Pushing Harder
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
I have always moved
toward the edge of what I can do.
Not from panic.
Not from hunger for approval.
But from a quiet, internal gravity
that treats potential
as a responsibility.
I push because I know
what happens when I don’t.
The work dulls.
The mind calcifies.
The self begins to shrink
to the size of what is easiest.
So I lean forward—
into craft,
into labour,
into the long, uncelebrated hours
where discipline replaces inspiration
and momentum is earned inch by inch.
This is not performance.
It is practice.
And yes—
there is a cost.
I have pushed past fluency
into fracture.
Past endurance
into depletion.
I have mistaken persistence
for wisdom
and paid for it with collapse.
There were moments
I didn’t stop until the system failed—
body,
attention,
joy—
and I learned, too late,
where the limits lived.
Failure did not teach me to quit.
It taught me to refine.
I returned each time
with sharper listening,
with restraint I had not yet learned,
with a clearer understanding
that drive without discernment
becomes violence—
even when it is self-inflicted.
Let me be precise here:
nothing good in me
was forged by terror.
I do not owe my stamina
to chaos.
I do not thank cruelty
for my resolve.
I do not grant credit
to those who would claim
my strength as collateral
for their harm.
What endures in me
was cultivated—
deliberately,
over time—
through choice,
through repetition,
through the willingness
to stay with difficulty
without mythologizing suffering.
My grit is not inherited trauma.
It is trained capacity.
And now—
with age,
with clarity,
with a harder respect for my own limits—
I still push.
But I push with alignment,
not annihilation.
I work deeply.
I rest strategically.
I fail,
adjust,
continue.
This is not softness.
It is mastery.
The celebration is not that I endure.
It is that I persist intelligently.
That I know when to press
and when to protect.
When to demand more of myself
and when to refuse the old reflex
to bleed for progress.
I am still relentless.
But now my momentum
moves with me,
not against me.
That is the difference.
And that difference
is everything.
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Poetry Anthologies by Britt Wolfe:
