A subscriber who is a fellow writer and who suffers from a mental illness that isn't addiction emailed me with kind words about my piece about famous people in recovery. She shared how my writing had impacted her with words brief and true, and I was gobsmacked. I am still "going through it," as they say, and her message made so much more than my day, and it inspired me to run to the Internet to share like a 17-year-old girl after her first kiss.
“It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”
―Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room
My ratchet little blog is just starting out, and I'm not sure that it will ever be anything more than a place to upload my crazy mind to the Internet to disturb generations to come. I have dreams, and I have at least a little talent shaped by some formal and a lot of informal education, but in the grand scheme of creative people, it is truly nothing.
Even still, I got a message from a new subscriber today that meant more to me than I can possibly articulate here. My first thought when I read it wasn't "oh, thank God someone likes my stuff," or even "I'm so glad that what I wrote helped someone a little bit";
instead, it was "When was the last time that I took a break from my own goals and my own pain for long enough to write an email this kind and sincere to someone who I don't know for no (ostensibly practical) reason at all?"
Her message was beautiful, and it made so much more than my day.
Our world is so dark these days; the Internet in particular feels so much more hateful and accelerated than it used to. It's so easy to forget that our small acts of kindness, praise, and gratitude can do as much as supposedly "big" things to change this wildly entropic world that we inhabit (and perhaps even the warp-holed universes that we help create, too).
Being a teacher has made me aware of how much more sensitive to the overall vibe of our country and our world young people are - post-pandemic Gen Z has the most alarming mental health statistics on record, which if you're a Millennial should freeze the blood in your veins - and putting these softer kinds of thoughts out there is helping them, too. We all create the interlocking worlds that we inhabit, moment to moment, atom by atom, in our personal lives, our professional ones, in our tiny, unobserved interactions with people who "don't matter."
I'm picking a couple of people whose work I enjoy who I don't know and who I think probably don't receive heaps of praise and I'm sending them my own emails tonight.
This post isn't part of my "planned programming," and I'm not sure how many people will end up reading it. But for anyone who does, I hope that you consider sending your own messages, too.
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