“if your Nerve, deny you-

go above your Nerve.”

Emily Dickinson

I am continuing to read tiny beautiful things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed. In her letter, Elissa Bassist – a 28 year old writer who battles the demons of insecurity and sadness and anxiety – asks Sugar about how to get beyond pain to be able to live and write. Elissa feels washed up, awful, and depressed.

Sugar explains, “If you had a two-sided chalkboard in your living room I’d write humility one side and surrender on the other one for you. … We get the work done on the ground level. And the kindest thing I can do for you is to tell you to get your ass on the floor. I know it’s hard to write, darling. But it’s harder not to.” In cutting through Elissa’s old tapes and monkey mind and fear, Sugar states, “How many women wrote beautiful novels and stories and poems and essays and plays and scripts and songs in spite of all the crap they endured. … The unifying theme is resilience and faith. The unifying theme is being a warrior and a bad motherfucker. It is not fragility. It’s strength. It’s nerve.”

Sugar is giving Elissa the ultimate writer’s advice. I have heard it one million different ways over the years. Simply stated, “Writer’s write.” Women writers write. We dig deep. We love stories. We write everyday. We are rats chewing through concrete to write the books on our hearts.

The connection between humility and tenacity is the heart of this exchange. That seems important beyond writing, though writing is the chord it strikes with me. It speaks to doing the work. It speaks to building and creating. It speaks to knowing and doing what we must do. Humility enters in when we are grateful for the shoulders on which we stand. When we see the absolute light in others and do not let it diminish our own. When we allow ourselves to try 800 times. Humility and surrender pave the way for tenacity and strength and nerve.