The Importance of Support

September 18, 2019

The Importance of Support

Today is the third anniversary of my wedding to the best man alive (sorry, all other men!) and in honor of that, I wanted to touch on a subject that has been on my mind lately: support. Community. Solidarity.

It's not a social pursuit, making up your own worlds and populating them with imaginary people. It's a lot of things-- fun, challenging, immersive, enriching, complicated, frustrating, worthwhile-- but one thing it isn't is a route to social success. Writing entails a lot of holing yourself up at your desk, shutting out the world, and typing in solitude. Even the most introverted of us need human interaction, though, and eventually, that need grows too big to be fulfilled through a screen. We need people, real people, to talk to, bounce things off, to get distracted by, to draw inspiration from. Then, when we finally haul ourselves out of our dusty attics and socialize, we tend to spend a fair amount of time staring into the middle distance, typing ideas on our phones, or interrupting normal conversations with abrupt non-sequiturs like "What would you do if your dog became hyper-intelligent and tried to kill you?"

Right now, my audience is small. Each of these posts reaches, at the moment, and average of 6 people. So although I try to write as though I'm speaking to a much broader audience, because I hope that will be true someday, I'm really only talking to my close friends and family here. You, right here, reading this, are my support system. You make all of my writing possible. You all support me, in one way or another: commiserating with my mental health struggles, watching my kids, listening to my cockamamie plot struggles, weighing in on my story synopsis, beta reading, commenting here to let me know I'm not alone.

Thank you.

Despite this support, I feel isolated, sometimes. I feel like the only person in my friend group who knows what this process is like: seeing a story through, from idea to "The End," and then cutting it all to bits and starting over, and over, and over. To be so sucked into a pretend world that you eat, sleep, and dream it for years. To be more invested in imaginary worlds, sometimes, than the real one, and then to get the wake-up call that no one else knows that world, much less actually cares about it. No one else is caught in this endless mood swing between giddy, elated, over-inflated pride, and crushing, bleak, overly-critical despair. (Ok, actually, a lot of my people DO understand that one, all too well.)

Writers are reclusive, secretive, squirrely folks, on the whole. Sensitive to criticism, terrified of having their ideas stolen or dismissed, prone to headaches when exposed to loud sounds, bright lights, or reality. (Ok, not always, they're actually often perfectly normal, functional humans, but that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)

But storytelling is, at its root, a social endeavor. I don't know many people who write stories just to have for themselves. If we did it just to entertain ourselves, why would we go through all the pain and impossibility of translating that perfect, untouchable, flawless vision into this messy jumble of words? Telling stories is a way of reaching out, of sharing our minds with others, of tossing the imperfect wad of yarn and story to someone else while holding the thread ourselves, trying to add our own line to the plaid scarf of human experience.

So today, I want to thank my husband, who is open to receive my messy yarn-word ball, no matter how tangled, and no matter how full his own hands are. Of all the people who inspire me, you inspire me the most. Of all the people who help me, you help me the most. And of all the people who hear me, you hear me the best. You give me the confidence to keep trying. I love you. Happy anniversary.