The Whale I’ve been Avoiding
On naming the thing that could swallow me whole
The Prompt: Write a Poem About a Whale
Man vs. Self
A whale could be anything.
Mount Everest.
Machu Picchu.
A school of wealthy investors shifting the market.
A comeback so large it consumes you.
It could be an animal—
so massive it can easily defeat me
while I try to steady myself
in a makeshift boat
on unchartered water.
© 2026 Carla Monroy
Part of the 100 Day Poetry Project
The Drought
Lately, I’ve felt dry.
Not empty—just resistant.
The ideas are there but they feel coated in glue. I sit down to write and immediately want to revise before anything is born. I massage sentences that haven’t earned it yet. Momentum dies from overhandling — not from lack of talent.
Travel disrupts routine. Work expands. The environment shifts. And I keep thinking discipline should feel easier by now.
It doesn’t.
Consistency, especially when you’re in motion, is its own current. You either learn to row through it or drift.
The Real Whale
This blog isn’t my whale.
The whale is a book I’m publishing.
It’s written. Finished. Now it sits in edits — sequencing, trimming, moving one poem forward, pulling another back. Small decisions that suddenly feel enormous because they’re attached to something real.
For a long time, I didn’t want to say that out loud. There’s a belief that if you speak a goal too soon, you fracture its energy. Silence protects it.
But silence can also protect fear.
Publishing a book means being read without a filter. It means no more drafts to hide behind. No more “I’m working on it.” It’s done. Which means it can be judged.
That’s the size of the animal in the water.
Man vs. Self
The classic conflict isn’t man vs. nature.
It’s man vs. self.
The hesitation.
The instinct to polish instead of ship.
The temptation to pivot instead of persist.
I’ve considered abandoning the 100-day project. Not because I can’t do it — but because consistency, when it stops feeling novel, exposes discipline.
The irony? The book is finished. The hard part creatively is done. What remains is the quieter, heavier work of standing behind it.
That’s the real current I’m learning to navigate.
Momentum is a Decision
So here’s the choice:
Not to drift.
Not to overthink.
Not to shrink the ambition because the water looks deep.
If the whale is large enough to swallow me, it’s large enough to change me.
And that’s the point.
Is there a whale you’re facing in your life? Share it, speak it out loud, and let’s work through it together.
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