Hey there. Can I interrupt whatever you’re working on? 

Let me tell you about my last two weeks. I learned a lot of things. Most of them were not good. Twice I found myself in extremely uncomfortable situations created by other people.  In the process, people who I thought were better people turned out not to be better people.

I got rejected for at least three things that I really needed, or at the very least wanted, to happen. It might be four if I let my mind wander.

I flatlined creatively, too. I spent several entire complete afternoons at a coffee shop typing and deleting words until I’d convinced myself that my time was better spent editing video, which I also scrapped.

I skipped out on a show that was offered last Friday because I didn’t have anything new to work on.

I guarantee you I neglected a few more things that aren’t leaping to mind.

So why tell you all this?

Because when you start seeing my posts from Italy next month, or someone else’s feed flashes nothing but the wins, or no matter how far down you scroll on Facebook you just see thing after thing that you don’t have sitting over there in the Joneses driveway… when that happens, remember that we’re all sitting in the same gumbo pot.

We’re wondering if this crazy thing we’ve decided to do is going to pay off, or whether we should bury ourselves back in a cubicle.  And we look around and everybody else is just killing it, and makes you contemplate tossing it all in.

So I just thought I’d let you know that it happens to all of us.  Especially me.  I think about quitting all the time, too, in case you were wondering. 

But before I let that story congeal in my brain container, I make myself go back over the wins from the last two weeks as well.  I won’t bore you with them, but there are a few. Enough, anyway. Tiny ones, but they add up. Pro tip: write them down.

And that’s all you can do sometimes; just try to get the scale back to even for the moment. Just one more rung on that stupid salmon ladder in those ninja warrior gyms. I’m just here to let you know that it’s not just you. Those sounds you hear are the rest of us grunting and groaning and side-eyeing the exit sign right alongside you, swinging our own bars, hoping our cores hold.

And I’m telling you you got this. Now get back to work.