What Writing a Book Taught Me About Change

The horizon isn’t the destination. It’s just as far as you can see right now.

At the start of the year, I believed I knew exactly where I was headed: I would publish my first book by year’s end, maybe even as early as spring. I had a complete manuscript in hand. The writing was the hard part, I told myself. The rest would be logistics.

I was wrong in every way that matters.

Over the next eleven months, I walked through a maze I didn’t know existed: permissions research, typesetting decisions, multiple editing passes, moments of intense self-doubt verging on panic. Every step forward revealed another task I hadn’t anticipated. Hofstadter’s Law came alive in real time. In an attempt to cheer me on, my sister mailed me a tiny trophy engraved: This actually is my first rodeo.

The real surprise wasn’t how long everything took; it was how strangely disorienting the progress felt. I kept having the sensation of pushing off from shore, rowing toward the horizon, only to look up and see that it hadn’t moved at all. No matter how hard I worked, the line in the distance stayed the same.

But when I glanced back toward the shoreline, I could see how far I’d come.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just publishing a book; I was becoming an author. The word has roots in the Latin augere—“to increase, to cause to grow.” I love that. Because this year, the thing that grew wasn’t just a manuscript. It was my capacity to navigate uncertainty, to adapt and to persist, to trust the process even when the horizon refused to come closer. Maybe that’s what an author really is: someone willing to grow alongside the thing they’re creating.

That was the lesson I nearly missed: the horizon recedes because it’s not the goal. It’s just the edge of your current understanding. Progress doesn’t happen out on the horizon; it happens under your feet, one unremarkable step at a time.

On December 2, I published the book. I’m proud of that. But the real accomplishment is less visible: I learned in a new way how to move through the unknown, how to stay with the process long after the novelty wore off, how to keep going when it felt like nothing was moving at all.

This year taught me to set my compass by the horizon, but to measure my progress by the shore.