🌿 The Grove Journals #35

The Onion and the Slow Middle

On invisible weeks, the work you can’t point to, and the layer you only find by peeling

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I want to tell you about a week where I felt like I did nothing.

That’s not quite true, and I knew it wasn’t true even while I was feeling it — which is its own special kind of maddening. I did plenty. I tended my house in small, deliberate rounds. I showed up every single morning for my rituals. I wrote thousands of words. I kept the promises I make to myself before the coffee’s even cooled.

And still. When I sat down at the end of the week and tried to point at one thing and say there — I made that, that’s mine, that counts — my hand just sort of hovered in the air. Vague. Empty. I couldn’t land it on anything.

It was a slow-middle week.

You know the kind. Nothing launched. Nothing finished. No fireworks, no finish line, no before-and-after photo worth posting. Just the long, quiet, unglamorous middle of things — the part of the bridge you can’t see from either shore. Behind you, the last accomplishment is too far back to take credit for anymore. Ahead of you, the next one hasn’t arrived. And you’re just out there in the fog, walking, with no landmark to prove you’ve moved at all.

We are so badly trained for the middle, fellow traveler. We celebrate the launches. We throw parades for the finish lines. Nobody has ever once thrown a parade for a Tuesday. And so, when a whole week is made of Tuesdays, we conclude — wrongly, cruelly, automatically — that we “wasted” it.

But here is what I figured out, sitting in my own fog this week. And I had to drag it up by the roots, so let me hand it to you clean:

Sometimes the most important thing that happens in a week is completely invisible — because it didn’t happen out there. It happened in here.

Let me Shrek this for you, because it’s the only way I know how to say it. 🧅

Healing — and honestly, just being a person — is an onion. It has layers. And the thing nobody warns you about onions is that you can peel back a layer, feel the cool air hit it, think ah, there, now I’ve reached the middle, now I understand myself — and find another layer underneath. Often the very layer that was doing the most damage, hiding politely behind the ones you’d already dealt with.

This week, I peeled back a layer I didn’t know was there.

I won’t give you the whole anatomy of it out here in the open air — some of that’s for behind the curtain, with the travelers who’ve pulled up a paid chair. But I’ll give you the shape of it, because the shape is universal and somebody reading this needs to recognize it in themselves:

I caught a survival pattern in the act of sabotaging me.

Not the obvious kind. The sneaky kind. The kind that wears the costume of relief. If you’ve ever lived through a long season of lack — of scarcity, of not-enough, of white-knuckling your way from one thin moment to the next — then your nervous system learned something it thinks is helping you. It learned that when relief finally arrives, you’d better grab everything at once, fast, before it disappears. Stuff every hole the famine drilled into you. Make the lack stop.

And the trap — oh, the trap is exquisite — is that grabbing at everything to end the lack is the exact behavior that recreates the lack. The relief becomes the seed of the next shortage. The pattern feeds on itself and calls it survival.

I saw it. This week, for the first time, I saw the whole shape of it, clearly, while it was happening, instead of only recognizing it months later in the wreckage.

There is no metric for that. No dashboard tracks it. It will never show up in a year-end review. If you measured my week by anything you could point at, it was a nothing week. But that layer coming loose? That’s some of the realest work I did all year. You cannot change a pattern you cannot see. Seeing it is the change beginning. The naming is the first crack in the wall.

And here’s where I turn and look at you across the fence, because this is a newsletter for people building creative lives, and the same exact thing is true of our work:

We measure ourselves by the visible. Words shipped. Books launched. Numbers up or down. And we completely discount the weeks where the real movement was internal — a realization, a boundary finally held, a pattern named, a truer understanding of why we keep doing the safe thing instead of the scary, important thing.

I’ll confess my own version: I realized this week that I’ve been writing every single day — diligently, faithfully — but not toward the things that actually finish. I’ve been pouring my words into the safe, recurring, never-ending stuff, because it’s gentle and it never has to be brave. And the book that scares me a little, the one that would actually move something? It’s been sitting in the dark, waiting, while I busy myself with safer ink.

That’s a layer too. 🧅

So, if you had a slow-middle week — if your hand is hovering in the air right now, unable to land on one shiny thing you made — I want to offer you a different question than the one your shadow is asking.

Don’t ask what did I produce this week?

Ask: what did I see this week that I couldn’t see before?

Because the launches will come. The finish lines will come. But they are built, every single one of them, on the invisible Tuesdays and the layers you peeled in the fog when nobody — not even you — could tell you were doing anything at all.

You were. You are. Keep peeling, traveler. The center’s worth it. 🐾

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🔒 The real numbers, the actual pattern I caught, and a journaling exercise — below, for the paid travelers peeling their own onions.

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