I’m having a hard time writing these days.

Sort of.

I have no problem churning out sometimes 10,000 + words a week for a paycheck. Words strung together in ways that search engines love, peppered with enough affiliate links to make my salary worth the investment. Sometimes it’s quick-turn news briefs with attention-grabbing headlines that will rack up page views. Fast is the key, even if the end product doesn’t add much to the conversation.

By the end of the day, I’ve used up all of my words. I’m exhausted—too dog-tired for storytelling that feeds my soul and not just pays the bills.

Don’t get me wrong. I have one of the coolest jobs ever. It offers opportunities to hike through landscapes I once thought existed only in glossy magazine images. I get to travel and test top-notch new gear. I get to spend days in a treestand or a ground blind and call it “work.”

And although I am only a mediocre hunter, I am a damn good writer.

But what would I tell 10-year-old me with her knobby-kneed legs tucked beneath her as she carefully opened the crisp pages of a brand new issue of Outdoor Life?

She would think I am a goddess.

But what does it matter if the bulk of what I wrote today doesn’t really matter all that much? Sure, it will pick up plenty of page views and commerce conversions. But there’s a good chance my voice will be whitewashed away in the editing process. It makes the piece more palatable, and ruffling feathers isn’t good for traffic.

But the best writing ruffles all the feathers. It ruffles them so hard they can’t be preened back into place. It pushes boundaries, stretches paradigms, and breaks stereotypes. It makes you feel something more than a compulsion to buy something.

Sitting on my childhood home's beat-up brown corduroy couch, that 10-year-old girl devoured Jack O’Connor, Elmer Keith, Jim Merritt, and Keith McCafferty. She got lost in the woods with them without ever leaving that couch, and she learned a thing or two in the process. Sadly, that kind of writing is hard to come by in this hurry-up, click-baity, digital age.

The remembering makes me hungry. Maybe I’ll starve trying to find it as I doom-scroll away my evening, but I’m just too damned tired to try and fix a meal myself.