🌿 The Grove Journals #39
The Voice That Isn't Lying — Just Guessing Wrong
On the difference between a warning and a forecast — and why my nervous system keeps confusing the two.
I want to tell you about a very specific moment this week, because I think it’s the whole letter in miniature.
It was raining — again — and I was elbow-deep in dishes, pans stacked on every flat surface, glass storage containers waiting their turn in the dishwasher, and somewhere underneath the physical work, a much older, much louder voice started up its usual monologue: you don’t have enough. You’re not going to have enough. Something is going to go wrong, and you will not be ready for it.
Here’s the thing. That week, the voice wasn’t entirely making things up. I had a customer invoice I’d been promised payment on — and had already sent one polite reminder about — was still sitting unpaid five days later. The tightness was real. The dates were real. My bank account was not exaggerating anything.
So, what do you do when the scary voice in your head is at least partially right?
You do what I’ve apparently been quietly teaching myself to do for months now, and only just caught myself doing on purpose: you go find the evidence. Not the feeling — the evidence.
I opened the pantry. I looked in the freezer. I did not let the voice narrate an “empty house” from the next room — I walked in and looked myself. And what I found, again, was a house that was actually fine. Fed. Held. Resourced enough for the actual week in front of me, regardless of what the fear was forecasting three weeks out.
That’s when it landed for me, clean and simple, in a way it hadn’t quite before: that voice doesn’t lie, per se. It just forecasts.
(and pretty badly, at that) 🤪🤣
It takes the one real, true, present-tense data point — money is tight right now — and quietly, without asking permission, extends it into an infinite, unknowable, uncontrollable future, and then hands me that extended version dressed up as fact. “You don’t have enough” becomes “you will never have enough.” “This bill was hard to cover” becomes “everything is about to fall apart.”
The starting data is real. The forecast is fiction wearing the data’s coat.
And once I saw that distinction — data versus forecast — I couldn’t unsee how often I’ve been treating the forecast as gospel.
I want to be honest about the parts of this that are still genuinely a risk, though, because I promised you this rebuild would be told with the real numbers and the real uncertainty left in, not sanded down into a tidy lesson.
I made a calculated bet this year pulling two of my three pen names out of Kindle Unlimited — sending them wide, and building their main homes on Substack instead of leaving them entirely inside Amazon’s walls. It’s the right call, structurally; keeping every egg in one platform’s basket is its own kind of risk, just a quieter, more invisible one. But it means I don’t get the tidy, comforting weekly page-read number on those two anymore. I traded a familiar metric for a sturdier foundation, and some weeks that trade still makes the scarcity-voice very loud, because it can’t point at a shrinking number and say “see, told you,” it just has less information to work with and fills the silence with worse guesses.
Meanwhile, the one pen name still fully inside Kindle Unlimited — my cozy mysteries — became the entire home of a much bigger goal I said out loud not all that long ago, half laughing at myself as I said it: I want to go from an average of a thousand page reads a week to a thousand a day. Not in the span of a month (LOL — I wish!!), so I knew the biggest part of that “battle” would be with my own impatience. But as a genuine, real target for these next few months — which I am currently about calf-deep into and slowly progressing.
It’s either going to work beautifully, or it’s going to teach me something valuable about why it doesn’t. Either way, it’s not the forecast-voice talking. It’s the data-and-a-plan voice. There’s a difference, and I’m slowly getting better at telling them apart.
🔒 The rest of this letter — the part where I admit what I’m actually scared of, the phone call that should have been purely good news, and the real ledger numbers — is below, for paid subscribers.
