Just a thank you - to you. Yes, you.

Nothing more.

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

It’s been a challenging few months, for reasons you know and for reasons you don’t know. But isn’t that life for all of us?

It feels like one of those periods of massive change, redirection, reassessment, reprioritization. That can be, oh… a wee bit destabilizing? Shall we say? And one of the big things that has kept me steady, besides the people I love in my life is…this.

You.

Your essential part in this.

Getting back to my own personal writing has been my lifeline to myself in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

It’s like that feeling of showering for the first time in a few days (ahem), doing my hair, swiping on some mascara, then looking in the mirror and relaxing into that reassuring familiarity of, “oh, hey! It’s me again!”

Only more meaningful. Because with writing, the “it’s me again” part is on the inside.

That’s why I wanted to take a moment on this random day, with no particular milestone to commemorate, to say thank you. Thank you so so much.

To those of you who who are subscribers, who take the time to open yet another email in your overflowing inboxes, somewhere between the breaking news clickbait and the clearance sale alerts—your time is everything to me. I am so honored knowing that in even a small way, what I’m writing might matter to you, make you feel something, give words the feelings you’ve had too, make you smile, make you think.

And to those of you who are paid subscribers, well wow. I never imagined how profoundly humbling it would be to have so many of you putting your trust in me in this way.

Your support keeps me accountable— to you, to me. It really keeps me writing, and I need that.

I am also full of gratitude in part because I know it is relatively new, this idea of paying for independent writing directly to the writer. I mean we’re comfortable with the idea of paying for a book a favorite writer has authored, subscribing to a magazine with their columns, or snagging a pair of movie tickets to a screenplay they wrote. But to think that you might spend a few dollars a month on a series of online essays and opinions that you can’t show off on your coffee table, that features no outrageous celebrity cameo, that offers no guarantee of a big plot twist in Act III…well, wow.

Then again, life is nothing if not a series of plot twists. So no promises, but I imagine there will be plenty.

(Celeb cameos? Hm. I can work on that.)

One of the most surprising and wonderful aspects of writing online is learning it can create real connections.

But somehow I didn’t realize until recently just how much my writing connects me to me.

Thank you.

---