Can I build community through my writing?

To build a community around my writing, I think about the gym community I built starting in 2009. I specialized in a well-known fitness brand which attracted customers. This time, in my writing, I don’t have a well-known brand. 

What I have is my unique story and the determination to tell it. But why should you read it?

I write to offer hope and encouragement. I write to illuminate resilience and the treasures found in it, causing it to be self-reinforcing. And I write to inspire you to make choices that honor your life’s uniqueness.

I write to tell my story, which is unknown to most of the people in my life. 

When I share that my mother died of cancer in the frigid winter of sixth grade, my friends and gym colleagues show compassion. “That must have been so hard.” In their faces I see a pause, as they wonder how it must have been to emerge from that and become the energetic, idea-filled woman they know.

Yes, it was hard. In a culture and era (the Bicentennial year of 1976) that didn’t talk about feelings, and didn’t know about therapy, I had to keep marching — keep going to school, letting myself into the house, doing my homework… and writing in my journal. My mind’s metaphor back then: I was in the army, where you can’t have the comfort you long for and you can’t quit.

With more emotional support than my dad could give, I wouldn’t have had to work so hard, and could have focused more on school, and friends, and plans for high school. Instead, with a sense that I never, ever knew what to do, I made one tiny choice at a time from the limited options I saw in front of me.

Carl Jung wrote that a person’s individual path comes not from knowing how or what to do, but from putting one foot in front of the other. It is not prescribed and you don’t know it in advance. It comes into being when you “quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” I didn’t read this quotation from Jung until recently, but it resonated immediately with my remembered inner eleven-year-old, who responded in my mind, yep, that’s what I did.

That’s what my book is about. I almost have a full draft and will start a rewrite, and I will write here about that process, including excerpts. You can receive blog posts automatically by clicking Follow, or you can allow me to email them to you every so often by entering your email address in the form.