Just when I think that perhaps I should throw up my hands and leave the merry-go-round completely (headfirst if necessary), the Universe throws in a few things to keep me hanging on. Like finding out a fellow writer is a fan, and that I’ve made their day by agreeing to a small request. Or like someone just finishing a four-book roadtrip I wrote and telling me about their favourite character(s). Or like a very nice letter from someone who found my YA books a lifeline while navigating the jungle known as the school system.
Small things, tiny things, precious things.
I often forget, working in isolation, that the work goes out into the world and finds those who need it. I consider myself an invisible midlister just chugging away, doing the best I can with what I’m given or can wrest from the dustheap, never truckling or bowing, ripping each word out of my guts or chipping from the cortex as occasion demands. Of course I’m an introvert, a bit of a hermit, and while not quite a misanthrope certainly no philanthropist, so I’m happiest being unremarked and left to toodle along my own little train track, building as I go.
But sometimes even I get lonely and discouraged. Sometimes the fight to keep the work whole and protected so it can become a line into the abyss for someone else is messy and draining. (It’s all very much like this Akimbo Comic, which lives in my head rent-free.)
And it’s kind of…funny? Each time I get to the point of kicking over the traces and abandoning the war, some small thing hits my inbox or my DMs, my texts or even out in meatspace. I get a little jolt, a piece of proof that one of my stories helped someone somewhere, even if it was just a momentary smile or a few hours’ worth of escape from capitalist hellscape dystopia on a boiling planet. That it had an effect.
And that gives me the strength to go on a bit longer, especially on days when even spite has failed me. Spit out the blood, blink away yet more hot claret, brace oneself on the broken sword, and rise yet again. Reach down just a little further and find the doorway for one last ultimate defense as the music swells breathlessly. Or simply scan the horizon, pick a point, and say, there’s the next one as your weary band of travelers looks to you for direction.
I have often disliked hope, especially in the past few years as the cycle between daring to feel any and being kicked in the teeth accelerates. But it keeps happening, springing up through the cracks in my heart like golden weeds, binding the pieces together in one more jagged whole. The kintsugi of endurance. Drive some ink into the scars, let them be a roadmap.
I should not have been born, by all odds I should not have survived nearly half a century, and I definitely should not be the one handing out hope to other ragged, haggard survivors. Yet here we are.
And so long as there’s even one person out there to help, so long as there’s even a chance that the ball will land in the lap of someone who needs it, I’ll be pointing my bat at the fence and getting ready for another swing. I’ve done it all day, I can do it all day, and tomorrow I’ll get up and do it all day again.
So if you’re a fellow writer/artist/singer/whatever, keep going. If someone made something that dragged you out of the abyss, try to tell them. And if nobody tells you that your thing is helping, take it from me–it has, and it will. Keep going, please, for the love of the gods, keep going.
Keep making.
Because the abyss is hungry enough to swallow us all, and the ropes we send into it become a ladder, a net. Because you never know when a flailing, questing, drowning hand will light on the rope you twisted and be yanked to the surface for a breath of knife-cold, blessed air. Because one day the net will catch you too. Because it’s our job, it’s our calling, it’s our humanity. Because fuck the greedy abyss-servant bastards who want to reduce us all to ad engagement. Because it’s a day that ends in “y”.
Because, just because. And someday when you’re at the end of your endurance, a little jolt will arrive. They happen along when we need them, more often than not.
And maybe this is one of them. So, let’s get up again, my beloved.
We can do this all day.