šæ The Grove Journals #34
The Floor You Can Stand On ā On baselines, one whole life, and clearing the last room
I used to keep my life in separate drawers.
There was the drawer marked Work, and the drawer marked Home, and the drawer marked Body, and a small locked one in the back marked Trauma & Healing that I mostly pretended wasnāt there. I treated them like they had nothing to do with each other. As if I could let the house fall into chaos and still write clean chapters. As if I could run my body into the ground on Tuesday and have a brilliant business idea on Wednesday. As if the work lived in one room of me and the rest of my life lived in another, and the door between them stayed politely shut.
It does not stay shut. It was never even a real door.
This week taught me that again ā gently, and from two directions at once ā so let me tell you about both, because the braid is the whole point.
The first thread is about my work. For months Iāve been building something I couldnāt yet see paying off ā a little series of books that lead readers from one to the next to the next, a flywheel that only works if people actually finish one and reach for another. For a long stretch this spring, it nearly coasted to a stop. The numbers got quiet. A reader would finish what was available and arrive at the end of the road with nowhere left to walk, and the whole machine would slow to almost-nothing. I watched it bottom out. Iāll be honest ā I wondered if the quiet meant the thing simply didnāt work.
And then I finished the next book. I gave the readers road again.
And the machine didnāt just restart. It leapt. The pages people read this week didnāt double or triple ā they quadrupled, and then some. The exact thing Iād built it to do, the thing the theory promised, and my fear kept arguing with, it did. Right in front of me. Not because I outshouted anyone. Because I gave the people who already loved the story somewhere to keep going.
I want to be careful here, because cheerful vagueness helps no one: in raw dollars, the week was still small. (Weāll talk real numbers behind the curtain in a minute.) But here is the thing Iāve finally learned to hold ā the shape of a thing tells you more than the size of it. And the shape this week was a hockey stick at the bottom of its curve, looking up. Thatās not a small thing dressed up as a big one. Thatās a real engine, proving it runs, before it has all its fuel.
The second thread is about my house. And I promise you it is the same story.
Because while the engine was proving itself, I was sitting in rooms I love that had slid past the point where my body could keep up with them. Not filthy by any stretch ā just behind. Behind in the way a home gets behind when its keeper has spent eighteen months surviving illness and income shocks and the long slow work of rebuilding a self. The clutter isnāt a character flaw. Itās the residue of a season spent pouring everything outward.
So, this week I did something Iāve never been good at: I made a plan I can actually keep. Not a Pinterest fantasy of a magazine house. A baseline. A floor I can stand on. A version of ākeptā that a woman with fibromyalgia and a degenerative spinal issue and more, plus a finite number of spoons can maintain without lighting herself on fire to do it. Room by room, in small rounds, with my son lifting what my spine and hips wonāt ā until the whole place rests at a level I can hold. Much of that simply being clutter from old packing boxes that sat unpacked waiting for a home or to be sent on their way to someone else who can make use of the items and memories they held.
And here is where the two threads become one rope.
Because a home you can actually maintain is a nervous system that can actually rest. And a nervous system that can rest is a brain that can write the next book. And the next book is the road that keeps the engine spinning. The clean counter and the climbing page-reads are not in separate drawers. Clearing the house is clearing the runway for the work. It is all one life. It was always only ever one life.
Thereās one room left. The last one. The room that hasnāt really changed since a chapter of my life I have long since closed ā a space still faintly carrying the air of someone who used to live here, a version of my world Iāve outgrown. Clearing it isnāt decorating. Itās the final eviction of an old ghostās dust. š And Iām not rushing it, because that room deserves to be a project, not a frantic afternoon. It deserves the same thing the books got: a plan, a pace, and a keeper who respects her own limits enough to do it right.
Which brings me to the quiet third strand woven through both ā my body, setting the honest pace of all of it.
I am done treating my limitations as a moral failing to push through. The body is not the obstacle to the life. The body is the one carrying the life. So the question this week stopped being how much can I force and started being how much can I sustain ā in the house, in the work, in the slow clearing of the last room. Borrowed energy always comes due. A floor you can stand on beats a peak you collapse off of. Every single time.
So, if youāre standing in your own life this week with the drawers spilling into each other ā the unfinished manuscript and the messy kitchen and the tired body all somehow tangled up and making each other worse ā I want to hand you this across the fence:
Stop trying to fix them separately. They were never separate.
Build one floor you can stand on. Bring the house to a baseline you can hold, so the body can rest, so the mind can make the work, so the work can carry you forward. Pick the one room, the one chapter, the one small round you have the spoons for today. And let the rest wait without shame.
Itās all one life, fellow traveler. Tend it like it knows that. š¾
The engine runs. The floor is getting solid. And thereās one last room of old dust with my name on the broom. š
š The real numbers, the honest pace, and a journaling exercises ā below, for the paid travelers walking their own version of this.
š» PART 2 ā FROM THE DEN (š)
Let me give you the actual data, because the gap between what the ledger says and what the 2am insists is the most useful thing I know how to share.
