Hi, loves. 🌿

PSA: Hard things are hard!

A week or so after the LA fires, when my family was still holed up at my sister’s house an hour south of the smoke, I managed to fit in a workout in their garage. Everything was upside down — school was cancelled, the air was unbreathable near us, the fires kept growing — but my sister’s workout space was perfectly set up, with plush mats on the floor and weights in an organized storage system along a back wall.

I didn’t have my computer — it broke the night we left LA at 11pm — so my phone was propped up in whatever way I could manage so I could see my teacher (or really, so that she could see me). I’d only started weight training that fall with Alissa, and I didn’t believe in my body all that deeply. It had been through a lot — a failed surgery, many years of recurrent back pain, thousands of dollars thrown at healers of every ilk; limitations were my security blanket — but in the preceding years on my Pilates mat, Alissa had started to make me believe. I could do things I hadn’t attempted in years, and I felt good. Stable and strong and less fragile.

In the fall, we’d started with 3-pound weights (fuck anyone who says you need to lift heavy; you do what you can do without killing yourself!), and I’d steadily moved up to 5 pounds. Along with a few pairs of underwear, a change of clothing and a book, I’d stashed both pairs of weights in the trunk of our car before we fled. (These are the things you can remember when your house isn’t burning down.)

That morning, through the small speaker of my phone, Alissa said, “try the 8s.” I didn’t own any 8-pound weights (are you crazy!), but my sister’s family did, all lined up perfectly beside me, and Alissa had spotted them in the corner of the frame. “No way!” I said, “I can’t!” “I bet you can,” she said. “Just try.”

It turned out I could. I could! It was a miracle, but of course, it wasn’t a miracle at all. It was the result of slow and steady work. Later, I understood — or maybe Alissa told me — that she had used my LA-fire adrenaline to push me to do something harder than I was used to. She’d used the situation not to help me cower in the corner, but to stretch to a challenge she knew I was ready for. And it worked. From then on, I could lift 8 pounds.

Books I’ve read, or will read, this summer. I am sure they were all hard to write but it certainly doesn’t feel that way reading them!

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot these last few weeks as I rebuild my novel yet again. The beauty of an excellent teacher — like an excellent therapist or parent — is knowing when you’re ready to take the next leap and then giving you that gentle, loving push. They don’t let you back down when they know you are ready for something harder. They look you square in the face and say: try it!

The problem with a novel, for me, at least, is that the “something harder” moment comes back for you again and again. You can solve one problem, feel like a genius for an hour or a day, only to have another one pop up (often as a result of your last genius fix). You can end up feeling that other people, more skilled or imaginative writers, are better suited to this — people who don’t run into these problems. (Guess what? They don’t exist. Soon you realize maybe all of this is just making the book better, richer.)

These are, don’t get me wrong, excellent problems to have — this deep work is what a lot of us live for, it is the harder thing we wanted to reach for when other things felt easy or unsatisfying, but it is, nonetheless, difficult. I keep thinking of the plaque somewhere in Obama’s White House — now in the Presidential Center — that says, “Hard things are hard.” I’m quite sure that working to stop environmental catastrophe, world wars and Ebola outbreaks make novel-writing sound like a joke, but we all need the water to reach our particular level.

These days, I often long for a book version of Alissa, a person who would step in and say, I know what you’re capable of, just reach. Luckily, I do have these people (all writers need them!), wonderful friends and readers and mentors I send pages to here and there, who are on the receiving end of my despairing texts, who hear me say I am giving up and then, ignore, I am not. They help me keep reaching.

I’ve started to think that this is maybe what we most owe each other? A reminder of all that’s in us? We started Summer School this week, and I said to the wonderful women gathered there, I can’t promise anything (nor do I want to, I despise false promises!), but I can promise that if you keep showing up, you will make something — even if it’s hard. And then you will look at that hard, glorious thing and think: holy shit. I did that. I did that! I think I’ll do it again.

Sending love,

Abs xo