Keep Your Hand on the Plow: Lessons from Tilling the Soil of Life

There’s an old saying that goes, "Keep your hand on the plow and hold on." At first glance, it seems like a simple call to hard work, but when you dig deeper, it becomes clear that this metaphor speaks to something much more profound. Tilling the soil of our lives—breaking up the hardened ground and making way for growth—can be painful, exhausting, and lonely work. And if we’re not prepared or supported, it can feel like the earth is swallowing us whole.

That’s why keeping your hand on the plow and holding on is not just about perseverance; it’s about survival. It’s about doing the work even when it feels like you’re out of control and no one is coming to help you.

When I was 12, working for my Uncle Tommy at his gift shop in Hueytown, Alabama, I learned that lesson the hard way. Uncle Tommy’s shop, The Hut Stuff, has been around for over 50 years, and while I didn’t have any specific skills for the business, I was strong enough to be useful. So, I spent my summer (and a lot of after school hours) doing manual labor — digging trenches, post-holes, building storage houses for frame molding, moving dirt, and breaking up the thick Alabama clay. One day, I was given a tiller to break up the ground around the buildings to divert the heavy Alabama rainwater. I had never used heavy machinery before, and let’s just say I wasn’t quite prepared for what came next. As soon as I pulled the trigger, the tiller lurched forward and yanked me right off my feet. I went face-first into a bed of azalea bushes, and that tiller kept going like it didn’t care one bit.

That moment? It reminds me of coming out. Coming out was like that tiller lurching forward. I wasn’t prepared to live in a world that wanted me to figure out how to be queer all by myself. It was terrifying, messy, and I felt completely out of control, like I’d been thrown into a world that was expecting me to navigate my identity without the tools or the support I needed.

But here’s the thing: everybody’s life is hard when the work of finding themselves without support, and the world is stacked against them.

Throughout history, people have been forced to keep their hands on the plow under brutal conditions—enslaved people in the fields, laborers without rights, the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized. The reality is that society often expects people — especially those who are queer, Black, poor, immigrants, disabled, or educated outside of a traditional system — to break their backs tilling the soil of their lives without offering them the tools, support, or respect they deserve. These are the people asked to do the hardest work with the least help.

Forcing someone to keep their hand on the plow without rest, without resources, without care — it’s violence. And yet, this is what so many marginalized people experience every day. Society expects us to pull ourselves up, break new ground, and plant something beautiful while the weight of history, oppression, and exclusion pulls us down.

That’s why finding community is so crucial. Finding community is the solidarity we deserve. When you’re trying to do this work alone, it can feel like what you’re going through is terminally unique — like no one else has felt the same fear, the same struggle, the same sense of being untethered. But that’s not true. You’re in good company — the company of so many other people who have the same struggles and will celebrate the same triumphs. These are the people who will help you hold onto the plow when you feel like letting go.

That’s why keeping your hand on the plow is so much more than an individual act of perseverance. It’s about resisting a system that tells you to keep working, keep fighting, even when it’s breaking you. It’s about finding the strength to hold on, not because the world supports you, but because you refuse to let go—and because, more often than not, you’re surrounded by people who understand the work you’re doing.

So yes, tilling the soil of our lives is hard, but we don’t do it alone. We hold on for each other, especially for those of us who’ve been told that the work is ours to do without help. We keep our hands on the plow, but we also demand the tools, the rest, and the solidarity we deserve.

The work is difficult, but it’s worth it. With every stumble and every fall into the azalea bushes of life, we get back up, we learn, and we grow. And when we look back, we realize that every challenge was not just a step closer to who we are, but a defiant refusal to let the harsh world win.

This picture is from Teen Vogue.