🌿 The Grove Journals #29

The Bumpy Road

On money fear, a book that almost wrote itself during the hardest week, and what it means to stay on the right road even when it’s really, genuinely, not-metaphorically bumpy.

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I want to talk about money fear.

Not the cleaned-up, already-processed, “and here’s what I learned” version of it.

The real-time, this-is-happening-right-now version. The kind that showed up in my chest this week like an uninvited houseguest who rearranges your furniture at 2am and then acts like they’ve always lived there.

Because I think we don’t talk about it honestly enough — not in author spaces, not in creative entrepreneur spaces, not anywhere that’s supposed to be about building something.

We talk about mindset. We talk about abundance thinking. We talk about the strategies and the systems and the frameworks for managing the fear.

And those things matter. I’ve built a whole practice around them.

But sometimes the fear just shows up. And it’s loud. And it knows exactly which levers to pull.

Mine showed up this week because the math was visible.

That’s the particular flavor of money fear I’ve learned is hardest for me — not the vague ambient anxiety of “things feel uncertain,” but the specific, spreadsheet-legible version. The moment when you can actually see the finite runway laid out in front of you. When the numbers stop being abstract and become a countdown.

Current projects ending. Nothing new confirmed on the horizon. A very clear picture of exactly how many weeks of breathing room exist between here and “figure something out.”

I’ve been here before. Many times. The terrain is familiar even when it’s scary.

What was different this week was what I did with it.

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There’s a version of me — not ancient history, honestly not even that long ago — who would have let that visibility spiral into a full architectural redesign of her fear. Who would have looked at the finite runway and immediately started building a catastrophe on top of it. Who would have spent three days in the particular exhausting fog of scarcity-brain, where every decision feels impossible and every option feels inadequate and the creative work feels simultaneously urgent and completely out of reach.

That version of me is not gone. She showed up briefly, actually — one afternoon this week when the numbers were sitting open on my screen and the quiet of the house was a little too quiet and the spiral reached for me with real intent.

I felt it. I recognized it. I let it be real for a little while — because pretending it isn’t real has never once helped me — and then I did something that version of me didn’t know how to do:

I got focused instead of frozen.

I opened a document. I talked it through with someone I trust. I looked at what was actually, verifiably, measurably true versus what the fear was trying to add to what was true. I made a plan. A real one, with actual steps and actual priorities and actual reasons for hope that weren’t just affirmations pasted over panic.

And then — and this is the part that still surprises me a little when I witness it — I went and wrote chapters of my book.

During the money-fear week.

During the finite-runway week.

During the week I also rolled out a complete software system for a government client and managed allergy season and held my creative rhythm without missing a single day.

She just... also wrote a book. 🐻

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I’ve been thinking a lot about roads this week.

Specifically, about the difference between a bumpy road and the wrong road.

Because I think we — creative people, rebuilders, anyone who has chosen a life that doesn’t come with a guaranteed paycheck and a clear map — we are trained to interpret difficulty as signal. Trained to read the bumps as evidence.

See? This is hard. Hard means wrong. Wrong means turn around. Turn around means safety.

But what if the road is bumpy simply because it’s real?

What if the difficulty isn’t a verdict — it’s just terrain?

I’ve been on smooth roads that were absolutely taking me somewhere I didn’t want to go. I’ve been comfortable in situations that were slowly making me smaller. I’ve had easy seasons that were easy because I wasn’t growing, wasn’t risking, wasn’t building anything that mattered.

This road is bumpy. The financial uncertainty is real. The timeline is tight. The runway is finite and visible and occasionally terrifying.

And it is also so clearly, unmistakably, bone-deep the right road.

I know because of what I’m building on it. I know because of who I’m becoming on it. I know because even in the hard weeks — even with the spiral reaching for me and the math laid out on the screen and the fear doing its level best to redecorate — I still went and wrote the chapters.

That’s not discipline. That’s not hustle. That’s not “pushing through.”

That’s love. That’s what it looks like when you’re on the right road. 🌿

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Where in your own creative life are you misreading bumpy as wrong? What would change if you trusted that difficulty and rightness can exist on the same road at the same time? What did you build this week — even in the hard parts?

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🔒 The personal section is below — for paid subscribers.

This is where The Mojo Mama Bear gets specific: the actual numbers from this week’s Sovereign Sunday review, what the data said about one of my books that’s been quietly doing its job while I was busy managing everything else, and what it actually feels like to be ten days out from publishing Book 3 while the runway is finite and the ramps are in season. 🌱👻

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