MARINATED STEAK
6 / 23 / 2026
I’m high.
On creating.
Floating in the lands of “holy shit this is good” and “what ifs”.
I’m so invigorated and obsessed with what I am writing that I can’t wait another minute to send it out. It feels like I’m going to burst if someone doesn’t read it and share the excitement with me soon.
But I’m a vet at this point, and the creation highs don’t have their sweet claws in me like they used to.
Over the last six years of writing, teaching, coaching, and creating content, I’ve learned there’s something even more satisfying than the original inspiration hit.
And that’s letting it marinate.
Thankfully, I’ve learned to do the same thing with my steak.
So I shut my laptop and I start getting ready for bed.
Oh, the luxuries of no longer vibrating with urgency.
Over the next few days, fourteen different lifetimes seem to take place.
And when it’s time to sit and write again, I open my laptop and realize I no longer resonate as strongly with what I originally wrote.
It’s incomplete, something I’m still discovering, and it’s just … not ready.
If I force it, I won’t be satisfied with it. Actually I might straight up resent it.
And I’ll enter the same circle of obligation. Because I said I would send out an email every week and maybe it was a good idea I just need to try harder but now I have nothing to show for it and I’m not keeping my word and I’m not dedicated enough and I’ll probably never be able to commit fully to anything in my life, it’s stupid to trust my heart and then I’ll miserably fail, and blah blah blah.
ARRRGGG - doesn’t it make you want to scream? Or hysterically laugh.
Either one will do.
Because it’s all ridiculous and rooted in fear.
You see, we think that on the other side of surrender is failure. Like if we stop forcing things in our life and we choose to surrender that we’ll flop on the beach like a dead fish and be swept away by the ocean waves never to be seen or remembered again. Or even worse, we’ll become poor and starve and experience a slow, agonizing death. I’m Italian American, trust me - the latter would be the worst.
But I’ve come to understand this - when I finally make it to the other side of obligation, I touch devotion.
And devotion, amori miei (my loves), is far from failure.
But it lives remarkably close to death.
(More on that another time).
Devotion moves with desire and agency.
Obligation moves with force and urgency.
One of those feels like living, the other one constantly feels like a fight.
One of them leaves room for something more matured, more fulfilling and more satisfying to come in.
One of them leaves us starving.
One of them is whole and complete. Enough in itself.
One of them will never be enough.
So I choose to show up with trust. Scrap the writing. Start over. And listen to what wants to flow through me. Honoring it by writing it.
Turns out the original email from last Thursday wasn't ready.
But I was.
Because it’s ok to become, before I produce.
So here we are. Part of me worried if this will be enough for you, the reader. But a whole lot of me feeling completed by what I discovered.
I feel pretty good about that.