chair under a willow, away from the party, and I hugged my knees. I watched the party, squashing tears, vowing to myself I would never, ever experience something like that again

And yes, a few years later, those men pitched a little show called The Voice. I never sang again.

Looking back, what strikes me isn’t that I wasn’t simply embarrassed. Children survive embarrassment all the time. It was far, far deeper than that. The mocking commentary from adults who’d been drinking— I had no context or defense for it. I believed, wholeheartedly, that I had mortally offended them. What stayed with me was the conclusion I drew from it: You should never, ever risk offending people again.

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So I learned to shrink.

I learned that taking up less space was safer than risking that depth of mortal embarrassment. That being small, quiet and inoffensive was infinitely safer than being authentic, messy and maybe just a little bit human. That if I could just give the right performance, maybe people would approve of me. This shame was physical. My stomach bottoming out, anxiety curdling as hot, oily pain in my gut, my hands going cold, clammy, and sweaty. Shame burning my eyes and pulling them to the ground.

And through those excruciating feelings, the lesson remained: stay small, stay agreeable, and don’t you dare try and be yourself.

The greatest cost of this shame wasn’t that it hurt: the greatest cost was that it disrupted my growth. I didn’t just stop singing. I stopped exploring. It didn’t just kill my curiosity; it eviscerated it. I stopped asking the good questions, such as: What do I actually like? What excites me? Who am I when nobody is watching?

When we spend our formative years shrinking and warping ourselves into something palatable and acceptable, we lose precious time discovering ourselves. Instead, we’re experts in reading rooms, anticipating judgment and answering only what keeps us safe and accepted. And all of that energy comes from somewhere, from the deep, special soul part of ourselves that should be cultivating wondrous things. Curiosity, creativity, joy. Instead, it starves them.

We become experts in managing perception and performers of inauthenticity, instead of creators and curators of our own unique, messy identity.

II. healing isn’t the pursuit of perfection

In modern mental health discussions, I take issue with the overall outcome we’re supposed to achieve. We’re told that if we do enough therapy, journaling, self-improvement, or healing work, one day we’ll arrive at a version of ourselves that is entirely free from discomfort. We’re taught that shame is something to eliminate completely, and if we’re not attaining this goal, then there must be something inherently wrong with us.

Social media does a tremendous job reinforcing this fantasy. The perfect morning routine. The perfect journal. The perfect mindset. The perfect life. The message is subtle but relentless: And if you’re still struggling, you’re not healing right.

But we are not machines. Human beings aren’t software waiting for the next update. Our interior lives follow the rules of nature. We move in cycles. We revisit old fears and patterns. We encounter old wounds in new forms, in new seasons of life, new jobs, new friends, and new lovers. Growth never unfolds in a straight line.

It spirals and fractals.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

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III. shame is creative power

This year I realized something profound about shame’s role in my life. Shame wasn’t evidence that something was wrong with me. It was merely information. Shame appeared in my life when something mattered deeply. When I was fully visible, I was actively risking rejection. It came tumbling forward when I’d expose a part of myself, and I couldn’t control how that vulnerability was received.

The problem, I realized, isn’t shame. The problem is the story I’d attached to it.

Instead of: “There’s something wrong with me,” I’d ask: “Why does this matter so much to me?”

That shift changed everything for me. Nobody feels ashamed about things they don’t care about. You don’t feel vulnerable sharing a grocery list. But you sure feel vulnerable sharing a poem. You don’t feel exposed discussing the weather. But you do feel exposed revealing your romantic intentions. Shame has a less-than-pleasant way of illuminating what matters. It’s messy and intrinsically human. But it points toward desire, to identity, to longing and to purpose. It’s essential to navigating our complex emotional lives. The things that make us feel so raw and exposed are often the same things that reveal who we really are. Which means shame isn’t always warning us away from something dangerous. Sometimes it’s the uncomfortable thing pointing us towards catalyst and change.

This is why I’m convinced shame and creativity are so deeply connected. Every creative act carries inherent risk. Risk of rejection, of misunderstanding, and good ‘ole fashioned failure. Every time you attempt something creative, you risk being misunderstood and not seen in the way you’ve hoped.

But I’m convinced the artist’s purpose is not to eliminate these risks. It’s to learn how to move through them with some level of courage and grace. Because if you eliminate risk entirely, you eliminate originality. By originality, I mean you eliminate the possibility of making something only you could make. And perhaps worst of all, you eliminate access to the most meaningful parts of yourself.

IV. be an alchemist

For me, I was liberated when I stopped asking: “How do I get rid of shame?” and instead asked: “What is this feeling trying to show me?”

That question transformed my perspective. Curiosity grew, replacing harsh judgment. Exploration took root, out of slippery avoidance. Discovery overshadowed self-protection.

As a writer, this is the greatest gift my morning journaling practice gives me. Not perfection, but transformation. Showing up each day, for the writing practice and growing my ability to take difficult mental material and create something entirely new from it. Taking all that overwhelming fear and suffocating uncertainty, and transmuting it. Learning to channel confusion into understanding, pain into compassion, and exposure into connection.

This is the beginning of embracing real creative power. To reclaim your artistic identity not as a harbinger of shame and change, but as an alchemist.

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VIII. three ways to embrace shame

Move It Through the Body

I’ve learned that shame is physical. So change your physical state: Walk. Dance. Lift weights. Hike. Stretch. Move.

The goal isn’t to eliminate feelings. The goal is to remind yourself that this discomfort can move, and needs to move out of the body. That it doesn’t have to become your identity or a referendum on your worth. It’s a physical state, not permanence.

Put It on the Page

Write the thing you’re afraid to write. Fear always makes whatever’s scaring us bigger than it actually is. And fear is an energy. The work that scares us the most usually contains the exact material we’re meant to explore. Another concept that’s shifted my perspective for the better is the idea that fear and faith are the same energy. But one will keep us trapped and unfulfilled, while the other allows us to remain open and evolving.

Live Before You Feel Ready

Read the poem. Share the work. Go to the event. Speak up. Take the class. Apply for the opportunity.

Remember, taking action won’t eliminate shame. But taking action, and making it your default, teaches you that shame doesn’t get the final say. Remember that our modern world is obsessed with outcomes: Healing. Fixing. Arriving.

But life is not an arrival. It’s a practice. So I take action, and I keep rituals. Because those most meaningful rituals in my life — writing, tarot, hosting, long walks, conversations with friends — don’t eradicate my discomfort, but they help me remain present with it. And this presence changes everything.

X. Creative Power

One of the hardest truths I’ve had to accept this year, as I’ve pushed forward in my creative practice, is this: I will never overcome shame. But I no longer believe that’s the point of my journey. The gift in this often painful journey is that shame no longer gets to determine the shape of my life. It no longer decides what I create, what I attempt, or who or what I love. And it definitely doesn’t have the final say on who I will become. The moment I became more curious instead of afraid of my shame was when it stopped being my enemy. Instead, it has become my greatest teacher. Shame helps me access a huge source of creative energy. And it’s my truest gauge that something truly meaningful is at stake.

And maybe that’s the real work, as a writer and an artist. Not expending endless energy trying to eliminate shame. But instead channeling that energy into creative alchemy, refusing to abandon yourself, and therefore, finally discovering yourself.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve revisited our nostalgia issue an almost absurd number of times, rereading these stories that I can recite from memory.

There’s something so special about returning to the issue after the excitement of launch day (and my anxiety of making sure everything runs smoothly) has settled. I can carefully flip through the pages, sip my coffee, and spend as much time as I want in each world our writers created for the Ditch Life community as someone more than just their editor— a reader, a time-traveler, maybe even a best friend.

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I’ve said before that, for me, nostalgia follows wherever I go. It sits in my classroom, decorates my journal, and hangs on my kitchen wall. When planning the second issue of Ditch Life Magazine, nostalgia jumped up and down in front of me, shouting at the top of its lungs, begging to be chosen as our theme— and I’m so glad it did.

The stories and poems that our writers pieced together for this issue— and the images they selected to fall in line beside them— perfectly capture those fleeting moments of nostalgia: the pain of losing a friend or sibling, the beauty woven into a picnic blanket, and the versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown. Together, these stories remind us that nostalgia isn’t just about looking back, but understanding how our past continuously shapes who we are.

If you haven’t had the chance to explore the past that lingers in the pages of the nostalgia issue, I hope you take the time to do so as the week comes to a close. Our writers are the heart of Ditch Life Publishing, and I’m forever grateful they chose to share these pieces with us.

I’m in the kitchen, moving between the stove and the cutting board, falling into a rhythm I’ve come to recognize. The space is small, but it works. It always does. Music hums in the background, a chill, folksy station I’ve come to love. The air is thick with cumin and pepper, and oil sizzles. The chili simmers low, steady, and forgiving. Carrots, onions, garlic— all chopped— slide off the board and gather into bowls.

Again. And again.

The wine is open, breathing on the counter. The oven hums softly.

This is the part I’ve come to love. And still — right on cue — the churning anxiety arrives. About an hour before my friends are due to arrive, it always arrives first.

What did I forget? Did I mess something up? Is something dirty? Will it all come together? I stop at the sink, frozen. Then I catch myself. I stir the pot slowly and breathe deeply. Is this an exam? Or is this a simple gathering with friends? My heart softens, and my breathing expands. Not everything is perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. This is enough.

The Case for Staying In

It’s almost impossible to ignore how expensive it’s become to go out. A single dinner now costs what used to stretch across an entire week of groceries. Drinks, appetizers, the slow mantra of “just one more”, and suddenly the night feels less like connection and more like a transaction.

It’s certainly easy. But it’s also… strange. We say we crave connection. But more and more, we outsource it. Restaurants give us the illusion of togetherness: shared tables, dim lighting, and the hum of conversation. But if we’re there to show off, or to compete, we’re not the ones consuming but the ones being consumed by [capitalism]?

Hosting is different. It asks something vulnerable of you. You invite people into your space, into the place where your life actually happens. Here’s the kitchen where you cook. Here’s the table where you eat. They can see the small, lived-in corners that hold all your messy, human routines.

It reveals things about you. It revealed how you prepare for your life, and how you care about your friends and loved ones. And it puts on full display what you value. Lately, I’ve found myself drawn to it more and more. Not because it’s easy, but because it feels more honest. And also because hosting comes with its own pressure, this pressure has revealed some confusion I’ve had about performance and presence.

The Trap

It’s easy to believe hosting is about getting everything right. That it’s about executing the perfect meal, setting the most beautiful table, and creating the kind of night that looks like it belongs somewhere impossible: on a screen, in a magazine, or in some accomplished and successful person’s life.

There’s a quiet competition built into it, even if no one says it out loud.

