Reaching the summit
or when there's always another mountain to climb
Hello again, friends. As I come back from my hiatus I feel both more refreshed and more tired than ever. The end of the year is both welcome and a terrifying reminder that somehow 2025 is basically done and I have little to externally show for it. At least when it comes to writing.
Here is where my friends and family would certainly step in and correct me and if I’m being fair to myself, I would as well. I did release a book this year (Maya in Multicolor!), but i't’s also a year that felt like 3 steps forward and then 10 steps back.
That’s the thing about being an author that no one really talks about, that the journey after publication is just as much of a fight and a slog as the journey to your debut book. Sometimes it’s as simple as simply struggling to write the next book, sometimes it’s more existential. Rejection is just as prevalent after debut as it was before and no one tells you that.
All of this has led to me feeling as if I’m hiking up a long trail. Constantly.
I think for a long time I believed that there was a summit to this entire journey. I don’t think I ever wrote it down or said it out loud, but somewhere in the architecture of how I thought about this career, this creative life, I believed there was an endpoint. A place where you plant a flag and catch your breath and get to just... be there.
Arrived. Established. Done climbing. Bag full of trail mix that never runs out.
The first book would be the summit. Then it wasn’t, so maybe it was the second book, or finishing the Tiger at Midnight trilogy, or some other marker I kept moving further up the trail.
Here I am after five published books and I’m here to tell you that there’s always another mountain to climb. The view from the summit, it turns out, is just of another mountain.
I don’t know why this keeps surprising me. You’d think after enough times, the pattern would sink in. But there’s something about the human brain, or maybe just my brain, that keeps believing this peak is the real one. That after this climb, I’ll get to rest.
Sometimes you know you’re climbing. You chose it. You laced up the boots, studied the route, packed your bag. That kind of hard is tolerable, even when it’s brutal, because it’s yours. You signed up for the challenge.
But sometimes a mountain just... appears.
You wake up one day and there it is, blocking the path you thought you were on. A mountain you didn’t agree to. A mountain you didn’t pack for.
That’s what these past six months have felt like as life hit me harder than it had in awhile (and that’s saying a lot given the last few years). I could feel the daily hike toward creativity getting harder, which only made me feel like I was falling even further behind in that longer trek to that mystical mountain peak.
There’s a specific exhaustion that comes from this kind of climbing. It’s different from the tired you feel when you choose the challenge because this one comes with a side of why.
Why this. Why now. Why, when I was already so tired.
But the cruelest version isn’t the surprise mountain. It’s the false summit.
You’ve been climbing for hours, your legs are screaming, you’re out of water and sweaty and then, there it is. The top. You can see it so you push through the next brutal stretch, lungs burning, muscles aching, and you reach it, and then…
It’s just a ridge.
The real summit is miles away, still obscured by clouds. You weren’t even close.
This is the one that gets me. The surprise mountains are hard, but at least they’re honest about what they are. The false summit makes you feel like a fool, like you should have known better than to hope.
I used to think stopping was the same as failing. That if you sat down on the trail, you’d never get back up. That the only way through was through, always, no matter what.
I’m not sure I believe that anymore.
Sometimes sitting down is the only thing that keeps you on the mountain at all.
I’m not even sure what that means yet. But I think that’s what I’m circling around here, that by thinking of creativity as a mountain to summit, I’ve been thinking about it all wrong.
So why do we keep climbing?
This is the part where I’m supposed to have an answer. Something about passion, or purpose, or the stories that live inside us demanding to be told. And maybe that’s part of it.
But I think the honest answer is messier than that. It’s stubbornness and love and habit and the terrifying inability to imagine a life where we don’t do this, we don’t write. It’s the way a blank page still feels like possibility, even after all the times it’s wrecked me.
I wish I could tie this up neatly. Give you the three steps to summit any mountain, the mindset shift that makes it all manageable, the reframe that turns exhaustion into fuel.
But I don’t have that yet. What I have is one simple statement I’m holding close.
I’m still here.
Still climbing, or maybe just starting to climb again. Still looking up at a peak I can’t quite see, unsure if it’s real or another ridge. Maybe that’s the actual skill we’re building, all this time.
Not how to reach summits, but how to be on the mountain, in the middle, with no peak in sight, with tired legs and an uncertain map, and somehow keep going anyway.
I’m curious: where are you on your mountain right now?
Are you climbing, resting, discovering a new mountain? I’d love to hear down in the comments. 💕
Support my writing
If you’re curious about the books I’ve written, you can learn more here. I’ve written a fantasy romance trilogy, a cozy rom-com with a touch of magic, and a college springtime romance.
Maya in Multicolor | The Boyfriend Wish | The Tiger at Midnight trilogy |