Why I write here:

Year-end reflections

Photo by Samuele Giglio on Unsplash

What’s my Why? This question keeps coming up for me this month, including about writing here. I don’t have a simple answer. Instead, I’ve been chipping away at an answer, so that’s how I’m putting it on the page.

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“Write for the love of it.” “Do you love it? Then keep going.” People often say these things about writing. They are good ways to put the focus on the inside job, and not things like subscriber numbers or getting paid.

But here’s the thing: Sometimes I don’t love it. I don’t love the dread that comes before I start writing. I don’t ever—as a rule—love writing first drafts or even thinking about them. And sometimes when a draft needs a lot of revision and I’m deep in it, I don’t love any part of reworking it. If love were the only metric, I would have quit a thousand times.

Don’t get me wrong, loving what you do can matter a lot—maybe more than anything else. But in my experience, love is like the water table that’s always underfoot. Sometimes I can tap it while I’m writing, and sometimes it feels far away. Expecting to reach it all the time sets myself up for disappointment.

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Even when I don’t love it, writing here helps me sort.

I’ll let you in on something: Some days I find myself curled up on the closet floor. I wrote a little note to myself once about these days, reminding myself that they happen sometimes. Just as it can be easy to forget how debilitating nausea feels until you feel it again—we must forget, or we would never eat sushi or leftovers—I forget how closet-floor days feel when I’m in between them. I’ve had a few recently, and while I was there, I found the note I wrote myself:

“Reminder: Sometimes you will find yourself on the closet floor, and your skin will literally ache like you have the flu, and your bones will feel like they could blow away. You’ve felt this before. It doesn’t mean you are broken. Usually, it means you need a good long cry.”

So I did have a long good cry, and the note helped, but what helped most of all was the thought of writing it out … here. As Joan Didion said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” And my process here can help even more than a journal. I can’t remember where I heard that telling our stories makes us well, and I’m not a verbal processor; I’m a written processor. For me, the telling gets more healing as I iron things out by rewriting and then rewriting again.

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Then there’s another piece, which may be the biggest: I write here because deep connection is my favorite food. I write because of all of you who say something to me during the year about one line or one piece that really spoke to you—or say something to my mom or to David. Each of these little moments feels like a shooting star connecting two spots in a dark sky.

And I am always burning for more. Robyn Arzon at Peloton recently said in a cycling class that we haven’t yet met all the people who will love us. This feels to me like a thought for a New Year: It speaks to the boundlessness of hope, and to that well called love that we somehow, sometimes, dip into when we keep going.