Is this about connection, or about being approved of?

For a long time, I didn’t know the difference. I wanted people to love the food and to tell me it was good. I wanted them to confirm that I had done it right. But somewhere along the way, hosting became less about gathering in authentic connection and more about reassurance. I’ve struggled to understand that approval is not the same thing as connection. And if you’re not careful, you’ll confuse one for the other without even noticing.

There’s a place for performance. I firmly believe this. You perform in business, in networking, and in spaces where you are meant to present something polished. But hosting your friends? That’s supposed to be where you retire from the performance and let your guard down.

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Hosting as Devotion

What I’ve started to understand is this: Hosting, at its best, is a form of devotion. It’s not dramatic, aesthetic, or optimized. Just… attentive.

It looks like cooking again and again: learning what works, what doesn’t. It looks like effort without spectacle. It looks like choosing to gather, even when it would be easier not to.

You are not performing. You are tending.

The work isn’t to impress people. It’s to be with them. In staying present long enough to actually experience the night you worked so hard to create. And that, for me, has always been the hardest part.

Cooking as Rhythm

Cooking has become one of the ways I steady myself. It’s a form of creation. It gives shape to something intangible. You take the idea of a dish and a meal and make it real, through structure, process, measuring, and execution. I can have a terrible week, but once I start making a meal for myself or for friends, the spiral slows. The world narrows down to the chopping, cutting, frying, and stirring. It takes the sharp edges of perfectionism and gives them a productive outlet: creating something tactile and nourishing.

There’s a rhythm to it, and I want my life to feature more rhythm, less optimization.

Chop. Stir. Taste. Adjust. Repeat.

But the perfectionistic tension never fully disappears. I still want it to be good, and I want my friends to enjoy it. I still feel that small pull: the one that asks, is this enough? But is that the point?

Over time, something shifts. You evolve from following recipes to actually trusting yourself. From measuring everything exactly, to feeling your way through it. From control to something closer to what I’ve learned is called trust.

Slip and Soften

But there’s always a moment where something goes wrong.

Timing slips. One dish is hot, while the others run cold. A dish doesn’t work and falls flat. Something tastes slightly off because I still don’t know how to salt things properly. And suddenly, the spiral begins. If this isn’t working… What does that say about me? I’ve been in this moment, so often, so overwhelmed, and convinced I’ve taken on too much.

But something surprising happens when you let it soften.

Your friends step in. They help. They laugh. They open another bottle of wine. Because no one is grading the meal. No one is secretly evaluating you, hoping you’ll fail. They’re not there for perfection. They’re there for you. And more often than not, the night unfolds beautifully, anyway.

Keep it Simple

There are small ways to make a gathering feel intentional. A simple theme: Bread and wine. Everything Yellow. Lord of the Dips. Music that sparks conversation: I love investigating the record line-up my friends have curated for that evening. And lighting that softens the room: we do not condone overhead lighting. For me, it’s always the one dish I’m so excited to share and have everyone try. For another friend, it’s practicing a cocktail and making one for each guest. Whatever it is, what is true is this: it doesn’t need to be elaborate, and it doesn’t need to impress. It just needs to feel like you meant it. Because, as I am now relieved to report, the goal isn’t perfection, it’s presence. No one told me that in my twenties, but I’m relieved to have discovered this in my thirties.

Return to the Table

On the Central Coast, there’s a certain rhythm to all of this. Evenings stretch from pink sherbet sunsets to purple velvet night skies, dotted with stars, yes, stars you can see. Beautiful bottles are opened without ceremony. No one is rushing to turn over the table. It’s not quite a city pace. Not quite rural either. Something in between. Maybe, I dare say, something we were supposed to live in. Not the mad rushing of sirens and shouts of city cacophony, or the roar of crickets in a creepy forest. No, we were meant to go about our ordinary lives with the certainty that we can end the day quietly with friends, food, and really, really good wine.

You remember the wine, the beautiful labels, the fancy names of the varieties. Your friends are members of different wineries, by design, so that you can all share and try them. And finally, you remember the laughter. The naughty, ridiculous rounds of Cards Against Humanity that leave you snorting and your sides sore the next day. It’s the way the night unfolded, with care and ease and laughter. The feeling of being somewhere you didn’t need to rush through, didn’t need to wear a mask, didn’t need to brace. Only to be.

The End of the Night

My favorite part of hosting happens at the very end. The night winds down, with full bellies and faces that hurt from grinning. The plates are cleared, a group effort of storing leftovers and loading the dishwasher. No one wants the host to be left with a million dishes. Everyone slowly starts gathering their things, grabbing jackets and games, and putting on shoes.

I pack up leftovers. A container here. A slice of something wrapped in foil. A “take this with you,” and the big hugs goodbye. There’s something deeply satisfying about the evening’s end. The idea that the night doesn’t really end when people leave. That it carries forward, into the next day, into someone else’s kitchen, and perhaps into a quiet moment where they suddenly remember the smiles and the laughter.

In a world that often feels scarce, rushed, and transactional, it feels good to give more than enough.

Hosting isn’t about impressing anyone. It’s not about proving something or about getting everything exactly right. It’s about attention. It’s about presence. It’s about choosing — again and again — to gather.

You don’t need a reservation. You just need a table.

I used to be obsessed with romance— the intense, dramatic kind you learn from movies, books, and late-night conversations with friends. I remember the Twilight premieres falling on my teenage birthday weekends, giggling in dark theaters with my high school friends, with all of us caught up in the same dramatic, sweeping idea of love.

We decorated our lockers with pictures of handsome actors and musicians, dissected episodes of Gossip Girl and Sex in the City, and imagined who might ask us to dance at the next all-boys’ school dance.

It was fun, and it was formative. But it was an era, the wonderful era of youthful intensity and drama, and not at all the sensation I want to feel now, when I dwell on romance.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps through changing careers, through moving from my childhood home, and through actively building a life that required more than just dreaming, I became interested in something subtler, and something quieter.

Devotion.

Devotion is love in action. It’s not confined to just romance. It lives in friendship, in community, and in the way we care for ourselves. It’s less about what is declared loudly and publicly, and more about what is repeated quietly, consistently, and privately.

I started noticing it in these small, repeatable moments.

Showing someone something on your phone and watching them genuinely laugh: not the polite chuckle, but the kind of guffaw that lingers. A few of my friend groups have shared Instagram threads where we send each other videos tied to inside jokes we’ve collected over months and years. It’s not a doomscroll; it’s a record of shared language, of accumulated humor, and of knowing exactly what will land. It’s closeness I feel in the digital sphere that I believe keeps us connected, in a healthy way.

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Or it’s leaning in together over a book or a notebook. When I meet with writer friends, and we share drafts of half-formed poems, or of scattered ideas, I feel like I’m being let inside someone else’s mind. There’s a huge amount of trust in that. It’s messy, vulnerable, but so very much alive.

And maybe, the most important of all: when someone reads my work closely enough to challenge it. I love when a friend bleeds over a draft, adding tons of notes in the margins, asking big questions, and making all kinds of suggestions. I feel cared for in a way that’s difficult to explain. It takes time to engage like that. It takes honesty. For me, if you can’t tell me the truth, why are we even here?

And something smaller still: tell me there’s something in my teeth. Take the eyelash off my cheek and tell me to make a wish. Adjust my zipper, fix my collar, or point out my missing earring. We are never fully put together. What a relief it is to be seen in that, and quietly cared for anyway!

These moments feel romantic. Not because they’re grand, but because they’re attentive. Because they require noticing. We’re taught to recognize love in what’s visible: big gestures, declarations, and epic spectacle. But those are a poor guide for sustaining anything real over time. What stays with me are the smaller gestures. The ones that repeat. The ones that accumulate.

Intimacy, and true devotion, I think, live there— in this special attention, and in the quiet return to each other. And once you start noticing it there, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere else.

Romantic Devotion

We tend to reserve the word ‘romance’ for a specific kind of relationship, but even there, it rarely looks the way we’re told it should.

It looks like bringing someone water before they ask. Making them coffee in the morning. Paying attention to your partner’s physical state— whether they’re tired, hungry, overwhelmed— and responding without turning it into a performance.

It looks like learning someone’s rhythms and respecting them. It’s understanding when they need closeness and when they need space, and not taking that space personally.

It looks like doing small things that make someone’s life easier. Washing their car. Fixing their bike. Running out for something they forgot. Taking care of the logistics so they can exhale and focus on their tasks at hand. It looks like remembering: how they take their coffee, what foods they avoid, and what they don’t like to talk about. And choosing to honor those things, even when it would be easier not to.

And sometimes it looks like nothing at all, just sitting together. Maybe it’s the quiet morning coffee. Or snuggling on the couch at the end of the day. Maybe it’s sitting side by side in the sun. Whatever it is, it’s not performing and does not need to prove anything. It’s just letting the silence be.

Somewhere along the way, romance became synonymous with intensity. But intensity is easy, and drama is easy. Attention is harder. True care is quieter. It asks more of you, and it unfolds over time.

Romance, at its best, is not about being overwhelmed. It’s about being seen, and responded to, consistently.

Platonic Devotion

Friendship, more often than not, is where devotion is most reliably practiced.

It looks like early mornings and inconvenient tasks. Those Airport drop-offs, those long drives and the quiet logistics of showing up for someone’s life with enthusiasm and humor. And sometimes, it’s even simpler than that: being folded into each other’s ordinary routines. There’s a kind of generosity between friends that rarely gets named. Picking up the tab. Trading off driving to a far away place. Offering support without keeping score. Those are the friends I now know to travel with.

A few years ago, I planned a trip to New Orleans with my close friends. I had been many times before, and I was excited to show them everything: the restaurants, the music, and the places I loved most.

But what stayed with them wasn’t any of that. It was the small things. One friend thanked me for bringing sugar-free electrolytes for the group each morning. We’d wake up tired, the air already warm and heavy with humidity, and there they were on the communal table. It was such a minor detail, to me, but it made the days easier, and it certainly made our nights out dancing more enjoyable.

That’s what she remembered. Not the spectacle. The care.

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It looks like a friend following up on something you mentioned weeks ago. A reading. A performance. Something that mattered to you— not because it’s urgent, but because they remembered.

It looks like voice memos instead of texts. I love voice memos. Sending your voice, your tone, and your presence is so personal, so alive. Letting someone hear your laughter, your pauses, and feel the shape of your story. I feel like I’m in the same room as my friends, and it’s so special since so many of them live so far away.

It looks like texting a friend and asking to sit with them while you unravel, and them staying. Not fixing it. Not reframing it. Just staying, listening, and not judging you later for your vulnerability.

True devotion in friendship doesn’t announce itself. It’s maintained consistently over these acts of generosity and attention.

