Y'all Come Sit a Spell

The easy answer is, “I write for myself.”

And I do. Mostly.

I write about the things that get lodged under my skin. The small indignities of being a grown-up. The grief that changes shape but does not entirely leave. The weird glass animals that make me happy. The things we are told not to say out loud because they are too tender, too angry, too complicated, too human.

If I did not care about the subject myself, I do not think I could make it worth anyone else’s time. Writing has to begin with something true. Otherwise, it is just content-shaped wallpaper. Somebody may scroll past it, maybe even click a little heart, but it will not have much life in it.

So yes. I write for myself first.

But I do not think that is the whole truth for most of us who put our words out into the world.

Because if I truly did not care whether anyone read it, I could keep it in a notebook. I could tuck it in a folder on my computer with a dramatic little filename and let it live there forever. There is nothing wrong with that. Some writing is private, and some things belong only to the person who needed to get them out.

But sharing is different.

Sharing says, “I have been thinking about this. Maybe you have too.”

It says, “I do not have a tidy answer, but I pulled up a chair.”

That is what I picture when I write here. Not a stage. Not a lecture hall. Certainly not me standing on a mountaintop with a polished little nugget of wisdom and a ring light.

A porch.

There is a favorite beverage involved. Coffee, tea, Coke, water in the good cup, whatever is getting you through this particular Tuesday. We sit down together and have a conversation. Sometimes it is funny. Sometimes it is about a glass pig or a tree or why adulting is stupid. Sometimes it is grief, ADHD, anger, faith, friendship, or the complicated truth that nobody has put words to quite right.

I am flawed. You are flawed. Thank goodness.

People without flaws do not exist, and if they did, they would be boring as hell. The things that make us hesitate before we speak are often the very things that let someone else recognize themselves in us. Not because our stories are identical, but because the feeling underneath them is familiar.

Maybe somebody reads a post and thinks, “Well damn. Me too.”

That is connection.

I am not writing for an audience in the way that phrase often gets used. I am not trying to reverse-engineer a person into clicking, staying, buying, agreeing, or behaving. I cannot write from a place of trying to please everybody. That would make me miserable, and it would make the writing dull.

But I am writing toward people.

Toward the person who needs to know they are not the only one who loses track of people when they cannot see them. Toward the person who wonders whether everybody else got a handbook for being an adult and somehow they missed the mail. Toward the person who still needs a little joy, a little beauty, a little reminder that oddness is not a defect.

I write for myself because I need to say it.

I share it because I hope it reaches somebody else who needs to hear it.

That feels like enough of a reason to keep the porch light on.