A Love Letter to Every Writer who almost quit Today!
You are doing something that has no good explanation when someone asks you about it at a party. You are doing something that looks from the outside like a person sitting alone staring at a screen or a notebook and moving their lips slightly and occasionally deleting everything they just made. It does not look like much. It does not look like anything. And you have spent years trying to find the words to explain to people who will never get it why you keep coming back to this thing that pays badly and humiliates you regularly and asks everything from you and gives back something you cannot even show them properly.
And i want to tell you something. You don't owe anyone that explanation. Not ever. What you are doing is one of the most quietly radical acts a human being can perform and the fact that it doesn't look like it from the outside is part of what makes it so strange and so necessary and so yours.
Here is what you actually do. you take a human being, a real one or an imagined one, and you put them on a page, and suddenly they are alive somewhere they were never alive before. You give them a Life. You give them a specific fear. You give them the way they hold their cup when they're pretending not to be upset. You give them a mother who meant well and failed anyway. You give them a moment where they almost said the true thing and then didn't. And then someone on the other side of the world, someone you will never meet, someone living a life that looks nothing like yours, opens the page and finds that person and goes oh. Oh that's real. I know that. i thought i was the only one who knew that. and something in them that was clenched opens slightly.
That is not a small thing. that is not a hobby. that is one human consciousness reaching through time and paper and language and finding another one in the dark and saying you are not alone in this specific way that you thought was only yours.
People will tell you it doesn't matter. they will say it more politely than that, they will ask what your plan is, they will ask about the job market, they will say they could never be that creative like it's a compliment when it's actually a way of putting what you do in a box they don't have to think about anymore. And some of them genuinely cannot access what you do, they are not built for it, and that is fine, that is not a moral failing, but it means they are also genuinely unable to measure what it's worth. They are measuring silence with a ruler. They are asking how much the color blue weighs. the instrument is wrong. their inability to quantify it is not evidence that it has no value. it is evidence that value comes in more than one currency and they only learned one.
Think about the books that kept you alive. And i don't mean that metaphorically, i mean it exactly. Think about the specific book you found at the specific moment when you needed proof that someone somewhere had felt this feeling and survived it or at least felt it fully enough to write it down. Think about what it meant that someone had already been here before you. That the thing you thought was a private malfunction was actually a human condition that had been written about and wrestled with and turned into something that could live on a shelf and wait for you to need it.
Someone made that. A person, a tired person, a person with doubts and a day job and people in their life who didn't quite get it, sat down and made the thing that would one day be the thing that saved you. They had no idea you existed. They wrote it anyway. That is the covenant you are part of. That is the line you stand in.
And yes, one person reading your work and feeling less alone is enough. I know the world wants scale. I know the world wants numbers and reach and metrics and impact reports. But one person is a universe. One person's interior life is more complex than any system we have ever built. If you write something that changes the temperature inside one person's chest, that ripples. It ripples in ways you will never track and never see and never get credit for.
They will be slightly different in a conversation they have three years from now because of something you made. They will recognize something in someone they love because you taught them the word for it. They will be a little less cruel to themselves on a Wednesday in november because once they read something you wrote and it gave them permission. You will never know, but the work still did it.
Here is something else nobody says enough. You are one of the few people trying to slow time down. Everything else speeds it up. Everything else is designed to get you to the next thing faster, to skim, to scroll, to consume and move on. And you are sitting there trying to make someone stop. Trying to make someone stay inside a moment long enough to actually feel it. Trying to reconstruct the full weight of a single look between two people or the exact specific grief of a particular kind of loss or the strange comedy of being alive in a body with a brain that contradicts itself constantly. You are working against the entire direction of the culture and you are doing it one sentence at a time and that is not naive, that is not precious, that is a form of resistance that doesn't get called resistance because it's too quiet and too slow and doesn't photograph well.
You give people language for things they were living without language for. and living without language for something is a particular kind of suffering. It makes you feel crazy. It makes you feel like the thing isn't real or isn't valid or is too strange to be shared. and then someone writes the sentence that names it and suddenly it exists outside of you. Suddenly it has edges. suddenly it is a thing that can be pointed to and said yes, that, that is the thing, i thought it was only inside me. you did that. a sentence did that. Do you understand how much power that is. do you understand that naming something is one of the oldest forms of power humans have ever practiced and you do it on a page for strangers and ask nothing back.
You let people live lives they will never get to live. You let the person who never left their small town stand in a street in a city they'll never visit and feel the specific loneliness of being unknown and free all at once. You let the person who is dying live a little longer inside a character who isn't. You let the person who is afraid of their own anger follow a character who burns everything down and feel the heat of it safely from the inside. You let the person who has never been loved the way they needed to be loved read about it happening and feel it happening to them, feel it in their actual body, because the brain does not fully distinguish between a real experience and one rendered in enough detail and with enough truth. You are giving people experiences their lives didn't give them. You are expanding what it is possible for a person to feel and know and understand about being human.
You are not wasting your life. i know it can feel like that. i know there are days when the gap between what you imagined and what you made is so enormous and so humiliating that you can't see the point. i know there are years that feel like they produced nothing, years that were actually building something underground that you couldn't see yet. i know the world does a very good job of making you feel like the things it can measure are the things that matter and everything else is self-indulgence for people who couldn't hack the real thing.
that is a lie the world tells because the world is largely run by people who stopped listening to the part of themselves that needed what you make. they stopped and they built systems that reflect that stopping and now the systems say your thing has no value because the systems cannot hold your thing, cannot process it, cannot turn it into a number. that is a failure of the systems. it is not a verdict on the work.
keep writing. keep writing the hard true thing. keep writing the version nobody asked for. keep writing past the part where it's comfortable and into the part where it gets strange and specific and uncomfortably close to the real thing you were actually trying to say. keep writing for the person who needed this five years ago. keep writing for the person who needs it right now and doesn't know yet that you're making it. keep writing because you are one of the people still insisting that the interior life is worth this much attention, this much care, this much time. that insistence matters. in a world that is very loud about very little, the quiet stubborn act of trying to render human experience honestly and fully is not nothing.
it is, actually, close to everything.
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