-Oh my gosh,Writing as a Way of Healingby Louise DeSalvo is INSANE. So good. I originally picked it up to explore writing for emotional well-being, but it also doubles as a guide on how to write a book. I underlined or starred something on almost every page. You can see my enthusiasm scribbled all over the inside cover.
–The Art of Slow Writingalso by Louise DeSalvo—a book I found going down the rabbit hole after readingWriting as a Way of Healing. It’s incredible. If you’re a writer, you need to read it. I love how she writes and what she writes about. So I of course had to pick up her memoirVertigo, which is STELLAR so far. (More on that one next month!)
–The Autobiography of Malcolm Xby, well, Malcolm X is just as powerful as everyone says. Super eye-opening. I considered things I hadn’t before. And it’s incredibly inspiring: a man reads his way through a prison library and becomes one of the most powerful activists in the world. He would be so sad to see the state of our country today.
In 1984, a scientist named Jean-Pierre Petit proposed something strange: what if there were two overlapping worlds—ours and a mirror version of it? A universe layered on top of our own, invisible but just as present.
The idea was mostly ignored. Too weird, too sci-fi. But what if he was onto something? Not necessarily about physics—but about life?
Maybe Petit’s idea describes our lives more than we think.
Because most of what shapes us—and what holds us back—isn’t tangible. It’s internal architecture—rules, beliefs, expectations—built over the years. It can feel like we’re trapped.
We move through this internal world without realizing it, adjusting ourselves to unspoken rules, to barriers no one can see but everyone seems to obey. These are the invisible walls.
Sometimes we run into them. Other times, we build them ourselves. Often, we contort around them, not knowing we could walk straight through.
But here’s the hard part: breaking through these internal barriers doesn’t always feel like progress. It can feel like doubt. Like loss. Like wasted effort. Like nothing at all.
But what if that’s because the barriers don’t actually exist?
It never feels like it’s working…until it is
In 1936, in what’s often called one of the most mentally and physically grueling sports on the planet, the University of Washington crew members Joe Rantz, Roger Morris, and George Hunt led their team to an Olympic gold medal in Berlin, Germany. They won by a fraction of a second.
But that fraction wasn’t won in the race, of course. It was won in the years before, in all the practices, all the invisible miles no one saw.
During their collegiate career, each had taken nearly half a million (469,000) strokes with his oar. Each had rowed approximately 4,344 miles—nearly the equivalent of Seattle to Japan.
But here’s where it gets interesting: of the 4,344 miles rowed, only 28 were during an actual race.
28!
More than 99% of what they did was practice. Invisible.
Each mile, each stroke felt endless—filled with doubt, pain, and exhaustion. Yet they kept rowing, trusting in something they couldn’t see.
There’s the 100/0 rule in relationships (give everything, expect nothing), but what if it applies to anything worth doing? To do the thing you won’t get credit for. To keep showing up when it feels like nothing is changing.
Big wins look like they happen in big moments. They don’t. They happen in the days and months and years of quiet dedication. The problem is that most of us stop when we don’t see immediate proof. We think, If it were working, wouldn’t I feel different by now? Wouldn’t I have something to show for it?
But that’s the thing: it never feels like it’s working—until, one day, it is.
How to escape a room with no door
There’s an old problem in architecture: how do you design a space that feels open, even when it’s enclosed?
The answer?
Natural light.
In other words, you don’t need more doors. You just need a window.
The same is true in life. When Clive Cussler began writing novels in 1965, he produced two manuscripts—Pacific Vortex! and The Mediterranean Caper. There was one problem though: no one would publish them.
So he got creative. “He created a fake letterhead for an agency that didn’t exist,” writes Cal Newport, “and then sent a note to a real agent, Peter Lampack, asking if he was interested in taking on this promising new writer named Clive whom he didn’t have time to represent. The plan worked.”
How often do we feel trapped when a door doesn’t open, as if there was only one route to our destination? How many opportunities do we overlook because the solution isn’t perfect?
Cussler’s solution was another form of invisible effort—quiet, creative, persistent. When the publishing door wouldn’t budge, he was pragmatic enough to spot a window. And flexible enough to slip through.
The real escape
You wouldn’t know it by looking at him today—mentor, author of six books, Director of Strategy and Innovation with #cut50—but in 1991, at just nineteen years old, Shaka Senghor was sentenced to up to 40 years in prison for shooting and killing a man during a paranoid argument.
At first, his sentencing nearly broke him. The grief. The shame. The weight of what he’d done. He’d let his family down. Taken a life. Left his infant son without a father.
