Please remember this is your first draft.

(This isn’t just advice for writers.)

👆🏼Click above for a voiceover of me reading this little letter.

I’d love to believe the back of books that promise peace to those who practice prayer long enough. I’d like to believe that capability is cumulative. I’d love for life to work more like an escalator than a staircase, carried upwards by the force of something bigger than myself. Just hold on. You’ll get there.

Instead, we trudge on, expecting ourselves to climb higher, get stronger, do better, all while pain and problems and the past keep knocking us down the stairs.

The myth of perpetual progress sits on our shoulders like a sack of used diapers. We haul it from kindergarten to grad school, from first baby to grandchild, from job to job, in every stage and season expecting more growth, more wealth, and more faith out ourselves. And, damn, it stinks.

I met the myth last week. It was my first full week back into writing my next trade book for you, and I was elated to have the energy to sit in my study with my story and the empty page. The longer I wrote, though, the more I questioned my joy. What if no one likes this? What if it’s just not good? What if this structure isn’t as symbolic as it seems to me? It certainly isn’t as good as ____________. And, finally, Shouldn’t I be better at this by now?