(#3) the idea in your head may not be the thing you need to create.

This summer, I sat up early one morning thinking about a comment someone made at work, the exact quotation which I’ve forgotten. What I do remember is that the comment either implied (or said outright) that people who live in poverty cannot afford to eat healthy foods. And I remember struggling to make sense of that belief, struggling to orient myself inside of that world. I didn’t believe that it was true, but what if I was wrong?

So many people think that poverty means that you don’t have enough money, but more than that, it means you don’t have a support system. You don’t have someone you can turn to when money gets tight, when you get laid off at work, when your partner gets sick or dies, when your car breaks down and there’s no one to watch your kids. It's about isolation. I’ve been very poor at times in my life, but I have never lacked that system of support, the family and friends who I know and trust without a doubt would take care of me if I needed them to. Which means that I approach poverty as someone who has not experienced it.

It has never sat well with me that the values I hold are only available to people with means, that a personal value like wanting to buy local or organic food can only be held if you have a certain socio-economic status. It doesn’t sit right with me, but it is basically true. But does poverty mean that it is pointless/hopeless/not possible to be concerned with nutrition? All of this to say that I struggled with it.

And I was struck with what felt like inspiration. I got excited, I started typing furiously. I was going to write about the ways that the values I held could be available to anyone, I was going to write about the difficult choices and the dilemmas that faced a person who doesn’t make enough money to waltz into Whole Foods and buy everything he or she wants to.

I took a leap of faith and bought a domain name. I bought a one-year subscription to Squarespace. I dove in. And despite feeling curious, and passionate, despite investing my money and thought and time, I couldn’t write what I wanted to write. And so I spent the second half of 2014 reflecting on this fact:

The idea in your head may not be the thing you need to create.

I want to write about food. I care about health. I care, desperately, about the quality of life for each human being. But no matter how hard I tried to write that blog, no matter how many drafts and drafts I typed out, it wouldn’t come out right. What seemed thoughtful and eloquent and relevant in my head was trite and forced and didactic on the page. I hated it. For the last few months, I’ve resolved over and over again to start writing that blog and it just won’t happen.

The thing in my head was the start, it was the first spark, but what it becomes may look very different. And the harder I try to bring only that one manifestation to life, the worse it looks and feels.

It is so hard to know when and how to let something go, especially because I believe that to overcome my own resistance, I have to force my way through the weeds, keep going when I want to stop. But sometimes the idea in your head just won’t come to life, or it’s meant to come to life in another way. And it will - if you let it.