580 Days

It's 10:47 on a Thursday night, and I am walking circles in my backyard in the dark.

The phone in my hand says 6,214. I need 7,000. The string lights throw a yellow glow across the grass, and I walk the edge of it — around the patio chairs, past the bird feeders, along the fence line, back again. Hiccup watches me through the glass door with his head tilted, trying to work out why I’m pacing the yard at this hour.

786 steps to go. I could go inside. Nobody would know.

I would know.

So I keep walking. And when the phone sounds with that small, ridiculous celebration, I stand there in the dark looking at the digital flame of accomplishment and feel something I can only describe as proud of an entirely pointless thing.

That was a Thursday somewhere in the middle of 580 days.

Five hundred eighty. That's where the streak sits today. Seven thousand steps a day, every day, no exceptions, no borrowing from yesterday.

Here is what 580 days actually looks like:

It looks like pacing a fifteen-foot loop beside the gas pump while the numbers climb, because the tank takes four minutes and four minutes is four hundred steps. It looks like walking the concourse at Gate C29 with my backpack straps making my shoulders ache, passing the same newspaper stand for the fourth time, nodding at the clerk who has now definitely noticed me. It looks like answering the phone and immediately standing up, because a twenty-minute conversation is a mile tracked up and down the hallway and around the coffee table.

It looks like carrying one load of laundry down the hall instead of three.

Nobody is watching, and whether it’s 10 pm on my driveway, the walking track at the gym, or grocery store aisles, somewhere around day thirty I stopped negotiating with myself about it.

Sixty days into the steps, I get on a plane.

Bob Goff is hosting a Writer's Workshop at a retreat center called The Oaks, tucked into the hills in Southern California, and I registered one week before the retreat — excitedly, and then immediately with regret.

I arrive with my laptop and a secret. The secret is that I am not a writer. I am a woman with fifteen years of blog posts, an annual Christmas letter, and a story that will not leave me alone, and everyone in this room is going to figure that out by dinner on the first day.

They don't. Bob opens the first session by asking us to introduce ourselves and share what we are writing. I freak out inside and make up something about an idea I have for a memoir.

Three short days — sessions in the morning, hours in the afternoon to actually write instead of talk about writing, a living room with a fireplace, and enough odd corners that everybody finds their own. Each night, around the fire, a group of people who were strangers on Monday take turns sharing the things they are trying to put on paper. Nobody competes. Everybody cheers. I keep bracing to be found out, and instead, I keep getting handed a chair.

And then Bob says the thing.

Write 500 words a day. They can be bad words. That’s okay because later you can turn them into something better. Just start writing.

I write the number.

500.

Five hundred words a day. Same rules as the steps. I don't go to bed until they're written.

I fly home and that first night, I write about motherhood feeling like walking on a tightrope. It is not good. It is 500 words of nothing and everything — I’ve never even walked on a tight rope. I close my laptop feeling faintly embarrassed, hoping nobody ever reads it.

Day two, I write about a photo of me sleeping on my dad’s chest when I was two weeks old.

Day nine, something cracks open. I am typing fast, and I am not thinking about whether it's good, and when I look up, it's been an hour, and there are 1,400 words on the screen, and my face is wet, and I don't remember starting.

I write like that for three months. Grocery lists of memory. Fragments. Scenes with no home. I turn the editor off entirely — she is loud and she is unhelpful at 10 pm — and I let the pile grow.

Then one day, I open a new document and realize the pile has a shape.

The next six months, I stop writing pieces and start writing a book.

There's a day I remember better than the others. I'm four hours in on a Monday, working on the hardest chapter — the one I've been circling for weeks, taking the long way around, writing everything adjacent to it. And I get to the paragraph. The real one. My hands come off the keys and sit in my lap and I watch the cursor blink at me for what has to be five full minutes.

Because the thing about a memoir is that I am not the only person in it.

I pick up my phone. I text someone I love, and I ask, "Is it okay if I tell this part?

Then I put the phone in my pocket, and I walk the hallway until it buzzes.

That is the part I wrestle with the most. Not the discipline. Not the blank page. The part where the story I tell is stitched to people I would lay down in traffic for, and I have to figure out — line by line, scene by scene — what is mine to carry into the light and what belongs to somebody else.

Six months later I hit "print" for the first time. The stack comes out warm. I hold it in two hands, and it has actual weight, and I set it on the kitchen table and just look at it for a while.

A first draft. Sixty thousand words. I send it to my writing group and a few friends to get feedback.

Then three months of editing, which is where I learn that writing a book and finishing a book are two entirely different sports.

Editing looks like this: I read a chapter I love. I have read it forty times. I know its rhythms the way I know a hymn. And I sit with it, and I ask the honest question — does this belong to the book, or does it just belong to me?

It belongs to me.

I highlight fourteen hundred words. I hover. I paste them into a document called "pieces" so I can pretend it isn't a funeral. Then I delete them and I sit in my kitchen and I feel genuinely, absurdly sad, and I close my laptop and go walk the driveway to get the mail I already got.

I figure out how I want to write it and rewrite entire chapters one scene, one day at a time.

Second draft, fifty thousand words, done.

Which brings me to right now, which is the vulnerable part, so let me just say it plainly.

I am not finished. The manuscript is not ready. There is a document on my desktop that says "Dear Agent" and then stops, and I have opened it but have added no words to it.

And I am scared.

Not of the work — the work I know how to do. I have proven to myself 580 times that I will do the hard thing when nobody is watching. I'm scared of the other part. That I'll do all of this and no one will want it. That I'll do all of this and someone will want it, and then people who know me — people who love me, people I love, people who are in it — will read the most vulnerable things I have ever written and I won't be able to take them back.

Both of those fears are real.

But I have the notebook from The Oaks on my desk, and I have a fire pit in the hills of California where a circle of strangers listened to me say out loud what I was trying to write and did not laugh. And I have 580 days of evidence that I will do the hard, unwatched thing anyway.

So what I can do is get up tomorrow and write, and get up the next day and write, and keep pointing the tips of the skis toward the sky while God does whatever He is doing with all of it. Five hundred words does not care whether I am afraid. It only asks whether I showed up.

That's the thing I did not expect the walking to teach me. I thought I was building a habit. I was building evidence.

It's 10:51 now. The phone says 6,980.

Twenty more steps, and I'm going to go get them.

And tell me — what's the hard thing you're doing that nobody is watching? Leave it in the comments. I'd love to know I'm not the only one out there in the dark.