The top four ass-kicking truths I learned editing my first memoir.

(And they aren’t just for fellow writers.)

May 16, 2025

Editing my memoir was harder than writing it.

The deadline happened to fall during a hard, hard stretch with my health.

And the thought that carried me farthest wasn’t that the hard stretch would end but that the hard things held power to pull even more beauty out of me for others.

The work was hard not because I had done something wrong but because creating something luminous from loss is hard. Creating something from the scattered shards of our lives always is.

Here are the top four truths that kicked my ass while editing, truths for the creative inside us all:

1. I cannot be discarded.

I was placed on this planet to love. Particular work has been given to me that no one else can do. I am one filament of a thread in an inextricable web of connection that holds and nourishes everything. The cells that make up me are chaos and creation, pain and paradox, darkness and light. No part of me is unworthy of being witnessed in words.

My brain is a basket that holds myriad stories and scraps and I can carry that container with deference or disdain.

I will not curse the container. I will not wish away my particular way of making meaning out of madness. I will not berate myself for being a person who must take the backroads home.

When I submitted the first draft of my memoir to my publisher, it was 122,341 words.
When I submitted Draft 2 on Sunday [insert utter exhaustion and relief here], the total was 79,947 words.
Over two months of work, I cut 42,394 words, a number that is laughably larger than some of my friends’ full length non-fiction books. I chiseled in the spirit of Michelangelo, ruthless in removal of excess, and I harmonized like the Hallelujah Chorus, rewriting large portions of the words that remained until they sang and sang.
The book-length of words I cut were not bad. Many—maybe even most—were worthy of print. But unlike the terrifying story I survived, I get to choose the pace in which readers experience it. Those additional words were ones I needed to write as a bottom-up thinker to get to the top truths of the story. Editing is a form of agency, a reversal of the medical trauma I endured and lived to put on the page.
42,394 words appear discarded.
But I am not.

When we edit a book or edit a life, our need for improvement can land like a guilty verdict. The parts that fall away as we embrace beauty and change are not proof of failure. They are proof of life. The process it takes to get to the freest and fullest version of you is never a waste. The product you make might get thrown in the trash,1 but you can never be discarded.

(Pictured: sitting by the Arkansas River, on a high pain day, on a trip in which I condensed a 29 page stretch into something like 7 pages. 🫠)

2. If you hate your work, you might just be tired.

There comes a time when tiredness blurs over anything beautiful.

Tiredness is the harsh dad shouting from the sidelines at their son to run fucking faster. Tiredness is the mean girl from middle school who called you fugly. Tiredness doesn’t tell the truth about what you look like, how well you are doing, or where your work is headed.

The thing is, Tiredness appears an awful lot like a teacher. But the mean kind. It presents itself convincingly as the arbiter of right and wrong, good and bad, success or failure.

By the final few weeks of editing my manuscript, I was hating almost everything I wrote. I was so sick of hearing my own voice that I began to believe most of my book was bad, even though my editor loved it.
I kept getting in my own way, sanding down sentences that didn’t actually need work.
When I decided to read sections to my husband or have my agent tell me his hot takes, I quickly realized my book wasn’t bad, I was just too tired to judge it.
I cannot always tell myself the whole truth about my work.
True wisdom includes letting the truth be handed back to me when I cannot hold it myself.

True wisdom includes learning to listen to trusted partners when your own voice becomes mean.

True wisdom acknowledges human weakness not as a flaw but a feature of the nature of doing hard things.

We are all creators of families and futures and every single one of us must learn how to listen to tiredness and speak the truth right back.

Creativity in writing, painting, business, and relationships demands discernment. Be humbled by your body’s needs. Learn to let go of self-judgement when what you really need is rest.

(Pictured: me, waiting to see my immunologist, writing down editing notes alongside medical questions and soaking up inspiration)

3. Time is an illusion. And rest multiplies time.

There is more energy within you to fulfill your creative callings than you can tell by the ticking of the clock.

The most magical part of being chronically ill might be the way weakness transforms my relationship with time. I do not have the same 24 hours that you have. Seven days are not seven for me. (We all have hidden limits on how much we can do in a given week. I know.) In my body, living with six serious diseases, time collapses and stalls in waiting rooms, infusion chairs, and sudden stretches of days spent miserable in bed.

The clock clearly says there is not enough time to finish the work set before me in the body I have.

But the clock is never right.

I should not have been able to finish my developmental edits on time.
A major treatment reaction in February caused a cascade of problems in managing my diseases, and I have the spent the last few months struggling through the fallout of extra painful flares, reoccurring miserable treatment reactions, and many extra days spent in specialist appointments and unpleasant extra infusions trying to get both my treatment and diseases stabilized.
It is not ideal to do hardcore creative work when significantly struggling.
Sickness put me in bed more days than I can count while editing this book. But I showed up as best I could whenever I could. Every time I chose rest over rushing, time multiplied itself. The days I spent in bed, unable to even think about my book, stretched my soul like leather. I came back to the page supple, knowing that just as I cannot control my treatment, I cannot control what will come of this book. The days I showed up not knowing whether I had enough stamina served to be more than enough.
When I choose to trust that there will be enough energy, there always is. Day by day, I may appear stalled or stuck. But season by season, I accomplish more than appears possible.
The steady pace of showing up is always stronger than my struggle.

Embracing delays and uncertainty unhinges time from the clock and unlocks the creative part of you that will always transcend time. The part who knows you are eternal.

The limits in your life will provoke fear. But they are also teachers who can show you a fuller scope of imagination. Exercise your imagination for what is possible in pain. Honor your limits while honoring the hidden creative energy tucked irrevocably into every human heart. That energy is unstoppable when trusted. That energy is there even when you can’t see it. Time itself is too illusory a lens when it comes to what is possible for you to create with your life.

4. Everyone else is probably better than you.

Your work might actually be awful compared to your favorite authors and artists. Your work might never win a prize. You might get more three star reviews than fives.

Self-belief isn’t the antidote to insecurity. Steady, continuous work is.

While I was editing my memoir, I read two gorgeous memoirs with words that rippled goosebumps over my skin. In one, the metaphors were a borealis of color in my brain. I underlined not just for meaning but in recognition of majesty. In the other, the transitions between chapters were sparse yet fluid. The author’s deft at expressing spirituality in a form my soul could hear as alive and good seemed far beyond my current capacity to create.2
Similarly, in a novel I was reading, the dialogue was so incisive and natural. Never, I thought. I can’t pull that off.
When envy bit me, I didn’t stop reading other books. I recognized reality.
I am 36 years old. I have traditionally-published three books, books that have sold well.3 I have never written a memoir before. I am in difficult circumstances. I am on a deadline.
The very imperfections that might make my memoir technically less literary or excellent than ones I admire probably will carry the pulse of my heart to readers in pain.
My book may never be called the best. But it is the best gift I can give from the body I have.

Being the best is none of your business. Doing your best is.

When we bow before better work than our own, we bend down to reality. And reality is where both creativity and compassion live. Reality is where our best efforts become balm for others’ worst days.

Let excellence humble you and love guide you. Pure creativity is propelled by love.

Art shivers across our souls not simply because of some innate or elusive skill but because someone decided to keep showing up to give the good they had.

Keep creating. None of us are exempt from pain, but each of us—writer or not—hold creative power within it.

—KJ

Embodied

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