Gift Giving as Continuity

You see this same kind of devotion in the way we give things to each other.

The most meaningful gifts are rarely about the object itself. It’s the care and the time they carry inside them.

Have you ever received a plant grown from a friend’s cutting, given months later? Have you ever enjoyed jam made from fruit from your friend’s tree? One year, I grew herbs, dried them, and gave them as gifts of tea. These aren’t last-minute gestures. They are the result of sustained labor, effort, and attention.

In high school, I had a friend I traded annotated books with. We filled the margins with notes, jokes, and our reactions. We added Post-its with our longer, louder thoughts. We wrote summaries of our experience inside the covers. Later, in college, we switched to postcards, sending pieces of our lives across the country. I’ve kept them. Sometimes, when I feel lost in my writing, I go back to those books and letters. They remind me of who I’ve been, and who has seen me clearly.

For my birthday last year, a friend made me fresh bread and four different kinds of butter because of an inside joke we had. The butter lasted for weeks. I ate it slowly, in the middle of a difficult breakup. And each time I did, I was reminded that I was not alone.

That’s what made it a gift. Not the object, but the attention, stretched over time.

Sometimes it’s a note. A postcard. A small object someone carried because it reminded them of you. Sometimes it’s not a thing at all, but an action. It’s helping someone move, setting up their space, and participating in their beginning, in their new chapter. It’s care that extends beyond the moment. Care that carries forward.

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Community Care

If you want to understand devotion on a larger scale, you can see it in community.

Not in the obvious places - in the big events, the visible leadership - but in the quieter, repeated acts that hold everything together. It’s the same volunteers showing up early to set up, and staying late to clean up. Doing the work that allows a big, important event to actually exist.

It’s someone bringing extra food or water, just in case. Planning not just for themselves, but for others. It’s remembering names, asking about people’s lives, and offering special attention to people who may not expect it. In my Rotary club’s district, we host an annual leadership camp for high school students. Watching the students arrive shy, uncertain, and leave with a new sense of confidence is one of the most meaningful experiences I return to each year.

It’s not glamorous work. It doesn’t photograph well. But it matters.

Community love is not expressive. It’s functional. It’s infrastructure. It’s what connects you to your village.

Self-Devotion

And underneath all of this, there is a quieter question: how we practice this kind of attention in our own lives.

It looks like feeding yourself well, even when it would be easier not to. Taking the time to shop, to prepare, to sit down and eat something that sustains you. It looks like keeping small promises to yourself. Writing. Walking. Stretching. Not because you feel like it every time, but because you said you would.

Because when you keep those promises, you build self-trust. And that trust carries you through your lowest moments. It looks like building rituals: your morning coffee, a beautiful bath at the end of the day, or fresh flowers on the table each week.

And it looks like not abandoning yourself in relationships. Not dropping everything. Not overriding your needs in the name of connection. It’s the same kind of care— just practiced alone.

The Return

In the end, these don’t feel like separate categories to me.

Romance, friendship, gifts, community— they are all expressions of the same practice.

Attention. Memory. Repetition.

Devotion is not what announces itself. It’s what returns.

It’s an inside joke, it’s the note in the margin, and it’s the butter that lasts through a difficult season. It’s the person who notices, again and again, who you are and what you need.

I am less interested now in the spectacle of love. I am fascinated by the ordinary. Because the ordinary becomes meaningful not when it changes, but when we keep choosing it.

Again and again.

The Walk Before the Words

Before the sentences come the leash. Before the ideas, the walk.

My lab comes barreling out of his crate every morning, eighty-odd pounds of furred enthusiasm and sheer vitality. His morning runs like clockwork — he gobbles up his food, does his business in the yard, then finds me in my apartment. He’ll lie on my kitchen rug, a huge jungle scene full of animals. His spot is always over the bear — fitting, as Emeril is also all black fur and big golden eyes.

He waits while I fry eggs, toast a bagel, and drink my coffee. The quiet clicks of his tags clink softly when he shifts on the floor. The briny salt of the morning ocean air drifts through the window. And then, it’s finally time.

I head into the utility room with Emeril hot on my heels, and reach for his leash, stored in a little wooden basket. Emeril twirls and yips before finally settling as I snap on his choke chain and his leash. Then we’re off on our mile-and-a-half walk around this small beach town’s high school, a rare slice of America where kids still walk to school, and green rolling hills are dotted with black cows.

Which morning miracle should I tell you? Is it the fresh ocean air? The warmth of the sun just rising over the ocean and those green hills? The fox running through the basins, hunting bunnies, or Emeril’s frustrated bark because he cannot chase him?

Maybe it’s simply the familiar stomp of my sneakers on the pavement, and Emeril’s large paws keeping pace beside me.

Or maybe it’s that this happens nearly every morning, the same familiar route, a ritual that isn’t new or extraordinary — yet somehow feels as essential as breathing. I spend so many hours hunched over a computer or journal, writing draft after draft, spiraling away from making any sense and then back towards clarity again. I spend so much time in my head that sometimes it feels full and heavy enough to fall right off my shoulders.

So when I return to my body, feeling that pavement beneath my feet, wind brisk on my face, sweat gathering on my back — rhythm makes its daily return into my life. And who ensures that I keep up this ritual? Emeril, my eight-year-old black Labrador, whom I’ve had since he was six weeks old. Emeril demands the medicine I need as a writer: full presence in the physical world, a necessary respite from the often bleak and draining interiority of a writing life.

But I am hardly the first writer to discover this.

When John Steinbeck set out across the United States with his poodle in Travels with Charley, he understood that the dog traveling beside him was more than furry company. Charley was an amiable presence who turned strangers into friends and allowed Steinbeck to traverse the geography of the country and his mind at an amiable pace. Virginia Woolf walked the Sussex countryside with her dog Pinka as she untangled the threads of her thoughts. Mary Oliver wandered the dunes of Provincetown with Percy, learning from the patient rituals of walking, watching, and returning to the same landscapes day after day.

The Discipline Dogs Create

Dogs enforce a discipline that writers often resist.

Routine.

Emeril is the natural timekeeper of my day. He wakes when I wake. He expects breakfast. He expects the walk. If I linger too long on my phone scrolling or dawdling with chores, he will quietly appear beside me and stare balefully at me. It is not a demand, not exactly. It is simply the reminder I need: the day is moving forward whether I admit it or not.

Movement.

Emeril is a funny dog. When we walk or hike, he is absolutely locked into the path ahead. Other dogs on the trail or the sidewalk never interest him. People, even less. He is fully devoted to forward motion, nose low, paws steady, focused entirely on the path unfolding in front of him. At the dog beach, though, he becomes something else entirely. He charges into the ocean over and over, my enormous furry land seal, to retrieve his floating toy with endless enthusiasm. He gives the breed name ‘retriever’ it’s due. If I let him, he would stay in the water all day.

Care before productivity.

Emeril requires attention before I slip into the world of writing, deadlines and pressure. His meals, his walks, his baths — these are non-negotiables.

Attention to the physical world.

Emeril makes me aware of the outside world. He reminds me there is a world outside my computer screen and my mind. He’s there with me, in the garden, in the neighborhood, at the beach and matching my pace on the hiking trail. We live in this modern moment where we are constantly pressured to show up as optimized machines: producing, posting, performing. But dogs remind us of an older rhythm, something much more natural than what we’ve come to accept as normal.

Remember your life is not a referendum on productivity. You are not to be measured by metrics on your computer. Remember to go outside. Emeril does not care about my word counts or my publication dreams. He cares about his walk, his meals, and the present moment. This very moment.

Many writers I admire have lived within this same container of daily doggy devotion.

Steinbeck — Dogs as Companions to Curiosity

In 1960, Steinbeck packed a camper onto the back of his truck and set out across America with only one steady companion: Charley.

In Travels with Charley, the poodle is more than a mere traveling partner. Charley softens encounters with strangers across the country. People approach the dog first, delighted by his cheerful demeanor. Conversations open that might otherwise have remained closed. Steinbeck also pays careful attention to how people respond to Charley. Their treatment of the dog reveals something about their character.

“I had a poodle named Charley. He was born in France and understood only French. But he soon learned English. Charley traveled with me because I liked him and because a dog traveling with you makes it much easier to talk to people. People will talk to a dog.”

But perhaps the most intriguing role Charley plays is slowing Steinbeck down. The journey becomes less about documenting the country and more about inhabiting it; stopping when Charley needs to stop, wandering when curiosity arises, and lingering in places that might otherwise be passed by. Through Charley, Steinbeck moves through America not as a famous writer or journalist, but simply as a man traveling with his dog.

Woolf — Walking as Thinking

Virginia Woolf exists in my mind almost as an archetype. I used to imagine her as an otherworldly figure drifting along the countryside near Monk’s House, a notebook tucked under her arm. But over time she has become more fully human to me: a woman struggling with her creative life, with bouts of mental illness, and with the fragile balance between thinking and overwhelm. Walking helped restore that balance. Woolf spent countless hours walking the countryside, often accompanied by her dog Pinka. Her diaries reveal how walking regulated her thoughts and allowed ideas to form that might otherwise remain tangled in her mind.

“Walking alone in the country one gets a sense of expansion and relief; the mind opens and begins to work again.”

Walking was a way to interrupt rumination. To move the body so that the mind could move again. Pinka accompanied her on these daily rituals. She’d rush ahead down the path, double-back, barking at birds, and pulled Woolf gently out of the darker corners of her thoughts. Dogs do not merely accompany our thinking.

They interrupt it. And they return us to the present.

Mary Oliver — Dogs as Teachers of Attention

Few poets are as closely associated with the act of walking as Mary Oliver. I often imagine Oliver walking the dunes of Provincetown with her dog Percy, the wind sweeping across miles of pale sand. There are dunes near my own home that feel just as strange and majestic. Something about hills of sand forces the mind to slow down.

Oliver walked these landscapes again and again, composing poems while wandering through fields and shoreline. Percy appears in her essays not as a symbol but as a companion: muddy, joyful, and always slightly ahead on the trail.

Dogs are masters of attention. They stop frequently. They investigate. They follow scents, sounds, and the wind.

Oliver understood this instinctively.

“Attention,” she wrote in Upstream, “is the beginning of devotion.”

For Oliver, devotion meant returning again and again to the same landscapes — the same paths, the same shoreline — noticing what changed and what remained. Dogs live entirely within that world of devotion.

What Dogs Teach Writers

Across these writers, a pattern emerges…

Dogs teach us about rhythm. Writing cannot flourish in chaos forever. A life must eventually settle into patterns that allow creative work to emerge.

Dogs teach attention. They force us to notice the present moment: the weather, the smell of grass, the movement of clouds.

