I have a confession. Somewhere around page 100 of the sib book I’ve been writing, I stopped. (Not the book proposal that was just accepted.) This blog, in a book. I hired an editor. She did a once-over, and I did not finish the corrections.
Not because I ran out of things to say. Not because the project fell apart. I just… stopped. And if you’re a sib, you probably know exactly what that feels like — starting something with everything you’ve got, riding that first wave of momentum, and then hitting a wall that has nothing to do with whether the thing matters to you.
Sibs are so often the ones who keep things moving. We’re the planners, the ones who show up, the ones who don’t let the ball drop. So when something we care about stalls out — a project, a goal, a relationship, our own rest — it can feel like a personal failure instead of just… a normal part of how things go.
Here’s what I’m learning, again, at page 100: momentum and meaning aren’t the same thing. The book still matters. The stall doesn’t erase the 100 pages that came before it, nor does it disqualify the pages that are still ahead. And it may continue once the other book is published.
If you’re in a stall right now — with a project, with grief, with a relationship with your sibling, with anything — I’d gently push back on the story that the stall means it’s over. Sometimes it just means you’re between waves.
I’ll keep you posted on the book. In the meantime, if you want to be there when it launches, my email list is the first to know:
