The Moment Writing Changes

On time, attention, and listening to your body

The work, taken seriously....

For a long time, my writing belonged only to me. It lived in notebooks, in half-finished files, in the quiet promise that if it didn’t work out, no one would ever know. I could walk away when it got hard. I could leave a story mid-sentence and tell myself I’d come back to it someday. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t.

For those of us who come to serious writing later—after other careers, after raising families, after loss and responsibility—that’s often how the work begins. Writing fits into the margins of a too-busy life.

The truth is this: the best parts of me were going elsewhere. My students got my full attention. My colleagues got my sharpest thinking. By the time I came back to the page, late at night or in the wee hours before dawn, what I had left felt diluted.

I knew there was more in me than that. My writing deserved more than the tired edges of a long day. And here is the second truth: what I was meant to do didn’t disappear just because I ignored it. There was a cost to that avoidance, and I carried it in my body.

A jaw I didn’t realize I was clenching until it ached. Shoulders held high and tight, as if bracing for impact. Irritability over the smallest things. Restlessness without a clear cause. Heart palpitations. Hives. A nervous system stuck on red alert.

I needed a change. I needed to pay attention to what my body was telling me.

The decision to step aside and devote myself to this work full-time wasn’t taken lightly. It came with fear and a real accounting of loss—income, certainty, the safety of a well-defined role. I understood exactly what I was giving up. I tested every alternative.

But eventually, the choice became less about risk and more about alignment. About whether I was willing to keep offering my deepest work only in the margins of my life, or whether I was ready to move it front and center.

In less than a year, the work answered back. I didn’t set out chasing outcomes. I set out to give the writing the same seriousness I’d been giving everything else for years. Once I did, things began to move. An agent. A publishing home. The kind of forward motion that arrives with a deepened sense of responsibility.

These days, when I sit down to work, my shoulders don’t rise on instinct. My jaw loosens without effort. The ticking clock no longer feels accusatory.

Nothing about the work is easier. But it no longer asks me to fight my own body to do it. That’s how I know I’m finally doing what I was meant to do.

What deserves more than the margins of your day?