Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

Today, our topic is comfort. Isn't it always? Isn't it always? Like, don't I wake up every day of my life

kind of going, and you need a little comfort? Actually, I don't because I've been doing my anti-anxiety measures

and they work. But we'll talk about that many times. Speaking of which, I am writing this book

about anxiety and I've done all this research and I put it out in proposal and my publisher bought it and made me super happy, but only now have they written the contract.

So I kind of had January off. It was great. I was making a I was making podcasts in a course for later on in the year called The Art of Calm. You should come. It's going to be great. Anyway, my point is I had a month of doing other work and now I need to start writing again.

And in case you don't believe this, if you don't know this, if you haven't written a book

or you have written a book and it was easy for you, just know this.

Writing a book is not easy for me.

It's hard. It's really hard. And it's scary. You're afraid of everything. I'm afraid of getting

I'm afraid of everything. Afraid of getting things wrong. Afraid of sounding like a fool. Afraid of

confusing my reader. Afraid of not helping my reader. Afraid of my editor saying, that's not a word,

which she likes to do occasionally. And sometimes we don't agree. But I always let her go with that.

If you're out there, we'll go with your words. Anyway, it's a profoundly uncomfortable place.

There's always the blank page. And I have a lot of

writer friends now, and we're all terrified of the blank page. Liz Gilbert probably would say

she's not afraid of the blank page, but she still said writing her last novel, every day was

a joyride, and then she'd get up the next day to write and she'd

think, I don't want to. There's a part of us that it's just like, writer's block is a thing

because you're creating something that you've never done before. It's the very first time and that's

always unnerving. So I was looking at Instagram today and I saw this Instagram actually

Roe showed it to me. My social media window on the world is the cutest little

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