🌿 The Grove Journals #36

The Deep Water and the Shallow Channel

On the book that only started flowing once I stopped forcing it through the wrong part of myself — and what that finally taught me about where the gold is actually buried.

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There’s a story we tell ourselves about finishing things. That the writers who finish are the disciplined ones. The ones with more grit, tighter routines, better mornings. That if you just pushed harder — set the alarm earlier, white-knuckled through the resistance — the words would come.

I believed that story for a long time. I’m here to tell you it’s mostly a lie.

Because this week I finished a book. A whole one. The first in a brand-new series, a kind of story I’d never written before. And I did not finish it through willpower. I finished it the moment I stopped doing the very thing I thought was the “responsible” thing.

Let me explain.

For months, I’d been trying to make all of my creative energy flow through one channel — the safe one. The sensible one. The work that’s gentle and warm and marketable, the kind people expect from me, the kind that’s easiest to sell. And there’s nothing wrong with that work. I love it. It’s part of who I am.

But it is not all of who I am.

There’s another undercurrent in me — a darker, fiercer, far more intense one. The stories with teeth. The feelings too big and too sharp for a cozy afternoon or a gentle mystery to untangle. And I had been quietly damming that current up, telling myself it wasn’t practical, wasn’t the priority, wasn’t where the money was.

Later, I kept saying. Once the sensible work is done.

Here’s what I didn’t understand: when you dam up the deep water, you don’t just lose those particular stories. You clog the whole system. The pressure has to go somewhere, and if it has nowhere of its own to flow, it backs up and floods everything — including the “sensible” work you were trying so hard to protect. I wasn’t failing to finish because I lacked discipline. I was failing to finish because I’d built a single narrow channel and tried to force an ocean through it.

So, this week, I did something that felt almost irresponsible. I let the deep water out. I gave the fierce, intense, “less marketable” part of me its own riverbed and let it run.

And the book poured out of me.

Not trickled. Poured. The kind of writing day where you look up and the light has changed and you’ve forgotten to eat and you don’t even care, because for once the words aren’t something you’re dragging out of yourself — they’re something moving through you. That dam I’d been bracing against for months? It wasn’t holding back a flood. It was holding back the fuel.

I want to say this as plainly as I can, because I think someone reading this needs to hear it today:

The parts of you that feel like too much are not a liability to be managed. They are the engine.

The intensity you keep apologizing for. The grief, the rage, the longing, the strangeness, the stories that don’t fit neatly into a marketing category — those aren’t the parts of your creativity you’re supposed to suppress so the “real,” or “sellable” work can get done.

They’re the pressure-relief-valve that powers all of it.

A writer who’s been allowed to feel the full range of herself, on the page, with no apology — that writer ships more. Not despite the depth. Because of it.

A fed writer ships more.

I’d been trying to ship from a place of careful, palatable restraint, and wondering why the well kept running dry. The well wasn’t dry. I’d just been refusing to drink from the deepest part of it.

Now — here’s the gentler, harder second half, and it’s the part I’m sitting with as I write this.

Having let the water flow, my work this week isn’t to grab an oar and start sprinting again. The book is written, but it isn’t published, and there’s a long quiet stretch ahead between the two — the editing, the polishing, the slow business of getting it into hands. And every cell in my over-functioning body wants to fill that stretch with frantic motion, to do something about the waiting.

The growing happens underground, where you can’t see it. The roots need time before the flowers can bloom. The ripening can’t be rushed by staring at it. The most sovereign thing I can do right now is trust that the thing I planted is becoming what it’s becoming, in its own time, and not yank it up by the roots to check.

So that’s where I am, my loves. I unblocked the well by going deeper into myself, not by pushing harder. And now I’m practicing the discipline that’s so much quieter and so much harder than grinding:

I’m letting it grow.

If you’ve been white-knuckling your sensible channel and wondering why the work won’t come — I want to gently ask you to look at what current you’ve been damming up. What part of your writing self have you filed under later, once the practical stuff is done?

Because that drawer you keep it in? That might be exactly where your next finished book is hiding. 🌿

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🔒 The honest, unglamorous, behind-the-scenes pull is below — for paid subscribers. The real numbers, the part nobody puts on the highlight reel, and a journaling exercise to find your own dammed-up water.

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