on doing the thing because it's hard

i promised myself i would get up this morning and write to you. the last time i wrote you, i was was headed into a ten day, silent retreat. as i alluded to, i am a long processor and i am almost ready to start writing about that, but not yet (though there is a poem i can send you, if you’re really interested - reach out).

what i am ready to write about is what has me typing into substack before the sun is up, what i spiral back to once a year or so, what my students got sick of hearing about from me: doing things because they’re hard.

morning dew on spiderwebs at Philips Academy in Andover, MA where i participated in Andover Breadloaf’s workshop for educators this summer.

i’m not a morning person, though i like mornings, because i am a lifelong sleepygirl. there is almost never a moment throughout the day where i would not be willing to get back into bed given the opportunity. giving up that extra thirty minutes to an hour in the morning to make the space for writing, and meditation, and the foundation for the kind of day i’d always like to have seems like an easy trade, but for me it’s still a fight everyday (and friend, i’ve been losing for a couple weeks). i keep hoping this will get easier.

what i am thinking about this morning is: it is precisely because it is a fight that makes it worth doing. it is because it is a sacrifice that makes doing it meaningful.

i’ve been hosting a reading hour at a coffee shop i love for a little over a year. we read whatever book we brought for an hour and then those who want to stay and discuss a little of what they read, stay for an additional hour. it’s usually a pretty small group, but the conversations are rich and moving every time, somehow spiraling around a central theme for the evening no matter how disparate the books we each read are—a sort of communal magic.

last month no one came.

it was july in new orleans, notoriously a bad time to host anything or do anything but be still and wait for the heat to dissipate, and i’d had to reschedule because of an issue at the coffeeshop, but it’s hard not to take nobody showing up as feedback. no one had asked for reading hour in the first place. it was a thing i saw happening elsewhere that i wanted to exist in new orleans, so i put it together. if people weren’t interested, who was i to keep pushing it.

but then a couple people who had participated in the past reached out and asked when the next one was, so i scheduled it again, made the canva flyer, and showed up.

this month we had the most people we’ve ever had.

the quotes many of us chose centered around this tension between our very real and limiting context and our very real and powerful agency. we talked about the ease of blaming circumstance and doing nothing, the difficulty of breaking patterns you’ve inherited, the dire need for creativity and the courage to carry it through, the importance of how your perspective and daily habits can be the difference between knowing and doing, how making small ripples can be enough.

we talked about how for some of us who had been to reading hour before, even coming to a space we enjoy and doing an activity we find meaning in is a challenge—the connection and vulnerability we know we need requires more from us than the isolation our culture profits from. how even in showing up to read near and talk about books with people we don’t know, or didn’t know before, is an act of resisting that culture, of building a world closer to the one we want, if only for a moment.

i am knee deep in articles and essays planning for the first college class i’ve ever taught which starts a week from today. i am trying to make English Comp not the the class everyone hates, trying to make it meaningful beyond just being useful. i am reckoning with the fact that most people do not want to write, reckoning with it as a teacher for the first time in the face of ubiquitous AI. this weekend i paused in all that trying and wrote my students a letter about how writing is hard for everyone and that is precisely why we need to do it and do it again:

this skill, pushing past the comfortable you, the you that would rather do the the thing tomorrow, or tomorrow’s tomorrow because tomorrow is a concept more than a time, the skill of ignoring complacent you and doing the thing that you do not want to do that will bring you closer to the things you want is an act of becoming the you that has those things. like anything else, this becomes easier the more you do it.

today i have gotten up and done the thing that was hard for me and tomorrow i may falter, but each time i choose to do it again is its own prayer, it’s own new world, it’s own victory.

thank you for reading. it means the world.

with hope,

katie wills evans