Dogs teach humility. They care nothing for reputation or publication. They do not measure success by accolades.

And perhaps most importantly, dogs teach care. Something living must be tended before the work begins. Writers often struggle with that. Dogs become the example of devotion that keeps us grounded and thriving.

Most evenings, I return to writing. I find a second wind late at night, stretched out on the daybed in my living room with music playing quietly or a cooking show murmuring in the background. Emeril will push through the dog door and trot into the room, tail wagging fiercely as he finds me. He jumps up onto this favorite piece of furniture, spins twice, and settles beside me. Soon the room fills with the soft rhythm of his breathing. Sometimes his paws twitch in sleep, as if he is running again through the waves at the dog beach. I may be alone, turning images and thoughts into sentences, but I am not isolated.

Emeril has structured my days. He interrupts my isolation. He anchors me to the physical world. He insists on rolling in dirt. On walks in rain or shine. On living a life balanced between the physical and the abstract.

People often ask what the creative life looks like. This is one version of it.

Before the page, the walk.
Before the work, the care.

And sometimes the truest writing discipline is simply the small act of showing up — leash in hand — again tomorrow, and the morning after that.

One of my favorite parts of teaching has always been working with writers—asking questions, exploring ideas together, and helping someone shape a piece of writing until their voice really comes through.

When I started Ditch Life Publishing, I always imagined it as more than just a place where literary magazines are published. I wanted it to be a space that connects with writers throughout their process— especially in ways that reflect my love for both teaching and storytelling.

That’s where this new service comes in.

We’re excited to share that Ditch Life Publishing is now offering editorial services for writers.

Every manuscript needs something different, so we’ve created three editorial service tiers that vary in depth and price. The goal is to make thoughtful, professional editing accessible and flexible for writers wherever they are in their process.

You can learn more about the services and pricing here:

• Ditch Life Publishing Editorial Services

Because conversation is often the best place to start, we’re also offering a free 30-minute consultation call when you fill out our Google Form. During that time, we can talk about your manuscript, your goals, and what kind of editorial support would be most helpful.

As a small thank-you to the communities that inspire so much of this work, educators and students will receive 20% off any editorial service.

Helping writers develop their work is one of the most meaningful parts of this industry for me, and I’m thrilled that Ditch Life can now support you in this way.

If you’ve been working on something, we’d love to hear about it.

The first time I went to therapy, I felt like a child on the first day of school, full of unknown trepidation. I wasn’t sure if I should lie down on the short couch, feet dangling off the edge, with my eyes on the ceiling or sit up like I was waiting for a physical. I took a seat. As I sat, I wondered if the thoughts coursing through my brain were reflected on my face. The look of bewilderment was partly because I was expecting a woman.

I was expecting a woman, based solely on the fact that the therapist’s name was Erin, but it turned out to be Aaron. Maybe it was a mental Freudian slip, as confessing my deep, dark shortcomings to another man felt uncomfortable. Perhaps my mind had switched the spelling when I called for the appointment.

It’s been ingrained in male DNA that we avoid showing vulnerability to other men. Especially men we just met, and certainly not face-to-face. Any openness we have with each other is almost always done sideways– shoulder to shoulder. So for me, sitting across from someone, facing them, and explaining I need help, felt more natural if that someone was a woman.

I shifted on the sofa. My plan was to have a session or two, figure the rest out on my own, and get out. So, I saw no reason to start over with someone new based on gender. I resisted the thought of leaving.

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As we began, Aaron went through a series of questions that could best be described as “get-to-know-yous.” There were questions like:

“How much alcohol are you drinking?”

“Any habitual drug use?”

“Are you thinking of harming yourself?”

“Are you thinking of harming others?”

After I passed those, we got to work. Kind of. It wasn’t a great start. We moved on to questions like, Why was I there? What was bothering me? What did I need help with?

I thought for a minute. I should spill it all. I could simply explain that I feel beaten down with work, but when I am not working, I feel guilty. Or that I’m five years into a midlife crisis and I’m running in place. Maybe that I feel like I have no purpose, and I’m finding it hard to keep my temper in check. The other day, I threw a plate. Instead, I settled with, “I’m having issues with anger?”

I was asking him more than stating, as if he had some telepathic insight into my mind, or maybe I was requesting his permission for that one to suffice. Why couldn’t I just explain it with complete sentences, details, and adverbs? Show, not tell.

As he dug in a little deeper, my mind went blank. We switched back to the get-to-know-yous. We spoke about my family, my wife, and my kids. My job.

“What about you?” He asked. “What do you like to do?”

I couldn’t think of anything.

“Do you have hobbies?”

“Hobbies? I’m 45. I don’t have hobbies.”

“There’s nothing you like to do?”

“Eh. There’s stuff I enjoy… but I’m not down in the garage building ships in a bottle… I don’t have a ‘hobby’”.

“What’s something you used to like to do?”

“I write. Well, when I was younger, I wrote a lot?” again, asking permission for my answer to suffice.

That answer sparked something. We spoke about my old band, writing lyrics, me going back to school after that band imploded, and majoring in English. Then, after graduating— and realizing I would not be a professional writer— I somehow ended up working in finance.

“Here’s what I want you to do,” Aaron added as we neared the end of our 55-minute session. “Write me something for next week. Whatever you want, but write something that tells me more about you.”

It felt like homework. But I agreed. I pictured my school-aged self, sitting at my parents’ kitchen table. The golden-brown woodgrain traversed lengthwise across the bare landscape. All the dinner dishes had been cleared. The fluorescent kitchen light above me lit up the table in an otherwise dark house. It was just me, hunched over a notebook staring at blank college-ruled paper, procrastinating the fact that it was late, and instead of sleeping, I was still putting off doing my schoolwork.

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That night, I began writing again. I could justify setting aside work or whatever I felt obligated to do, because I had homework. So I wrote. Over the next week, I wrote and re-wrote and edited, and an hour before my next session (and after carefully making sure no one in my office was using the giant communal printer), I printed out an essay.

Somehow, my frustration, my midlife crisis, the imposter syndrome, and my feeling of being stuck on the work-obsessed hamster wheel I had built for myself, fueling my own anger and vomiting it back onto my family, all started to make sense. It flowed out of me in a way I couldn’t explain in a sterile room to a stranger with a notebook sitting in front of a bunch of books.

That next session, I read it to him. We spoke about it. We dug deeper. We laughed some. Things opened up. He was cracking me. Maybe it was my ego because he said he liked my writing, or maybe because I was able to explain myself, and he understood. Probably both. But we had a minor initial breakthrough that second week.

I don’t remember getting any more official homework again, but I ran with it. I kept writing and bringing in essays, and our sessions became pseudo writer’s workshops for me. Except, instead of critiquing the writing, we were analyzing the writer. I could spill out thoughts, pen to paper (more accurately keyboard to screen). I started taking an actual lunch break to write. I found a hobby. I found my therapy.

Writing (especially my writing) would never replace the expertise and guidance of a trained, licensed therapist, but for me, it opened those doors of perception. It allowed me to explain myself at a time when I couldn’t through conversation, and often explained what I had not even realized. The process gave me permission to be honest, search, and spill everything. When I wrote, it all poured out of me.

Over the next few years, Aaron and I met, and I wrote. He saw me through the death of my father, my brother’s passing, and then my grandmother’s. He talked me through nearly losing my youngest daughter and the celebration when I didn’t. When I started therapy, I had no idea the difficulty the next few years would bring, but I was so grateful I had taken that step to help me through.

Through it all, I kept writing. I wrote obituaries and letters. I wrote essays to explain the pain and loss and anger that were crushing me through those years. Some pieces I brought to our sessions, and others I set aside like a journal without the “Dear Diary” connotation behind it.

At my very first therapist session, Aaron said, “My goal is to make you cry and to make you swear”. I thought it wouldn’t take much to get me there…. I’m so spent. But I’m not going to swear in front of this guy. The years to follow brought tears and F-bombs, beyond surface-level extraction. It was raw intensity coming out into that sterile room and onto my keyboard over the months and years after we met. I wrote them all down; it was the only way to get it all out of me. It was either I write it or stuff it all… and, like a time bomb, wait for the aftermath.

I am not an extroverted person by nature. And I don’t express my thoughts very well, (my poor wife). I tend to process it all internally and never reveal the results or the process. This made therapy difficult as I tried to spill my guts openly and honestly to be helpful for the session, and simultaneously swallow everything I was thinking about sharing.

But when I wrote out the thoughts pulsing through my head down into my fingers and out to the keys, it flowed out of me. Whether it’s verse, fictional characters, or personal narrative, it all originates in my own experiences or in versions of me. The process of writing it down opens up the ability to reconcile my shortcomings or seek help for them through the written word.

It’s not a hobby anymore. Maybe it never was. For me, writing has become more ritual, more habitual, and still therapeutic. Even though I am no longer going to weekly counseling sessions, I still write for that clarity. It’s entered back into me as part of who I am. The creative process of being alone in the quietness, the only sounds are the clack of the keyboard and my mind racing to center me. Instead of every thought, idea, and question aimlessly rattling around in my head looking for a parking spot, the writing releases them and quiets my mind. It’s no longer a regained hobby, but it is still therapy.

Productivity culture treats creative work like a machine problem to optimize. Ritual treats it like a relationship to tend. And somewhere along the way—between convenience, efficiency, and the endless pursuit of “doing more”—we lost something uniquely human. We traded connection for compliance. We replaced meaning with metrics.

The question is, how do we get that back?

The False Promise

You know the apps. They show up on your feed, glossy and promising, insisting that this one will finally change everything for you. You download them. Immediately, it feels like you need a graduate degree in computer science just to program your own life into their interface.

So you tweak, you color-code, and you drag little tasks into perfect little boxes. You spend so many hours setting the thing up that you don’t actually get any work done. You’re exhausted. Where’s the magic fix now?

You don’t have more work completed. Instead, your calendar is a beautiful Jackson Pollock painting of absolute bullshit. It looks productive. But it doesn’t even scratch the surface of your to-do list—though wow, it certainly looks impressive.

Maybe, for a couple of weeks, you feel in control. You feel virtuous. You feel like this time you’ve cracked it.

And then burnout creeps in quietly, like the onset of a bad cold. You ignore the symptoms. You push through. But suddenly, you’re exhausted, behind, and wondering when you entered this particular circle of hell—the one that requires constant producing, optimizing, and upscaling. But not creating.

Now, I’m not knocking ambition. Ambition is essential to a creative life. It’s perfectly natural to want systems that help us move forward. But the problem I’ve found over the last decade is that none of these routines — these apps, these magic solutions — actually produce relief. They fail because of how they treat a creative life.

If you treat a creative human like a machine, you’re doomed from the start.

