You Don’t Owe Anyone

After 10 years, we’re done (with martyrdom)

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A Wish Come Clear is 10 years old this week. I published the first post on January 16, 2011. To quote Captain Awkward – a fellow 10 year blogging veteran – this makes the blog “1 bajillion years old in blog years.”

In hindsight, it’s easy to see that starting the blog was a good choice: It’s now a thriving community with thousands of kindred spirits gathered here. You, dear ones, are the reason that I wrote (and got a book deal for) my forthcoming book, You Don’t Owe Anyone.

Yet there were plenty of reasons why it was crazy for me to start a blog back in 2011. I had a stressful, more-than-full-time job, plus a mysterious malady that left me exhausted all the time.

So what changed? Why did I begin?

It reminds me of a listener question from The Pursue Your Path Series last year: “What one thing prompted you to pursue your path?”

The truest answer I can give is: Losing people I love.

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I’m behind, what do I do?

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Dear ones,

First, thank you so much for the outpouring of support and congratulations you sent after last week’s missive!

It’s a delight begin celebrating my book’s upcoming publication with you.

As promised, today I’m going to tell you about how to get your hands on a digital advance copy of You Don’t Owe Anyone.

But first – let me tell you why I almost didn’t send this missive today. It was partly because of the news from Washington, which is both predictable yet so catastrophically bad that it seems to drown out everything else.

But it was also because lately I’ve been hearing some variation of this theme from a diverse group of coaching clients …

“It’s the new year, so I’ve got to get going! Everybody is launching everything! I’ve got to go full speed on my business / creative project / life purpose! I’m BEHIND!

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The very real pain of not giving up

Dear one,

It’s not like you thought it would be, is it? To put it mildly, this past year did not go to plan. It was a reckoning, in every sense of the word.

We’ve seen just how tenuous our “normal” is, just how quickly life as we knew it can end. And so perhaps you’re looking ahead to this new year and feeling a strange mixture of terror and anticipation.

Will things get worse before they get better? Will COVID be a memory by this time next year? Where are we in the scope of this struggle?

Of course, I don’t have the answers. For now, we are still in the middle. There’s hope on the horizon, it’s true, but we can’t gauge the distance yet to travel.

The middle is the keep-on-keeping-on part. It’s the trudge of one foot in front of the other, the seemingly endless march. It’s tough to do, in writing and living.

It’s the hardest part of the story.

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