But a few years into his sentence, something quietly shifted.
He started to read.
He picked up The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a book that would change how he saw himself and the world. He devoured stacks of books—stories about survivors, leaders, men and women who had been shattered and then remade. If they could do it, maybe he could, too.
So he kept reading. He journaled. He faced himself. He mentored younger prisoners. He made plans despite the uncertainty of when he’d be released. Would he get out at age thirty-six? Sixty? Ever? He couldn’t predict his future—that was painfully obvious. But he could do everything in his power to build it.
Over the twenty years he ultimately served—seven of them in solitary confinement—Shaka published essays in national outlets. He co-authored a children’s book. He published a novel. He mentored. He studied. He led.
He did it without physical freedom. Without quiet. Without internet access.
He did it from inside a concrete cell.
Because Shaka had grasped something that few ever do: the strongest walls aren’t made of brick or stone. They’re built from false beliefs. From expectations we accept. From rules we never question. From windows we overlook. From quiet work we leave undone.
What stops us is rarely a lack of skill—it’s a lack of imagination, of flexibility, of will.
Shaka’s greatest rebellion wasn’t against concrete walls—it was against the idea that walls could define him at all.
By rejecting boundaries and doing the invisible, patient work of personal revolution, he freed himself long before his cell door opened.
Here’s a strange thought based on Jean-Pierre Petit’s theory:
Right now, in a parallel version of your life, you’ve already started the thing you’re afraid to start.
You’ve already had the conversation you’re avoiding.
You’ve already let go of what’s weighing you down.
You’ve already become the person you could be.
The only difference between you and that version of you?
That version stopped waiting for permission.
Because the walls were never real.
And you’ve been free this whole time.
Books Read:
-I read Leo Tolstoy’s super short stories The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, which I really enjoyed. I followed it with another short fictional story that I liked…
–Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Some takeaways I wrote in the flyleaf: consistent, small acts of kindness make up a good life. The fear of not doing something should be bigger than the fear of doing it.
-Oh my gosh, Michael Lewis is just a master storyteller. The Big Short is the story of how a lack of ethics and accountability, doused in greed, led to the housing market’s implosion in ’08. This easily could have been a dull book of numbers. Instead, it’s a thrilling narrative of how it all went down. I’m also eager to read his newest book, released this month, Who is Government?
–Transcendentalism and the Cultivation of the Soul by Barry M. Andrews. This is absolutely one of my favorite books I’ve read this year. It’s based on the ideas of Goethe, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau, who paved the way for a movement that urged people to think for themselves and follow their unique nature. I need to read Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’sWalden—a book Andrews said “is one of the most memorable treatises ever written on the art of life.” One of the best parts of this book was the bibliography. It led me to the book Writing Down Your Soul by Janet Conner (which I had on my bookshelf and forgot about, and, according to Amazon, I bought it in 2012!), whose recommended reading list led me to Writing as a Way of Healing by Louise DeSalvo—one of the absolute best books I’ve read on writing! (More on that one next month!) DeSalvo’s book is so good that I’ve started reading another of hers, The Art of Slow Writing, which is PHENOMENAL so far.
–Writing My Wrongs by Shaka Senghor. WOW. I only put this book down when I had to. Senghor knows how to tell a story, and he was so candid that I felt like I knew him. I even wrote, “I love this dude!” in the margin. Another favorite read so far this year.
In Meditations for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman says the main problem with how we approach decision-making is that we treat decisions as things that happen to us. Should we accept the marriage proposal? Take the job offer?
But the far more life-enhancing approach is not to wait for decisions to come along, but to hunt them. “In other words,” he says, “to operate on the assumption that somewhere, in . . . .your work or your life, lurks at least one decision you could make, right now, in order to get unstuck and get moving.” Steve Chandler refers to this decision-making as a form of choosing—similar-sounding but massively different from ‘trying to decide’ or figuring out what to do next. “You could fritter months trying to work out how to best begin the screenplay you’ve been meaning to write and you might never succeed,” Burkeman writes. “But to take the three opening scenes you’ve been pondering and just choose one is the work of a moment, and unequivocally within your capabilities.”
There are only two rules. The first is that your decision must be an action; you can’t just decide in your mind—you have to take a physical step. The second rule is that the step doesn’t need to be grand. It can be as small as you like.
Keep making these tiny-but-real decisions, and eventually, you’ll reach the point where finishing—the screenplay, the album, the grant proposal—is just the next step.