So let’s back up. Let’s address the human element in the room. Reminder: the most important relationship you have in this life is the one you have with yourself. When we subscribe to optimization culture — when we base our moral value on output — we move against nature. We root ourselves in shame rather than in devotion. If, instead, you honor the cycles of ritual and learn the art of tending, you may be surprised by how much grows — slowly, steadily, across changing seasons.

Writers are very good at imagining ideal lives. We’re less apt at living inside them.

Change how you see yourself. Change how you treat yourself. Everything else follows.

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Why Routines Feel So Good, and Then Collapse

Routines feel incredible at first because they’re fueled by three things:

Novelty.
Control.
The fantasy of a better future self.

When I imagine my future self, she is discipline personified. She’s always focused. She’s full of energy. She’s unburdened by grief, illness, hormones, weather, or the general inconvenience of being alive. She’s superhuman. And she is definitely not real.

Here’s a hot take: do I really have to wait for this fantasy to arrive in order to succeed? What if I accepted who I am today — who I am right now?

After spending a year free-writing every morning or evening, creating without deadlines or external pressure, I’ve realized that productivity routines are destined to collapse. They are hard, sharp, metallic structures that do not belong in a human creative life. They assume infinite energy, as if I can simply plug myself in to recharge.

These unrealistic routines ignore stress, grief, sickness, and humanity itself. When did being a colorful, flawed human become something to be embarrassed about? They sell rigidity, but promise consistency. Rigidity is essential for machinery. For medicine. For systems that must not fail. It does not translate to a creative, human life.

So the real question becomes this: how do you bring consistency into a big, beautiful, messy creative life?

Routine is compliance, rooted in shame.
Ritual is consent, rooted in self-trust.

Enter Ritual: Slow Magic, Not Optimization

Let’s demystify ritual. Ritual is not aesthetic cosplay. It’s not spiritual perfection. You are never “doing it wrong.”

I’m going to repeat that, because I heard it for years before it finally landed: you are never doing it wrong.

I know this because for years I put off my creative dreams by telling myself I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the right environment, the right amount of money, the right mindset, the right kind of brain. I compared myself relentlessly to perfectly curated lives online, from productivity zealots who seemed to have everything figured out. I made excuses, because the harder truth was this: I was afraid to look inward.

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That’s the tender core of a life built around ritual. Ritual forces you to be with yourself. It asks uncomfortable questions:

What do you actually like?
No—really. What do you like when no one is watching?
Not your friends. Not your family. Not your teachers. Not Instagram.
What do you reach for when you’re tired, not when you’re performing?
What does your body ask for before your mind starts negotiating?
What would you choose if you trusted yourself?

It’s humbling, and sometimes painful, to realize how many of our preferences are inherited, expected, or performed. But when you begin choosing yourself in small ways — your taste, your pace, your needs — you begin repairing self-trust and self-esteem.

One important caveat in the productivity conversation is materialism. Ritual is not about buying more things. This is not a detour into consumption, though that propaganda is oh-so seductive. If I just buy this course, this workbook, this program…

What ritual actually is:

A repeated act imbued with meaning.
A promise made gently, over and over, to yourself.
A signal to your nervous system that it’s safe to slow down.
A threshold between ordinary time and creative time.

Ritual never asks, How much can I extract from today?
It asks, What is possible today — and how do I show up honestly, humanly, without shame?

This is slow magic. Natural. Tending, not forcing.

Why Sustainability Matters, Especially Now

We’ve gotten burnout wrong. Chronic burnout is not a personal failure, and believing that it is may be one of the great evils of our time. For older millennials and Gen Z, especially, life has become so complex and overloaded that hobbies, crafts, and connection feel like wasteful luxuries instead of necessities.

This unconscious erosion shows up everywhere:

When our health fails.
When our relationships stay superficial and unsatisfying.
When we struggle to sustain delight or joy.

I’ve written before about how the world is engineered to fracture your focus. You are not broken for feeling distracted. When you stop blaming yourself, you can begin making choices from a place of acceptance rather than shame. And then there is grief — something Western culture is spectacularly bad at holding. In other times, grief was communal, ritualized, shared. Now we’re expected to carry it alone and quietly return to productivity.

If you’re a writer, understanding grief isn’t optional. Writing can become a vessel — letters to the living, memories of the dead, long handwritten pages that release what the body is holding. Layered over all of this is collective grief: political instability, economic uncertainty, the constant sense of groundlessness. Productivity culture demands more when people have less. That is cruelty in its most subversive form.

But ritual responds differently. It asks:

What if you prioritized your creative life differently?
What if you chose rhythm over constant output, allowing your work to unfold at a pace you can actually sustain?
What if you trusted repetition instead of frantic escalation, returning again and again without raising the stakes?
What if you valued presence over performance, showing up as you are rather than who you think you should be?

Ignoring burnout and grief doesn’t create discipline. It creates exhaustion. It makes us blurry, disconnected, and unable to determine what actually matters.

Why Ritual Feels “Cringe”

Let’s name the resistance. Ritual feels cringe because it requires sincerity—and sincerity doesn’t carry cultural cachet. Irony, sarcasm, and apathy feel cooler, but they’re false gods. Apathy is just shame pretending to be cool. If you let it seduce you, it will quietly kill your creative dreams. I’ve written before about how “cringe culture” trains us to flinch away from sincerity instead of trusting it—and this is one of the places that damage shows up most clearly.

Ritual isn’t ironic. It can’t be optimized. It asks you to care without guarantees. That’s terrifying.

All creative work carries the same truth: you have no certainty that this will work. You show up anyway. That’s courage.

We’re taught to distrust what can’t be quantified. But the greatest things in life — love, clarity, meaning — cannot be scheduled or guaranteed. Ritual also asks us to slow down. And slowing down exposes feelings. Many of us were taught that feeling deeply is weakness. It isn’t. Feeling. Listening. Regulating. Returning to center. This is what a human creative life actually requires.

Rituals to Try

Writers love to overcomplicate things. Remember, ritual doesn’t need to be elaborate or impressive.

It might look like:

Lighting a candle before writing, then gently blowing it out when you stop. (I use beeswax candles from a local maker — the trapped water snaps and pops as I write. It makes me feel part of centuries of writers working by waning light.)
Taking a ten-minute walk before you begin.
Washing your hands with a soap and lotion you love.
Playing a song or album you only play when you write.
Free-writing in a notebook before opening your laptop.
Taking five to ten slow, deep breaths with your feet on the floor.

The most liberating ritual for me has been free-writing in a notebook before any formal writing. I used to treat my notebooks as too precious to use. That denial revealed something deeper: why didn’t I believe my ideas were worth celebrating on the page? Once I released that belief, my writing practice changed dramatically.

Ritual works best when it’s unimpressive. Unglamorous. Normal. Too small to brag about.

That’s how you know it’s real.

Reclaim Ritual

Consistency isn’t about never missing a day. It’s about returning without punishment or shame. Ritual teaches the art of returning, and makes it beautiful and uniquely personal. Remember, you don’t need a better system. You just need a way back, again and again.

I’m staring down a half-written paragraph. My phone is face-down on my desk, buzzing anyway. Somewhere in the background of my MacBook, the browser tab count has quietly crept into the double digits.

And beneath all of that, a familiar shame spiral begins:

If I were a real writer, this wouldn’t be so hard.
If I were more capable, I could make this work.
If I were smarter, more disciplined, less distractible, I’d already be done.

Sound familiar? This is where we moralize attention, blaming ourselves when focus doesn’t snap to attention, instead of acknowledging how hostile the environment has become. We assume something inherently within us is broken.

But what if it isn’t? What if attention isn’t broken, just spooked?

Struggling to focus is not a personal failure, and it’s not evidence that you lack discipline, intelligence, or devotion to your craft. It’s a rational response to an environment that is actively hostile to sustained attention. We live in the most distracting era humans have ever known, and yet we’re rarely taught to name the real, awful toll that constant interruption takes on our brains.

Attention behaves less like a switch and more like a frightened, skittish animal. It startles easily. It disappears when the room gets loud. And it does not respond well to being yelled at.

Research has shown that average attention spans haven’t shrunk because our brains are “worse,” but because task-switching has exploded. We’re praised for juggling emails, notifications, meetings, messages, and deadlines, often all at once, with very little reprieve. Pursue any job description and note the celebration of candidates who thrive in “fast-paced environments,” as if speed and fragmentation were neutral virtues. We’re constantly told to operate like machines— a long shadow cast by the industrial age— even though the creative crafts many of us care about the most ask us to be deeply and stubbornly human.

Frequent interruptions increase stress hormones and reduce our capacity for deep work. Over time, our bodies and brains adapt. They learn to scan. To brace. To stay alert for the next sudden noise. The result isn’t a lack of focus: it’s a nervous system doing its best to survive an impossible habitat.

We are desperately trying to write long thoughts in a world engineered for short ones.

The Attention Economy Is Not Neutral

One of the most damaging myths about attention is that it exists in a vacuum, as if our ability to focus were somehow separate from the systems we move through every day.

It isn’t.

Algorithms reward novelty, outrage, and speed. Platforms profit from interruption, not completion. The scroll is designed to keep you moving, reacting, refreshing, but not lingering. Not finishing. Not staying with a single thought long enough to see where it might actually lead. This is not a neutral environment for attention. It’s loud, sudden, and full of movement – exactly the kind of place where that frightened creature called focus stays on edge.

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Skills like responsiveness, multitasking, and availability are often rewarded in the workplace, but they do not translate cleanly to creative work. Writing asks for depth, slowness, and continuity. It asks us to stay. To return. To follow an idea past its most obvious version and into stranger territory. To resist abandoning a sentence the moment it becomes uncomfortable or unclear.

So when writing feels hard, and when you feel restless, resistant, or inexplicably exhausted by the act of sitting down, please remember that it isn’t laziness. It’s friction. It’s asking a brain trained for constant alertness to settle. You can’t flip that switch instantly. Instead, you lower the volume and dim the lights. You make the space safer to enter.

Why Focus Feels So Much Harder Than It Used To

Every interruption carries a cost. Cognitive scientists call this a “restart cost”: the time and energy it takes for the brain to return to depth after being pulled away. Contrary to what productivity culture would like us to believe, the brain doesn’t snap back instantly.

You can’t shame your way past this any more than you can force a startled animal to come out from hiding.

There’s also attention residue. A message, a notification, and then another glance at yet another task, all leave fragments behind. Those fragments clutter our thinking. They make it harder to fully inhabit the work in front of us. It’s not that attention won’t return; it’s that it needs time to trust the room again.

