đż The Grove Journals #37
The Pantry and the Pipeline
I want to tell you about a week that was real.
Not real in the curated, âhereâs my tidy lesson with the rough edges sanded offâ way. Real in the bills need paid, groceries need ordered, and royalties donât hit for a few more days kind of way. A head cold sitting heavy behind my eyes. A couple of business expenses with their hands out that I simply could not pay yet. My son packing up to go house-sit for two weeks, which meant the particular quiet of a home thatâs about to get quieter.
It was, by any honest accounting, a scary week.
And here is the part I most want you to hear, because I think itâs the part nobody says out loud: I was afraid, and the fear was not irrational. This wasnât anxiety inventing a monster under the bed. The pantry was thin. The dates on the calendar really were tight. There are seasons where the worry isnât a distortion â itâs just a report. And I think we do each other a quiet disservice when we only ever talk about the fears that turned out to be nothing. Sometimes the fear is pointing at something true.
So, what do you do when the fear is right?
Hereâs what I did. And Iâm telling you the order on purpose, because the order is the whole thing.
I did not order the dollars to appear. I couldnât. That option wasnât on the table this week, and pretending otherwise wouldâve just added shame to scarcity.
What I did instead was take stock.
First, the literal pantry. I opened the freezer and the cupboard and I looked â actually looked, instead of letting my nervous system narrate a famine from the next room. And what I found was a fairly well-stocked supply. Which meant the cats, far from starving, were about to eat better than they usually do. (They have been getting little gourmet meals these last few days and have decided this crisis is, frankly, the best thing thatâs ever happened to them. đ±)
The thing my fear-voice had been calling empty was, when I turned and faced it, enough.
And then I took stock of the second pantry. The one that doesnât sit in the kitchen.
The pipeline.
Because here is what was also true, underneath the scary week: I have work coming. A returning client project rounding the corner. Monthly royalties and residuals income due in a matter of days, not weeks. A finished book under one of my pen names, sitting there ready to publish â a whole new series about to open its first door. A subscription offering Iâve been quietly building, nearly ready to switch on. None of that was hypothetical. All of it was already in motion. Already built, or nearly so. Already mine.
I want to be scrupulously honest with you about something, though, because this is where the real medicine is:
Taking stock did not make a single dollar appear in my bank account. đ
The chicken in the freezer didnât pay the invoice. (just rude, if you ask me! LOL) The reminder that money was coming in days did not make it arrive today. The book thatâs ready to publish hasnât earned a cent yet. Taking stock changed exactly nothing about the material facts of the week.
What it changed was me.
It changed the difference between sitting in discomfort and drowning in panic. Between âthis is tight and itâs coming due in a few daysâ and âI am in free fall and nothing will ever be okay again.â
Taking stock didnât fix the week â it kept me out of frantic-mode. And frantic-mode, if youâve ever lived there, is a thief. It makes you abandon the slow, steady, already-working things to go chase some shiny emergency rescue that usually doesnât exist. It burns the energy you need for the actual next step on a fire of imaginary ones.
When I took stock, I could see plainly: I am already doing the things. I have already taken the next steps. There is nothing frantic left to do â there is only to keep going. And keep-going is a much, much gentler instruction than fix-everything-right-now-or-perish.
So that became the whole assignment. Not solve the scarcity. Just donât abandon the plan thatâs already working, and donât add panic on top of a hard thing thatâs hard enough on its own.
Which brings me to the thing I most want to leave in your hands today. đ
If you are doing the brave thing â rebuilding, pivoting, starting, betting on yourself â you are going to feel discomfort. And I need you to know that this is not a sign youâve done something wrong. It is not evidence that youâve miscalculated, or that youâre not cut out for this, or that you should retreat.
It is the most predictable feeling in the world. It is supposed to be there.
Because look at where youâre going. Youâre leaving your comfort zone. The discomfort is right there in the name of the place you just left. đ
You cannot walk out of a comfort zone and into comfort â by definition, the door opens onto something less comfortable, at least at first.
The discomfort isnât the detour. Itâs the toll. Itâs what you pay to be standing somewhere new.
So, hereâs the whole of it, the thing this thin, scary, week taught me down in my bones:
The worry is real. And so are the solutions. Both things are true at once. Youâre allowed to feel fear honestly and to know, just as honestly, that youâre already resourced â in your literal pantry and in your unfinished pipeline â more than the fear will ever admit.
You donât have to make the discomfort disappear before youâre allowed to keep going.
You just have to take stock, remember whatâs already in motion, and take the next ordinary step.
The dollars come when they come. The discomfort passes when it passes. And in the meantime, you are not in free fall.
Youâre just standing somewhere new. đżđŸ
đ From the Den â for paid subscribers
This is where I get bear-bones honest with the real numbers and the part of the week I donât put on the public porch.
