I've been on a work bender this past month, working 12 hours a day and surviving on a bagel-coffee diet. I wish I had some Sociology 101 villain to blame this on (Protestant work ethic? Capitalist ambition?), but I was raised Unitarian by parents who prioritized Scrabble ahead of overtime.

I spend my work day  typing, deleting, and retyping. Once the writing is published, I almost never like what I've created. I want to edit and re-edit endlessly, but there it sits festering under the harsh eyes of commenters and readers who are sure to tear it apart and cackle over typos.

Despite producing mountains of text in the last three weeks, the only work I'm proud of is sitting on my kitchen windowsill. It is a bean plant. It is two feet tall.

I have never grown a plant before. Well, not one that's actually achieved anything. Last summer I successfully killed five plants, the poor basil withering from some mysterious ailment that anyone who had spent more time in a garden than they had on Facebook could probably have diagnosed. Sadly, not I.

This year, as the sky lightened for the first break from rain in early April, I set out to do the plant thing right. I loaded soil and seeds into old Prego jars and watered them every other day. And, by God, nature delivered. A week after I pushed four little bean seeds into the dark brown soil, they were popping up, tiny leaves unfolding from precocious stems that seemed to know exactly where they were going. Unlike writing, plants grow up perfect on the very first try.

When I stumbled home every night (or morning), dispirited by my typos, I was awestruck to see the progress. While I had spent the daylight hours communicating over a two-dimensional screen, the bean plants had grown two whole new leaves. Fabricated a whole new limb out of sunshine and air! There's no way I could compete.

As spring sets in for real and the clouds clear up and my friends start calling to ask if we still live in the same city anymore, I've realized I need to stop taking my cues from my editor and start taking cues from the bean plants. Here's my mantra for May: Take a deep breath, drink plenty of water.