Once I understood this, I stopped trying to bully myself into marathon writing sessions. Now, I work in short, focused bursts: ten to fifteen minutes of writing, followed by a break to stand up, read a reference, or let my brain breathe. I only expect three to three-and-a-half hours of true focus a day. After that, I stop. I do other tasks. I rest.

If we’re going to optimize for anything in 2026, it should be sustainability, not burnout.

Your brain is doing exactly what it evolved to do: scan, respond, protect. The invitation isn’t to override that instinct, but to work with it. To build routines that signal safety instead of urgency.

Struggling to focus doesn’t mean you lack discipline: it means your brain is doing its best in a system that never lets it settle.

Attention as a Practice

Another lie many of us believe is that attention is something you either have or you don’t. Our media and society make convincing arguments that other people possess some secret, unshakeable capacity for focus that we missed out on.

This is simply not true.

Attention is trainable, degradable, and rebuildable. It shifts across seasons of life. There are periods when we can strengthen it, and periods when survival, caregiving, grief, or exhaustion take precedence. None of this disqualifies you from returning later.

Rebuilding it is slow. That’s not a flaw: it’s the method. Our expectations need to be normal, not heroic. We all know “slow and steady wins the race.” The harder work is trusting that slowness is not failure.

Five Practices to Rebuild Attention

1. Chunk It Down

When you look at a finished novel or a luminous painting, you see the magnificent end result, but not the thousands of small, quiet, and unglamorous moments that made it possible. Those messy, scribbled margins. The repeated false starts. The scenes that felt right and then went nowhere and had to be cut. Comparison, that awful evil, inflates the stakes until starting anything feels impossible.

So approach the task gently. Shrink the unit of success.

Instead of “write for an hour,” try: open the document and write the first sentence of a scene. Or sketch out the emotional arc of a chapter in bullet points. Or write a page of dialogue you’re not sure you’ll keep, but in this moment, it feels right. Sometimes the work is as small as naming the problem you’re stuck on, or leaving yourself a note for tomorrow that says start here.

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Try ten minutes.
Try to write one paragraph.
Try to write one imperfect page.

This is how books actually get written: not in heroic bursts of inspiration, but in small, repeatable gestures that invite momentum to build. You don’t approach a skittish animal by running toward it. You sit nearby. You make yourself predictable. You let it decide when to come closer. Momentum matters more than mastery. Some days you’ll give 80%. Some days you’ll give 20%. Those 20% days still count. Mastering consistency isn’t constant output: it’s the practice of returning, again and again, until the work learns it can trust you.

2. Use Friction as Fuel

Willpower is overrated. Environment design is what actually works.

Look honestly at your creative space. Is it calm, or is it full of distractions and noise? Libraries, classrooms, and offices help us keep our focus for a reason: fewer choices, fewer interruptions, and clearer boundaries.

For me, that means my phone is in another room. A one-tab rule. Writing time is separate from reading time. Generative writing (no judgment, just get those words on the page) is separate from editing. I also start each day with free-writing by hand, not with any expectation of producing anything good, but to clear my mental load so that attention has somewhere safe to land.

Distraction doesn’t need to be completely eradicated. It just needs to be inconvenient.

This isn’t control. It’s actually care and respect. You’re not trapping attention: you’re making the creative space quiet enough that it feels safe to stay.

3. Write at the Time You Don’t Feel Ready

There is no perfect mood for writing. Waiting for one is the fastest way to never begin.

Some of my best work has come from boredom, irritation, and uncertainty. Just a few of the very states we’re taught to avoid. Instead of fighting them, use them. Write badly. Write sideways. Write things you’ll never show anyone.

Showing up without forcing teaches your nervous system that writing is safe, not just on good days, but on hard ones too.

4. Add a Little Delight

Our brains run on dopamine, and dopamine responds to anticipation and reward, not punishment. Writing doesn’t need to be tedious to be serious. So let’s forgo punishing beliefs for a little more pleasure and delight in our practice.

For me, pleasure looks like coffee in the morning, a big pot of chicory coffee from New Orleans. It’s taking a break to brew some excellent tea in the afternoon, and then turn up Vivaldi to anchor my focus. Sometimes I need a change of place. My favorite busy, small-town coffee shop, where the espresso machine roars and the many conversations overlap to create enough background noise to anchor my brain into focusing. These things work for me, and I’m sure you have your own little moments of joy you can weave into your practice.

Our culture loves to glorify suffering, especially in creative work. I reject that, and you should, too. Delight isn’t indulgence. It’s fuel.

5. Practice Returning Without Drama

Minds wander. That’s not an error: it’s a feature.

What we’re shooting for isn’t perfect focus. There’s no such thing, so don’t set that expectation. It’s noticing when attention wanders and learning to return without punishment. Sometimes that means movement. I take breaks to do small, intense workouts, or I take my Labrador on a walk. Sometimes it means listening to what the distraction is pointing toward. Remember tip No. 3? Perhaps your mind is wandering towards an uncomfortable emotion that wants to be fuel. Let this happen.

A useful mantra I use: It’s okay to wander, because I know how to come back.

When you learn to accept that any kind of output, even the worst, shittiest draft you’ve ever seen, is progress. Because as soon as you sit down again to write, you’re teaching yourself to trust yourself to return.

To Conclude

In a culture that thrives on interruption, sustained attention is a radical choice. The craft of writing refuses the addiction of endless scrolling and constant availability. It insists on continuity, on letting a thought stretch out, contradict itself, and arrive somewhere unexpected. You can let writing become a quiet refuge, a place where attention can lower its guard and stay awhile. To write now, in 2026, is to claim that your inner life deserves more than a sliver of attention between notifications. It deserves depth. It deserves time. It deserves sanctuary from the algorithm.

You are not broken. Your attention is not deficient: it’s just really tired.

So start where you can. With a paragraph. With just ten minutes. With the courageous decision to return rather than disappear. Writing doesn’t ask for flawless focus. It asks for patience. Attention isn’t something you conquer. It’s something you tend, the same way you practice kindness, care, and trust in your own voice.

And in a world built for interruption, that tending is already enough.

A Bad First Impression

Many people think they don’t like poetry, and for good reason. The way poetry is commonly taught is absurd and, at its worst, torturous. In the classroom, many of us were told to decode complicated poems, to interrogate them to “find the meaning,” as if poetry were a locked box with a bomb ticking inside. There’s only one way to diffuse it, and you’d better do it quickly! Ask anyone how they felt trying to decode a particular tricky poem without the necessary historical context or rhetorical tools, and you can almost taste their shame as they relay the awful memory.

What I mean is, I get it. Who wants to go rooting around an absurd, shame-inducing art form? But bear with me. Let me take you through the many failing ways poetry is taught, and the antidote.

Because the truth is, poetry never started in stuffy classrooms or ridiculous exam questions. It began around firelight— back when the earliest of humans celebrated rhythm. Rhythm in song, dance, and the spoken word reflected the rhythm of the natural world around them. Rhythm gave us stories, and with it made memory possible. And here we are, for better or for worse, but human all the same, with this shared language, this poetry, which makes life bearable. Allow me to counter your fear and shame with five of my most favorite poems. Think of them as an amuse bouche, a tapas table, or a curated selection to give you a place to start in the wonderful (yes, wonderful) world of poetry. I will then counter the many miserable ways you were introduced to poetry, and I hope to show you that poetry is one of the most intrinsically human things we create.

Poetry is a human technology that still matters because it helps us notice, name, connect, resist, and survive.

A Few Poems to Start With and Why

All of these poems do what poetry has always done: make us stop. Make us notice. Make us feel. Poetry shows up when regular language fails— when we fall in love, when we lose someone, when we succeed, when we crumble, when the world is at war, when we finally find peace.

• William Butler Yeats - the second coming

William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” resurges every time the world feels unstable. Written in 1919, in the aftermath of war and pandemic, it doesn’t soothe. It recognizes the sensation of watching the center of civilization fail. It radiates with that tumultuous combination of emotions, of grief, of rage, and hopelessness in each stanza. Each generation that reads this poem is struck by the horrifying conclusion: this must be about us, and this is precisely why it endures. When I encountered this poem in school, I stuck to relating it to the First World War. Now, in post-COVID times, this poem resonates in a much closer way, and I was grateful for its lines during the heavy uncertainty of 2020.

• Dylan Thomas - Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” written a few decades later, turns formal repetition into a vessel for grief. The poem is not an abstract rallying cry against death; it is a son pleading with his father to hold on. The urgency is intimate and universal at once: most of us know the ache of wanting someone we love to stay just a little longer. And most of us are stunned and unmoored by the unique rage that wells in a poignant grief, such as losing a close loved one. This poem gives us much-needed catharsis.

• Billy Collins - Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry” brings a more contemporary challenge into focus. Gently rebelling against the way poetry is taught, Collins invites readers to experience a poem rather than interrogate it. He exposes the open curiosity we lose somewhere between childhood and standardized tests, offering a vision of poetry grounded in exploration rather than analysis. His shrewd, dry humor is my favorite aspect of his poetry because it makes his poetry all the more accessible.

• Kwame Alexander - community poem

Kwame Alexander’s community poems expand poetry’s purpose into connection. He weaves multiple voices into a shared narrative, showing how poetry can gather people, honor differences, and create belonging in a fragmented world. His work brings poetry back to its earliest function: a communal act that strengthens the group. Poetry just for some far removed person writing in their attic (although we do love you, Miss Dickinson). It can be a vital source of connection in a world perilously tipping into crushing isolation.

• Olivia Gatwood - if there were a god

And Olivia Gatwood’s “If There Were a God” brings that communal lineage into the present. What appears at first to be a simple list of gratitudes reveals itself as a meditation on doubt, wonder, and the sacred hidden in ordinary life. Her imagined God is imperfect, skeptical, confused — much like us — yet the poem insists that small human moments contain their kind of holiness. Gatwood articulates what many of us feel but rarely name: meaning is made in the mundane, in coincidences, in kindness, and in the soft texture of daily experience. When I look at the kind of poet I want to be, I return to Gatwood’s work, or refer to it for those curious and timid about reading poetry. Her work is consistently visceral, modern, and familiar, and a great start to contemporary poetry.

Whenever you think no one could possibly understand what you feel, there is always a poem that proves otherwise.

Now I shall counter all the reasons I’ve heard you shouldn’t read poetry, and why it’s actually essential that you do.

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I. Poetry is Too Subjective

Critics argue that poetry is “too subjective,” but that’s the strength.
Subjectivity is what helps develop nuance, empathy, tolerance for ambiguity—the exact skills that strengthen relationships, leadership, and community.

In a culture obsessed with convenience, efficiency, and speed, it’s easy to live on autopilot. We skim, scroll, and perform. We react rather than reflect. Many people claim they “don’t have time for poetry,” but poetry is the shortest reading form we have. A single poem can shift your emotional state faster than any article, podcast, or video.

Poetry forces presence. It slows us down long enough to notice the micro-moments that make up a life: the change in light, the weight of silence, the tremor of memory, the emotional undercurrents we ignore to stay productive. Poems pull us back into our bodies and back into our senses. They give us a space to encounter ourselves instead of the persona we perform.

Poetry teaches us how to notice again— how to live rather than merely exist.

II. Poetry is Taboo

Poems say the things we avoid. They surface the grief, longing, shame, desire, hope, confusion, memory, and insecurity we try to bury. Poetry is blunt where we are polite; honest where we are strategic; raw where we are curated.

Whether it’s Gatwood naming the tension between doubt and belief, Thomas capturing the brutality of watching a parent die, or Yeats distilling collective dread into metaphor, poetry gives shape to the many feelings we don’t know how to name.

In America, where I was born and live currently, the insidious Puritanical restraint still bends emotional expression to its iron will, and to our detriment. Poetry is a counterforce. In poetry, we access the sensual, the layered, the emotive, the uncertain, and the hidden. It reveals our humanity instead of our performance.

Poetry is both a mirror and a compass: the mirror shows us what we’ve been avoiding, and the compass guides us toward something truer. That clarity is not just artistic: it’s profoundly practical. Emotional literacy improves communication, decision-making, conflict resolution, intimacy, and self-awareness. I could drown you in theory and science backing these claims, but instead, I’ll just say this. If poetry feels “too emotional,” that’s because the experience of being a human is emotional. Poetry just forces us to admit it.

III. Poetry Resists Capitalism

One of the biggest critiques of poetry is that it’s “impractical” or “not useful.”
Translation: poetry doesn’t produce profit.

Exactly.

Not everything should be monetized, optimized, or efficient. Poetry stands in direct resistance to productivity culture. It doesn’t ask you to hurry. It doesn’t measure your worth. It doesn’t improve your output. It demands nothing except presence. And that can be an annoying or downright terrifying ask, in a world dominated by capitalism. Just think about telling your boss, your parents, or your friends that you pulled out a notebook and spent the afternoon writing poems. Count how many admonish you not for trying, but for wasting precious time and labor.

If capitalism asks, “What does this produce?” poetry answers, meaning. And meaning is non-negotiable for a healthy human life.

Poetry changes our attention patterns. It re-trains us to feel comfortable with pauses. It releases urgency and numbing. It lessens the need to scroll endlessly or consume mindlessly. Even structured forms— haiku, sonnets, villanelles— demonstrate how constraint can produce freedom. Poetry teaches us to push against expectation, to experiment, to create space where the world demands speed.

IV. Poetry is Elitist and Removed

Despite being stereotyped as solitary, poetry has always been communal. It started around fires, continued through oral storytelling, and now thrives in bookstores, open mics, living rooms, classrooms, and digital spaces.

When people gather to hear poems aloud, something ancient activates. There’s a shared breath, a collective hush, a moment where strangers recognize themselves in someone else’s words. I make this bold claim even as I write here from Substack: no digital platform can replicate this atmosphere. Poetry readings remind us that vulnerability builds connection, and connection builds resilience.

In a world where the future often feels opaque and unpredictable, gathering for poetry becomes a radical act of togetherness. It provides shared language for our most complicated feelings, and helps people feel less isolated and more understood.

Poetry is not elitist by nature— only by pedagogy. Human history proves poetry belongs to everyone.

V. No one reads poetry anymore

The claim that “no one reads poetry anymore” collapses instantly when you look at the stats.

• Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem reached millions.

• Mary Oliver remains a cultural lighthouse.

• Rupi Kaur brought poetry into the mainstream for a new generation.

People are hungry for language that feels alive, concise, emotional, and profound. Poetry thrives because it suits the modern world better than almost any other form: short, potent, shareable, resonant. Far from outdated, poetry has simply adapted forms — exactly as it always has.

Poetry Survives Because We Do

If your early encounters with poetry felt humiliating or absurd, I don’t blame you for walking away. What you’ve read here— these poems, these lenses, these counterarguments— aren’t about proving you’re smart enough to “get” poetry. I hope I’ve proved you’re human enough, because that’s all poetry ever asked of you.

For as long as we’ve been people, we’ve stitched meaning out of light, sound, and story. Out of rhythm— the oldest technology we have. The steady beat of footsteps, the rise and fall of breath, the patterned pulse of speech. We’ve passed down wisdom, grief, humor, desire, rage, hope— all through language shaped to fit the human mouth and the human heart.

Poetry isn’t a trap. Poetry is survival.

And in a world loud enough to drown out everything that matters, poetry remains the one form brave enough to whisper the truth: you don’t turn to poetry because you understand it, you turn to poetry because it understands you.

Rebecca Baker is a writer and digital strategist from Arroyo Grande, CA. As the founder of Chicken Riddle Media, she helps small businesses and nonprofits shine online. With a background in marketing and publishing, she’s all about crafting engaging stories, web content, and promo materials. She also runs *Decked Tarot*, a Substack where she dives into tarot insights and guidance, blending creativity and intuition in every project she takes on.

I’ve always been drawn to spaces created with care— places that exist because someone noticed a gap and decided to fill it with honesty. City Girls Read XO began in that same spirit: a rediscovered love for reading, a desire to talk about it with others, and the courage to ask, Does anyone else want this too? That kind of beginning feels deeply aligned with what we always hope to create here at Ditch Life.

What stands out most to me is how intentional this community is about being human. It isn’t performative or exclusive; it’s a place to land. A third space built for women navigating shifting seasons of life, when making and maintaining friendships can quietly become harder, and when connection often has to be created on purpose.

At Ditch Life, our mission has always been to make room for early ideas, emerging voices, and people who want to belong before everything is figured out. City Girls Read XO carries that same energy in community form: an invitation to show up solo, trust your interests, and let connection unfold naturally. I’m excited to share their story with you, in their own words, because this is exactly the kind of work we believe in and want to support.

A note from co-founders Maia & Kiana

City Girls Read XO started about a year ago, right when I fell back into reading. I remember thinking, okay, wow, I’m rediscovering my love for reading, like full-on, Wattpad-era vibes, now I need a community to actually dish out my thoughts with.

So I posted on TikTok to see if anyone else felt the same… and long story short, City Girls Read basically took on a life of its own.

@citygirlsreadxoWhat do you mean we’ve already been having monthly book club meetings for a year?🥹🫂💘 If anyone wants to sponsor us and help make our one-year anniversary extra special, slide into our DMs on Instagram, let’s celebrate together! @nypl Also, not to brag but we’ve also been using @Partiful for a whole year too 💌 #nyc #sponsorme #booktok

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We’ve grown into a true third space that curates female friendships, especially for women in their 20s and 30s. Especially since I know how hard it gets to make friends when you’re not in school anymore or when life priorities start to shift; friendships can accidentally slip to the bottom of the list. So this space is intentionally made for meeting new people, having fun conversations, exploring different spots in the city, and hopefully leaving with a new friend or two. That’s why our slogan is “come solo,” because you really never know who you might leave with.

Get Connected

If their energy radiates straight through the screen to you as it did for me, you can learn more about City Girls Read XO on Instagram or TikTok. Follow them to stay up to date on their next Book Club meeting in the New Year, and maybe I’ll see you there!

6:45 am Turn off your alarm.

You’ve already refreshed your Substack three times. 12 views, one like, zero comments on yesterday’s piece. You really thought you’d uncovered something. The internet disagreed.

Also, you lost a subscriber. Down to 22.

You wonder if it was something you said. (It was definitely something you said.)

Shove your phone under your pillow. Pretend numbers don’t matter. (They matter.)

7:00 am Take a shower.

Try to wash your troubles down the drain.

7:30 am Make breakfast and coffee.

Try to sing the opening line to 9-5

“Tumble out of bed and stumble in the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition..”

If anything can motivate you, it’s Dolly.

8:00 am Your grandma calls.

Are you still doing that writing thing? Your cousin just made partner at her firm.

8:30 am Make a second cup of coffee. A strong one.

8:45 am Open laptop.

Open current Word doc.

Stare at cursor.

Drink coffee.

This is called your “writing process.”

9:30 am Check your email.

Open a form rejection email from the magazine you submitted a piece to three weeks ago. They thank you for submitting, but say it doesn’t really fit with what their readers want to read.

You scoff. Add it to your mental file labeled ‘Evidence I Should Quit.’

Move on.

10:00 am Back to your draft.

You re-read what you wrote yesterday. It’s terrible. Possibly the worst thing you have ever written. Possibly the worst thing ever written. You delete 10 words and change one very to incredibly.

Much better. (It’s not better.)

10:15 am Take a look at the LinkedIn job board

Maybe you should give this whole writing thing a pause and go back to something with health insurance and PTO. There is a posting for an office manager role that you know you could do. It already has 1,000 applicants.

Is it even worth it? (It’s not, but you submit anyway.)

Use AI to expedite your resume and cover letter customization.

Submit something to feel accomplished.

Deep down, you know all you did was feed the AI beast and throw another version of your resume into the void. But hey, at least you did something.

11:15 am. You keep scrolling LinkedIn.

A former classmate announced her second book deal.

You’re genuinely happy for her. You also want to throw your laptop out the window.

Below that, an article about how AI is replacing writers, nobody reads anymore, attention spans are destroyed, we’re all doomed.

I’ll think about that tomorrow.

11:55 am Text your therapist to see if you can get a discounted session.

12:00 pm Take a lunch break. You deserve it.

1:00 pm Back to the piece you’re working on.

You actually get into a good flow. A solid 37 minutes of consistent writing. And then the doorbell rings. It’s a package you don’t remember ordering.
Flow ruined.

1:37 pm You just wanna check Substack.

Your piece from last night: still 12 views.

Your aunt’s incoherent Facebook memes get more engagement.

You click on a post titled “How I grew my Substack to 10,000 Subscribers in 3 Months.”

Turns out the secret is to be an influencer and to have a newsletter all about how to make money.

Not exactly the literary inspo you were hoping for.

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2:15 pm Doom scroll.

Another school shooting. You’re writing an essay about anti-aging. The cognitive dissonance is crushing.

2:30 pm Take a crochet break until your cortisol comes down.

3:15 pm Back to your piece. You need to make progress.

You wrote 200 words during your flow. You delete 130 of them.

Get into another little flow. You write 100 more words.

This might actually be good?
Send to a writer friend for validation.

4:00 pm Research.

This is procrastination, but you’re calling it research.

5:00 pm Your phone buzzes.

Another SCOTUS decision eroding your rights and passing them over to the oligarchy.

5:05 pm Look at your bank account.

Calculate how many more months you can do this.

Spoiler: not many.

