The Things We Almost Give Up On
- Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
- Jul 19
- 7 min read
by Agnieszka Wolsoncroft
She held both my arms and looked me in the eyes.
Not the way teachers sometimes do when they want your attention. The other way. The way someone does when they need you to understand that what they are about to say will matter — not just today, but for a long time after today.
I was fourteen. She was my literature teacher, Ms Krauczunas, and she had just watched me collect another prize. I can still see the books: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Ancient Philosophy, their spines lined up on my desk like a small, serious library belonging to someone who was only just beginning.
I remember looking at that Ancient Philosophy book and thinking, with the complete certainty that only a fourteen-year-old can summon: I want that. A stoic’s peace of mind. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, that is what I am going to spend my life looking for.
Ms Krauczunas watched me with that particular expression that good teachers have when they see something in you that you haven’t fully seen yourself yet.
“Promise me,” she said, “you’ll never stop writing.”
My eyes were shiny. I knew she meant it the way you know certain things at fourteen, not with your head, but somewhere deeper, somewhere that doesn’t have a name yet.
“I promise,” I said.
And then life happened.
*
It didn’t happen all at once, it never does.
It happened in the ordinary language of people who loved me and were worried for me. Writing will never make you money. Writing careers only happen to exceptionally talented people. Be realistic. Be practical.
These things were said with the best of intentions. Fear sounds a great deal like wisdom sometimes, especially when it comes from someone who doesn’t want to watch you be hurt.
And so, the way you do with something fragile that you’re not sure how to protect, I tucked it away. Told myself it was probably just a phase. Found other things to be good at and got on with life.
The writing waited.
I went to work on cruise ships. I saw the world: ports and cities and coastlines I couldn’t have found on a map as a girl in northern Poland, people from every country, every background, every kind of life imaginable. I worked in hospitality: restaurants, hotels, the endlessly warm and complicated business of making people feel welcome.
Then London, fourteen years of it. Then Perth, on the other side of the world, where the skies are enormous and the light does something entirely its own.
Through all of it: the ships, the cities, the seasons that were difficult in ways I won’t rush through here: years of undiagnosed endometriosis, a miscarriage, grief that has no proper ceremony, the long waiting — I kept asking myself the same question: Why hospitality? With my degrees, my genuine love of philology and positive psychology, and my passion for business strategy, why was I always, always working with people, in rooms, around tables?
One afternoon, somewhere between one life and the next, the answer arrived. Not dramatically, just quietly, the way the truest things tend to come.
I realised that all this time I was simply gathering stories.
Every ship, every island, every city. Every person who sat across a table from me and told me something true, or made me laugh, or broke my heart a little with their story. Every difficult season and every country that left something in me I didn’t have before. I wasn’t wandering, I was filling up.
I believe the people we meet and the lives we are given come to us by Divine Appointment. Nothing is wasted and nothing is random.
Every detour was material, and every person, a chapter. The life I was living would one day become the writing. I just hadn’t started writing it yet.
*
I often think about Ms Krauczunas. The way she didn’t ask whether I was talented enough, or whether it was practical, or whether it would pay the rent. She just held my arms, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to promise.
She understood something that took me much longer to fully feel: a talent that stays hidden isn’t just a quiet personal sadness. It is a loss for everyone who might have needed it.
I watch Anya now and I think about this. She is seven, nearly eight, and she is already full of sparks — in the way she notices things, the way she asks questions nobody else thought to ask, the way she throws herself at life with a particular kind of fearless joy. My job is not to decide which sparks matter and which don’t. My job is to make sure she never feels that any of them need to be hidden.
Because maybe you had someone, once, who did the opposite of that. Who worried on your behalf. Who smoothed the spark down into something safer and smaller and less likely to burn.
And maybe you have been carrying the tucked-away thing ever since, wondering if it was ever real, if it was ever really yours.
It was real. It is still yours.
The people who discouraged you were not your enemies. They were afraid, and afraid people say careful things. But a promise you made to yourself once — or that someone who believed in you asked you to make — it doesn’t expire just because life got loud.
I am writing to you now.
A blog that goes out every other Sunday. A Substack newsletter that launched last week. Submissions to publishers and literary agents, because the stories gathered across a lifetime of living on purpose deserve to be read, and I believe they will be. Because I am writing books.
Not because it became easy, or because the world suddenly made it simple. Not at all. It is because over thirty years ago a woman held both my arms, looked me in the eyes, and asked me to keep a promise.
I am a person who keeps her promises. It is high time I delivered on this one.
And somewhere along the way, through the ships and the cities and the long beautiful accumulation of stories, I found something close to what that fourteen-year-old had decided to spend her life looking for. Not perfect stillness, but something steadier than I used to be. A quiet place inside that holds, even when things are hard.
Perhaps that is what the stoics meant all along. Not the absence of difficulty but the presence of something that doesn’t move.
Whatever it is that you tucked away, whatever is sitting quietly in that corner of yourself, patient and waiting — it hasn’t gone. It doesn’t have a use-by date. And the life you have been living in the meantime, however circuitous it looked, has been filling you up.
You have more to say than you think and more to give than you know.
*
Thanksgiving. Appreciation. Gratitude.
Thanksgiving (Action):
Pick it up again. Not perfectly, not grandly, just pick it up. Write the first paragraph. Hum the melody. Buy the notebook. Sign up for the class. The action doesn’t have to be large. It just has to be real. One small act of returning to the thing that waited.
Appreciation (Awareness):
Look back at the long way round and notice what it gave you. Every person you met. Every city that left something in you. Every hard season that deepened your capacity for something you couldn’t have named at the time. You were never lost. You were gathering. There is a difference, and it is everything.
Gratitude (Feeling):
Let yourself feel grateful for the teacher who saw you before you saw yourself. For the promise that survived everything that tried to crowd it out. For the fact that you are here, reading this on a Sunday, which means some part of you is still listening. Still hoping. Still quietly keeping faith with the thing you almost gave up on.
What you focus on expands. Focus on the promise. It’s still good.
Over thirty years ago, a teacher held both my arms and looked me in the eyes.
I promised. And here I am.
What did you promise?
With love and gratitude,
Agnieszka
If this post found you at the right moment — if there is something you have been meaning to return to — the 7-Day TAG Gratitude Reset is a gentle place to begin. It starts with exactly one small act of showing up for yourself.
Come back in a fortnight — and bring your sense of wonder. I’ll be here with a story about Anya, who turns eight on the 27th of July, and about what it means to watch a child move through the world with that particular fearless joy that the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to find our way back to. Eight is great. Like Anya.
A New Chapter Began
Last Sunday, I launched A Moment of TAG on Substack.
Every second Sunday, I'll be sharing a reflection inspired by the TAG Method: Thanksgiving, Appreciation and Gratitude.
The first word we explored was Visibility. Next week: Wonder.
I'd love you to join me.
Read more about gratitude and the TAG Method: GRATITUDE & THE TAG METHOD
If you'd like to read my previous posts, click here:
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