What the Sadie Brent ledger says: page reads this week came in at 2,658 ā up from 690 the week before. Thatās a 285% jump, and it landed the moment Book 3 went live and gave my readers somewhere to go. The mid-May floor had been a grim little 245. So, no ā the engine was never broken. It was just out of road.
And the dollars for Sadie? Bear-bones honest: about fifteen dollars for the week, all in. (Around $3-ish in direct sales, the rest estimated from page reads ā and KENP pays in fractions of a penny per page, so even a quadrupled week is still seedling money. LMAO. š±) My actual cash backbone this season is still the tech work, and Iām not going to pretend otherwise. The books are the growth engine Iām building while tech bridges the gap. Both things are true. Eyes open.
Hereās the number Iām actually watching, and itās a beautiful one to sit with: not the spike ā the floor.
A single big week can hide a binge-reader. What I want to see is whether reads reset to a higher baseline ā even 900 a week would tell me the floor itself moved up. Thatās the same word I used for my house this week. Baseline. The floor you can stand on. I didnāt plan the rhyme. My whole life apparently did.
On the home front: the plan is real and itās mine-sized. Room by room, small rounds, Deven on lift-and-carry duty during a flare, and a hard rule that Friday and Saturday stay sacred. The last room ā the bedroom ā Iām deliberately leaving as a future project, because itās the one still holding the stale air of a closed chapter, and that clearing deserves intention, not a frantic Tuesday. Iād rather do it slow and do it right than do it fast and leave even a corner of the old ghost behind.
And I held my limits this week without calling myself lazy for it. Thatās the win nobody puts on a metrics dashboard. The fibro+spine+arthritis set the pace and I let it, and the house still moved, and the work still happened, and nobody got run into the ground to make it so.
Thatās enough. Thatās more than enough. Thatās a floor being poured, slow and solid, under a whole and singular life.
āļø Your Turn (journaling, for paid travelers)
Pour something warm. Sit with these:
Which drawers of your life have you been pretending are separate ā and how are they secretly making each other harder?
What would a baseline look like for you ā not the magazine version, but the floor you could actually stand on and maintain? Name it for one area: home, body, or work.
Where are you running on borrowed energy, and what would it cost you when it comes due?
Whatās your ālast roomā ā the space, the project, or the chapter still holding old air? You donāt have to clear it today. Just name it, and decide it gets to be a project, not a frantic afternoon.
Tend it like one life, traveler. Because it is. šæ
With a solid floor and a broom for the old dust,
š» Stacy / The Mojo Mama Bear š
I used to keep my life in separate drawers.
There was the drawer marked Work, and the drawer marked Home, and the drawer marked Body, and a small locked one in the back marked Trauma & Healing that I mostly pretended wasnāt there. I treated them like they had nothing to do with each other. As if I could let the house fall into chaos and still write clean chapters. As if I could run my body into the ground on Tuesday and have a brilliant business idea on Wednesday. As if the work lived in one room of me and the rest of my life lived in another, and the door between them stayed politely shut.
It does not stay shut. It was never even a real door.
This week taught me that again ā gently, and from two directions at once ā so let me tell you about both, because the braid is the whole point.
The first thread is about my work. For months Iāve been building something I couldnāt yet see paying off ā a little series of books that lead readers from one to the next to the next, a flywheel that only works if people actually finish one and reach for another. For a long stretch this spring, it nearly coasted to a stop. The numbers got quiet. A reader would finish what was available and arrive at the end of the road with nowhere left to walk, and the whole machine would slow to almost-nothing. I watched it bottom out. Iāll be honest ā I wondered if the quiet meant the thing simply didnāt work.
And then I finished the next book. I gave the readers road again.
And the machine didnāt just restart. It leapt. The pages people read this week didnāt double or triple ā they quadrupled, and then some. The exact thing Iād built it to do, the thing the theory promised, and my fear kept arguing with, it did. Right in front of me. Not because I outshouted anyone. Because I gave the people who already loved the story somewhere to keep going.
I want to be careful here, because cheerful vagueness helps no one: in raw dollars, the week was still small. (Weāll talk real numbers behind the curtain in a minute.) But here is the thing Iāve finally learned to hold ā the shape of a thing tells you more than the size of it. And the shape this week was a hockey stick at the bottom of its curve, looking up. Thatās not a small thing dressed up as a big one. Thatās a real engine, proving it runs, before it has all its fuel.
The second thread is about my house. And I promise you it is the same story.
Because while the engine was proving itself, I was sitting in rooms I love that had slid past the point where my body could keep up with them. Not filthy by any stretch ā just behind. Cluttered. Boxes of things never unpacked after a home-downsizing, still sitting in their cardboard jail-cells, waiting for a proper home (or to be tossed). Behind in the way a home gets behind when its keeper has spent eighteen months surviving illness and income shocks and the long slow work of rebuilding a self. The clutter isnāt a character flaw. Itās the residue of a season spent pouring everything outward.
So, this week I did something Iāve never been good at: I made a plan I can actually keep. Not a Pinterest fantasy of a magazine house. A baseline. A floor I can stand on. A version of ākeptā that a woman with fibromyalgia and a degenerative spinal issue and more, plus a finite number of spoons can maintain without lighting herself on fire to do it. Room by room, in small rounds, with my son lifting what my spine and hips wonāt ā until the whole place rests at a level I can hold. Much of that simply being clutter from old packing boxes that sat unpacked waiting for a home or to be sent on their way to someone else who can make use of the items and memories they held.
And here is where the two threads become one rope.
Because a home you can actually maintain is a nervous system that can actually rest. And a nervous system that can rest is a brain that can write the next book. And the next book is the road that keeps the engine spinning. The clean counter and the climbing page-reads are not in separate drawers. Clearing the house is clearing the runway for the work. It is all one life. It was always only ever one life.
Thereās one room left. The last one. The room that hasnāt really changed since a chapter of my life I have long since closed ā a space still faintly carrying the air of someone who used to live here, a version of my world Iāve outgrown. Clearing it isnāt decorating. Itās the final eviction of an old ghostās dust. š And Iām not rushing it, because that room deserves to be a project, not a frantic afternoon. It deserves the same thing the books got: a plan, a pace, and a keeper who respects her own limits enough to do it right.
Which brings me to the quiet third strand woven through both ā my body, setting the honest pace of all of it.
I am done treating my limitations as a moral failing to push through. The body is not the obstacle to the life. The body is the one carrying the life. So the question this week stopped being how much can I force and started being how much can I sustain ā in the house, in the work, in the slow clearing of the last room. Borrowed energy always comes due. A floor you can stand on beats a peak you collapse off of. Every single time.
So, if youāre standing in your own life this week with the drawers spilling into each other ā the unfinished manuscript and the messy kitchen and the tired body all somehow tangled up and making each other worse ā I want to hand you this across the fence:
Stop trying to fix them separately. They were never separate.
Build one floor you can stand on. Bring the house to a baseline you can hold, so the body can rest, so the mind can make the work, so the work can carry you forward. Pick the one room, the one chapter, the one small round you have the spoons for today. And let the rest wait without shame.
Itās all one life, fellow traveler. Tend it like it knows that. š¾
The engine runs. The floor is getting solid. And thereās one last room of old dust with my name on the broom. š
š The real numbers, the honest pace, and a journaling exercises ā below, for the paid travelers walking their own version of this.
š» PART 2 ā FROM THE DEN (š)
Let me give you the actual data, because the gap between what the ledger says and what the 2am insists is the most useful thing I know how to share.
What the Sadie Brent ledger says: page reads this week came in at 2,658 ā up from 690 the week before. Thatās a 285% jump, and it landed the moment Book 3 went live and gave my readers somewhere to go. The mid-May floor had been a grim little 245. So, no ā the engine was never broken. It was just out of road.
And the dollars for Sadie? Bear-bones honest: about fifteen dollars for the week, all in. (Around $3-ish in direct sales, the rest estimated from page reads ā and KENP pays in fractions of a penny per page, so even a quadrupled week is still seedling money. LMAO. š±) My actual cash backbone this season is still the tech work, and Iām not going to pretend otherwise. The books are the growth engine Iām building while tech bridges the gap. Both things are true. Eyes open.
Hereās the number Iām actually watching, and itās a beautiful one to sit with: not the spike ā the floor.
A single big week can hide a binge-reader. What I want to see is whether reads reset to a higher baseline ā even 900 a week would tell me the floor itself moved up. Thatās the same word I used for my house this week. Baseline. The floor you can stand on. I didnāt plan the rhyme. My whole life apparently did.
On the home front: the plan is real and itās mine-sized. Room by room, small rounds, Deven on lift-and-carry duty during a flare, and a hard rule that Friday and Saturday stay sacred. The last room ā the bedroom ā Iām deliberately leaving as a future project, because itās the one still holding the stale air of a closed chapter, and that clearing deserves intention, not a frantic Tuesday. Iād rather do it slow and do it right than do it fast and leave even a corner of the old ghost behind.
And I held my limits this week without calling myself lazy for it. Thatās the win nobody puts on a metrics dashboard. The fibro+spine+arthritis set the pace and I let it, and the house still moved, and the work still happened, and nobody got run into the ground to make it so.
Thatās enough. Thatās more than enough. Thatās a floor being poured, slow and solid, under a whole and singular life.
āļø Your Turn (journaling, for paid travelers)
Pour something warm. Sit with these:
Which drawers of your life have you been pretending are separate ā and how are they secretly making each other harder?
What would a baseline look like for you ā not the magazine version, but the floor you could actually stand on and maintain? Name it for one area: home, body, or work.
Where are you running on borrowed energy, and what would it cost you when it comes due?
Whatās your ālast roomā ā the space, the project, or the chapter still holding old air? You donāt have to clear it today. Just name it, and decide it gets to be a project, not a frantic afternoon.
Tend it like one life, traveler. Because it is. šæ
With a solid floor and a broom for the old dust,
š» Stacy / The Mojo Mama Bear š