5:10 pm Look up the value of gold.

Maybe you should put all your money in gold.

5:15 pm Eat a Snickers. You’re not you when you’re hungry.

5:20 pm Go on a hot girl walk. Listen to your favorite podcast.

Sure, you could have achieved more today, but your well-being comes first!

5:35 pm Your deeply ingrained Puritanical worldview with a strong emphasis on productivity can no longer be drowned out by your podcast.

Turn around and head back home.

6:00 pm You want to check one more item off your to-do list for the day.

You reach out to an old coworker to set up a chat next week to “hear what they have been up to.”

You really just hope their company is hiring.

6:25 pm Back to doom-scrolling.

Another friend is extolling the benefits of microdosing.

You think it’s probably the crumbling of society that makes you so anxious, but what if it is just your brain chemistry?

You add “research microdosing” to that never-ending to-do list.

It won’t get to-done.

7:00 pm Cook dinner.

The one time of day you feel a bit of control as you cook a semi-elaborate recipe you found on Instagram. 6.8/10.

8:00 pm One last Substack check-in while you eat.

Another writer announces their course: ‘Make $10K/month writing!’ It costs $2K to enroll.

The irony is not lost on you.

Still 12 views.

8:30 pm Put on Friends.

It’s not funny, but life seemed so much simpler in the 90s.

And rent was definitely cheaper.

Dissociate.

10:05 pm Brush your teeth.

Read someone else’s brilliant essay. Feel inspired and jealous in equal measure.

10:15 pm Mentally compose flawless sentences while falling asleep.

They’ll be forgotten by morning.

10:30 pm Fall asleep.

You’ll need your rest before the 3 am panic attack about whether anyone will ever read anything you write.

We love a good “overnight success” story. I’m not immune to it either: I enjoy the reality TV shows where an ordinary person walks onto a brightly lit stage, sings a single brilliant note, completes a few rounds of competition, proves they have something special, and is immediately crowned a star. I love the author whose debut seems to explode from out of nowhere, the influencer who has a perfectly curated life, or the actor who suddenly appears in every major headline all at once.

But when I take a step back, I realize how rarely I consider all those invisible hours that came first. The trying. The failing. The editing. The stumbling. The very private belief these people had to hold for themselves long before anyone else could see it. What we don’t see in those glossy narratives are the messy rough drafts, the harsh rejections, the breakdowns, the debt, the crippling doubt, the nights crying in the shower, the partners who supported them, or the friends who didn’t. We never see the years of quiet work that built the foundation for that supposedly “instant” rise.

We don’t see people at their lowest moments. We didn’t see them when they had to build themselves up again and again, when every door had shut, when they had to face rejection head-on and decide to keep going anyway. So I’m here to make the case for keeping overnight success a myth, and bringing forward the real winners: consistency, devotion, and the ordinary, lifelong actions taken toward your dreams — especially in the quiet hours when the work is yours and yours alone.

Those Seductive, Quick Wins

In the age of TikTok virality, 90-day transformations, and meteoric debuts, we’ve conditioned ourselves to expect results on a compressed timeline. As a former marketing professional, I know exactly how much work goes into even a 10-second viral clip. There are hours — sometimes days — spent editing, adjusting, designing, rewriting, deleting, color-correcting, tweaking audio, reorganizing, and starting over. You might spend all day on something that performs just okay.

Even that “young breakout author” likely spent years drafting, redrafting, surviving critique groups that nearly broke them, querying agents, collecting rejections, signing with someone, editing again, going on submission, waiting months for a deal, then waiting months (or years) for publication. Their “sudden ascent” was a marathon dressed up as a sprint.

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And don’t get me wrong, I adore well-crafted documentaries and Hallmark movies, where life gets compressed into three tidy acts with a clear thesis or a guaranteed happy ending. You start the film and know the arc — conflict, lesson, then satisfying resolution. But real life doesn’t follow that formula. Our lives are more spiral than straight line, circling through luck, brilliant joys, difficult lessons, heartbreak, reinvention, and the one true throughline: ongoing resilience.

Real life is less “three acts” and more “seasons,” looping and returning with new meaning each time.

Sustainability Over Speed

At this point in my creative journey, I’ve matured into someone who is far more interested in sustainability than speed. Speed is intoxicating — a flash of validation, a brief sense of being ahead. But sustainability is nourishing. Sustainability is what tethers you to yourself.

Real progress comes from showing up repeatedly: by practicing, experimenting, and allowing myself to be “bad” at something before I ever improve. It comes from reviewing failures without turning them into wounds. It comes from acknowledging the healthy pivots: the moments I chose rest over burnout, the misaligned projects I let go of, and the risks I took even when I felt ridiculous.

Most of the work happens in extremely unglamorous moments: me at my desk, in sweatpants, surrounded by half-filled notebooks, writing another paragraph I might later delete. That’s the reality of success — small, private choices that stack up over time.

And while our brains love novelty, real success is built through the boring consistency we tend to overlook. Habits don’t magically lock in after 30 days, nor do they evaporate after missing a few. The real craft is in showing up again, and again, and again — with grace. Grace for your pace. Grace for your process. Grace for your humanity.

Survivorship Bias & The Stories We Consume

We hear about the 0.1% who go viral, not the millions who don’t. Not the ones who quietly post into the void. Not the ones who quit from discouragement. Not the ones who rebuild after a failed launch. Not the ones who work full-time jobs and make art at night.

So, of course we’re confused: the data set is skewed.

I find more comfort and inspiration in Substack writers or micro-influencers who are slowly, intentionally grinding toward their dreams. The ones who admit when something flops. The ones who celebrate selling ten copies of a digital product. The ones who share honestly about working on a book for five years. Their stories feel human. Their timelines feel possible.

Following people who are in the middle of their journey — not already at the summit — reshapes our expectations of what success looks like. It reminds us that the slow burn is its own kind of artistry.

The Emotional Cost of Believing the Myth

Believing in overnight success can quietly erode your self-worth.

Impostor syndrome whispers, Why not me? I work hard too.
Shame creeps in, insisting you should be further along.
Comparison drains your energy before you can even take the next step.

I don’t think those feelings ever fully disappear, but I do think they can be repurposed. That inner critic? I try to turn it from a cruel middle-school bully into a constructive coach: Do you want to take a break, or do you want to try again?

Not Do you want to give up? but What do you need to continue?

And when shame kicks in, I try to redirect it. Shame can, at its best, nudge us toward growth. But when it spirals into self-punishment, I interrupt it: I walk my dog, tend to my garden, call a friend, take myself to a movie, get a massage, or reorganize my desk like a mini ritual reset. Shame should never stop us from pursuing our dreams: it should only highlight where to adjust and realign.

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As for feeling behind? Most of us grew up in systems where our performance was constantly compared to peers. A curve, a ranking, a scoreboard. But adulthood is not graded on a curve. Our lives unfold at wildly different paces. When you reject the idea of a shared timeline, so many old expectations fall away.

It’s a quiet liberation — one I hope more and more artists allow themselves to feel.

A Better, Truer Story of Success

To me, success is a long, complicated journey shaped by longevity, evolution, experimentation, and a deepening relationship with your craft.

I want a life full of pursuits that add depth and richness: cooking, baking, drawing, sewing, writing, publishing. I see these not as boxes to check but as chapters I’ll continue returning to across decades. The most exciting part is the point where you’ve learned enough to start breaking the rules — to experiment, play, and shape something wholly your own. And to do it just for the joy of it. Not for the praise or the destination, but for the sacred experience of making.

And more and more, I see creatives stepping away from the algorithm rat race and choosing to spend more time offline. I genuinely believe 2026 is going to be a renaissance year for slow craft and in-person community — for sharing work with people who are committed to the same long haul.

Support and community matter just as much as talent. The friends who ask about your projects, the accountability partners, the mentors, the creative circles. This summer, I did The Artist’s Way with a new friend, and both our practices expanded. I’m leaning into more community next year, because each time I do, the anxieties shrink and the joy grows.

We aren’t meant to do this alone.

A Closing Reminder

Your timeline is yours. It has always been yours. That is the greatest, rarest gift.

Your future “overnight success” will be the result of thousands of quiet decisions to keep showing up, keep improving, keep believing in the long story you’re writing.

When I get discouraged, I remind myself: I get to pursue my craft. Not everyone has that opportunity. So even when things feel heavy, slow, or hopeless, I keep showing up, for myself, and for the dreams that only grow through tending.

Because the truth is simple and freeing:

There is no overnight success.
There is only you, choosing the work again and again…
until the world finally sees what you’ve been building all along.

Rebecca Baker is a writer and digital strategist from Arroyo Grande, CA. As the founder of Chicken Riddle Media, she helps small businesses and nonprofits shine online. With a background in marketing and publishing, she’s all about crafting engaging stories, web content, and promo materials. She also runs *Decked Tarot*, a Substack where she dives into tarot insights and guidance, blending creativity and intuition in every project she takes on.

Nostalgia is one of those rare feelings that can pull us backward and forward at the same time— toward memories we swear we’ve outgrown, and toward versions of ourselves we didn’t realize we missed. As we’ve peeked into the submissions for Ditch Life Magazine’s Issue Two: Nostalgia, we’ve been thrilled to see so many poets dive headfirst into that feeling. But we’re still craving more voices, more stories, more prose that digs into the kind of memories that won’t stay quiet.

To help spark ideas— and maybe nudge a few hesitant writers into hitting submit— we’ve put together a list of books that capture nostalgia in all its forms. Whether it’s longing for childhood, revisiting a complicated past, or exploring the places that shaped us, these stories just might be the creative jolt you need.

So crack open one of these books, wander backward for a while, and when you return, bring us a little piece of your magic.

Memoirs

1. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

McCourt’s remembrance softens hardship with wit and distance, turning even bleak moments into meaningful recollections.

2. When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago

Santiago’s sensory memories—music, language, food—recreate the emotional pull of a homeland left behind.

3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Walls revisits a turbulent childhood with a mix of ache and affection, highlighting the strange beauty found under challenging pasts.

4. Boy: Tales of Childhood – Roald Dahl

Dahl transforms childhood mischief and fear into larger-than-life memories, celebrating the wonder of growing up.

Novels & Short Stories

1. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami

The novel is structured as a recollection of youth— its friendships, music, and heartbreak— filtered through decades of distance.

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

The book moves like memory itself—circular, mythic, and full of stories passed down, rooting nostalgia in family and history.

3. A Christmas Memory – Truman Capote

Capote recaptures the sweetness and melancholy of childhood rituals, preserving moments of companionship like cherished ornaments.

4. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Stevens’s journey is an emotional return to the past— quiet, painful, and contemplative— as he reconsiders moments that defined him.