Five Days of Showing Up (Even When We Didn’t Feel Like It)

This week, a small group of us did something deceptively simple: we showed up and wrote. Each morning at 7am, we touched base via the chat, hunkered down for the time we had available, and offered virtual high-fives to celebrate progress.

Here’s why that’s meaningful:

• We showed up (even if we didn’t feel like it).

• We stayed accountable to ourselves and each other.

• We let the work be messy.

It didn’t matter whether someone missed a day or spent their writing time staring at a blank page. The point is: they showed up.

And in doing that, something shifted — writing stopped being something people wanted to do, and became something they do.

This week’s #WriteWithMe experiment was a reminder that growth mindset isn’t about doing things perfectly. It’s about coming back to them—again and again. It’s messy repetition. It’s finding your way back in, even when the work feels hard or unclear.

In On Writing, Stephen King shares the story of being hit by a car while drafting the book. Laid up in the hospital with a collapsed lung, broken ribs, and a leg fractured in multiple places, the once prolific daily writer stopped writing. When he finally returned, something had crept in: doubt, resistance, the question of whether he could still do it.

A psychology many writers know all too well.

Whether we’re managing a period of trauma, caregiving, or ordinary life demands, we know what it feels like to try and find our way back to the page after a hiatus. Daunting is an understatement. This is why so many writers advise touching the page daily.

This week reinforced that idea—but it wasn’t just about writing. It was about reclaiming a part of ourselves that’s easy to sideline—our creativity, our focus, our willingness to begin.

What we accomplished this week is something I want more of, but before we decide what comes next, I want to hear from you.

Transparently, I don’t want this to just be a one-week experiment. I want to build something that actually helps you keep going. I want to cheer on your projects and see you cross that finish line.

If that’s something you want too, I’d love for you to stay in this with me.

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*Parvi, Jerrine, Amy, Wendy, Abby, Allison - I loved being in community with you this week. Please drop links to the places we can find your writing in the comments!