The solution wasn’t perfect…but they were making progress
In 1881, Booker T. Washington arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama, to be a leader for the new Black industrial schools. At the time, the conditions of schools for Black children “were worse than stables that housed farm animals,” writes Sharon McMahon in The Small and the Mighty. Any money mainly went to the teacher’s measly salaries; there was no money for books or materials. If Washington needed funds, he would have to raise them himself.
Businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald had recently read and was touched by Washington’s autobiography Up from Slavery. The two became friends, and Washington asked Rosenwald to help fund six one-room schools for Black children. Rosenwald, who had recently given nearly all of his fortune away to various charities—about $21 million in today’s dollars—and had a little left over, agreed on the condition that the state and community match his contributions. Booker readily agreed, as he “believed in JR’s philosophy that people appreciate gifts more when they are required to contribute,” writes McMahon. “Making the recipient contribute funds demonstrated that there was public support for the initiative, and it meant that the recipient was likely to take care of the resources it used.”
Over the next two decades, Julius Rosenwald, partnering with Black communities and the Tuskegee Institute, built five thousand schools. The community rallied and gave what they could. One of JR’s employees of the Rosenwald fund said, “I have never seen greater human sacrifices made for the cause of education. Children without shoes on their feet gave from fifty cents to one dollar and old men and old women, whose costumes represented several years of wear, gave from one to five dollars. . . . It should be borne in mind that funds with which this project was completed came from people who represented a poor working class, men who wired at furnaces, women who washed and ironed for white people, and children who chopped cotton in the heat of the day for money to go in their snuff boxes.” Sharon McMahon writes, “Everyone did what they could, where they were, with the resources available to them.”
Thanks to the Rosenwald schools, hundreds of thousands of children were now being educated. The schools were still segregated and unequal, but Booker and JR knew that “they were working within the confines of an existing societal structure . . . . educating students had to be realistic.” Still, they “change[d] the course of history in an imperfect way.” The Rosenwald schools provided education for children who would go on to become famous civil rights leaders, including Maya Angelou. “And so while the schools were not equal or integrated . . . . without their ability to become educated, integration and equality under the law would not have occurred. Education was simply too powerful a weapon, and without the lift from JR, there is little chance that states would have allowed African Americans to wield it.” Without imperfect solutions, without tiny-but-real decisions, progress would not have been made.
Something in the bag at the end of each day
Between 1947 and 1948, President Harry Truman moved at a rapid pace. There was much to do. “Plans had to be conceived and clarified with minimum delay, imagination applied, decisions reached, and always with the realities and imponderables of politics weighed in the balance.” McCullough writes. “The pressure was unrelenting.” In response to critics, naval commander George Elsey would say, “‘You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points. You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.’”
If there was one thing Harry Truman was good at, it was getting things done. He said his greatest responsibility as President was to make decisions. He had to decide. He had to make a choice and act on it. In one of Harry’s initial meetings with Stalin and Churchill, Churchill proposed they discuss three or four points at each meeting. This frustrated Truman to no end. “‘I don’t want to discuss, I want to decide,’” he’d say. “Truman had kept insisting on results, not talk,” writes McCullough. He wanted “something in the bag at the end of each day.” A tiny-but-real decision. A move forward, imperfect or otherwise.
Books Read:
–The Man with the Golden Typewriter by Fergus Fleming is a collection of letters that Ian Fleming wrote while working on various projects, including the James Bond series. I skimmed through the more obscure and long-winded sections but found some valuable insights on writing, editing, and publishing.
–The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips was fantastic. It’s full of mini-biographies of mothers who were writers and artists and how they navigated creative life and motherhood. Really great stuff in here on self and authenticity.
-Wow. Ethan Mollick’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI was eye-opening. Imagine a computer that doesn’t simply follow commands but “thinks” alongside you. That’s how Mollick says we should view artificial intelligence. Unlike an Excel spreadsheet that automates repetitive tasks, AI is more like a creative partner you engage with. Whether we like it or not, it’s here and already changing how we live and work. This book should be required reading.
-I LOVED Marva A. Barnett’s To Love is to Act: Les Misérables and Victor Hugo’s Vision for Leading Lives of Conscience. It’s part biography, part deep dive into how and why Huge wrote one of history’s greatest pieces of literature. Hugo fought for the poor, denounced capital punishment, and believed in the power of redemption. The novel’s heart—Jean Valjean vs. Javert, humanity vs. the law—reflects his own battles. Les Misérables, says Barnett, is ultimately a story about love and Hugo’s belief that it wasn’t enough simply to feel love and compassion—one must act on it. His philosophy is succinctly expressed in some of the last words he ever wrote: to love is to act.
