đż The Grove Journals #24
The Voice That Wonât Let You Start (And Why Itâs Not Your Enemy)
On restarting, the inner critic thatâs just trying to keep you safe, and why beginning again is the bravest thing a writer can do.
đż Part 1: The Voice
Thereâs a particular kind of silence that lives between where you stopped and where youâre trying to start again.
You know the one.
Itâs not peaceful silence. Itâs not the good, fertile, pre-writing quiet where ideas are gathering themselves and getting ready to show up on the page. Itâs the silence that has a voice in it â low, persistent, familiar â saying things like:
Youâve been away too long. You should have kept going. Everyone else didnât stop. Everyone else is further along. Whatâs even the point of starting now?
If youâve ever tried to restart a writing practice â or a creative project, or a Substack, or a story you put down six months ago because life had very strong opinions about your schedule â you have heard this voice.
Most of us have been taught to treat it as the enemy.
We call it the inner critic. The gremlin. The saboteur. We talk about silencing it, overcoming it, pushing through it, drowning it out with enough momentum that it canât keep up.
And I want to gently, lovingly suggest that weâve had it exactly backwards.
That voice is not trying to destroy you.
It is trying to protect you.
Hereâs whatâs actually happening underneath all that âyouâve been away too longâ noise: some part of you â a very old, very tired, very loyal part â learned a long time ago that wanting things and not getting them hurts. That trying and failing hurts. That being seen and then judged hurts.
And so, when you move toward something that matters to you â something as tender and exposing as your writing, your creative dreams, the stories only you can tell â that part of you sounds the alarm.
Not because it wants you to fail.
Because itâs terrified you will.
The inner critic is not a saboteur. Itâs a scared protector who never got the memo that youâre not in danger anymore. Itâs doing the only job it ever knew how to do: keeping you small enough to stay safe.
The problem is that âsmallâ and âsafeâ is not where your writing lives.
So, what do you do with a protector whoâs gotten too protective?
You donât fight it. You donât silence it. You donât white-knuckle your way past it and hope it doesnât catch up.
You turn around and actually look at it.
Because hereâs what Iâve found â and what I suspect youâll find too, if youâre willing to try â the voice gets loudest right at the threshold. Right at the moment of starting again. Right at the exact spot where the gap between where you stopped and where youâre standing now feels widest and most humiliating.
And if you can pause at that threshold, just for a moment, and ask the voice what are you actually afraid of? â
Something shifts.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. Not in a way that makes a good movie montage.
But something shifts.
Because the voice, when you actually listen to it, is almost never saying what it sounds like itâs saying. It sounds like youâve failed. But what it means is I donât want you to get hurt again. It sounds like you should have kept going. But what it means is I donât know if I can survive another disappointment.
Thatâs not an enemy.
Thatâs a part of you that deserves some tenderness.
And hereâs the truth about restarting that nobody says out loud:
Starting again doesnât mean you failed.
Failing would be choosing not to start again.
The gap â the weeks, the months, the seasons where life intervened and the writing stopped and the project sat and the Substack went quiet â that gap is not evidence of your inadequacy. It is evidence that you are a human being living a full, complicated, non-linear life.
The writers who ânever stopâ are either mythological or exhausted. Probably both.
The writers who matter â the ones who build something real over time â are the ones who start again. And again. And again. Who treat every restart not as an admission of defeat but as an act of profound, stubborn, unglamorous courage.
You are allowed to begin from exactly where you are.
Not from where you wish youâd stayed. Not from where youâd be if the last several months had gone differently. Not from some imaginary version of yourself who never lost momentum.
From here. From now. From this exact imperfect, behind-schedule, slightly-humbled moment.
That is not a consolation prize.
That is the only place any of us ever actually start from. đż
A quick note before we go deeper: The Grove Journals is back â and sheâs consolidated. What used to be three separate weekly posts (Grove Journals, Letters from the Rebuild, Rewilding the Writerâs Soul) now lives here, together, in one weekly letter from the Grove. Same heart. Same honesty. Just one beautiful front door instead of three. Welcome back. I missed you here. đż
Below the fold, Iâm getting personal â the unglamorous, specific, real version of what this looked like in my own week. Plus a ten-minute journaling exercise that might change how you talk to that voice for good.
That part lives behind the paywall â because itâs the kind of thing I can only write honestly for the people whoâve chosen to be here. đŸđ
đ The personal pull is below â for paid subscribers
This is where The Grove Journals gets âbear bonesâ honest about what restarting actually looked like this week â the numbers, the gaps, the voice, and what I found when I finally turned around and listened to it.
