What To Do When You Can't Power Through

“It’s supposed to be in the nineties today,” Mark warns, as he shoots off to work, leaving me alone at my desk with my fear of sweating to death and, worse, a blank screen.

It’s already mid-July, or should I say it’s only mid-July, in that messy middle of summer, when I can’t yet mourn the speed at which these days of freedom are slipping away, but I can still get mad at myself for wasting the first month (where did June go?), waiting to hear from editors on two big projects and trying to write a beast of a new essay.

When my friend Sue calls to invite me to her Cape house some summer weekend, I moan about my struggles with my current writing project. “I can’t get any traction,” I tell her. “Maybe it’s not what I’m supposed to be working one. Or maybe it just sucks. Maybe I suck.”

“You usually make things happen by powering through,” Sue tells me, recognizing that quality in me, mostly because she has it, too. When we hear the words “probably not” or “I don’t think so”, we never back down. Instead we go sniffing around for the hidden access to that thing we’re being denied. If we can’t find an elegant way in, we pound our fists on the door of our desire, until we either burst it open, or annoy someone else into unlocking it for us. While not always fun, (Mark can vouch for how noisy it gets), it’s usually pretty effective. Until it isn’t.

“But some things you just can’t power through,” Sue reminds me. “There has to be surrender.”

As a kid, powering through was the only thing that worked. My parents offered minimal support for what I wanted, so I learned to be assertive and imaginative with my needs. When my mother nixed an activity that I wanted to try, I saved my money and figured out what bus to take to get there.

Powering through made me independent and tenacious, but it never taught me what to do when force and determination failed. And this summer, trying to power through a stuck writing project—while willing others into fruition—has put me in that vulnerable place of “what now?”

I had just hung up with Sue when my minister friend, Reverend Liz, called (an unusually chatty day for me). When I told her what I’d been thinking about, she described Brené Brown’s concept of “the messy middle.”

It’s where you want to just give up on a situation, but have already invested too much to quit.

It’s the second act in the movie in which the protagonist faces test after test in trying to fulfill her desires, but still keeps stumbling around, unable to find her elusive treasure. It’s the point at which everything feels hopeless. The dark abyss in the heroine’s journey.

It’s the place where I am struggling now, because I can’t power something into existence. My messy middle is me sitting at the base of a locked door in mid-July, my heart cracked and bruised from hurling myself so hard against it. It is the hot pressed hand of summer, keeping me from enjoying a Popsicle and a little happiness.

Useful, right?

So what to do?

Reverend Liz passes on Brene’s advice from her book “Rising Strong.” She says to “reckon” with our emotions, and “rumble” through the stories we are telling ourselves. (I can’t do this. I’m lazy, disorganized, and stupid. Oh, and I suck, too).

Only then, when we let ourselves be vulnerable and allow those feelings to wash through us can we change our story.

It takes hours of feeling like crap, but I finally turn my back on the door I’ve been pummeling all morning and lay down on my office floor. Then I cry, not quite the drenching summer rain that washes the world as bright and clean as Dorothy’s first glimpse of Oz, but still good and cleansing.

When I’m done, I’m done. And my story has changed.

My writing needs a little more time and love. It needs some forgiveness and, yes, a good editor, but only when she is back from vacation and has attention for my words. It also needs to say good-bye to my boy who leaves for college in one month, and a daughter who is wrestling her way into 16. It needs a long swim in Walden Pond when the day is through. It needs some surrender, some summer. And it definitely needs a Popsicle.