Ship Wrecked

Or, What It Feels like When Readers Find You

When you’ve spent years writing and submitting and querying and revising and you are stoic and you handle rejection well and you listen to criticism and you pivot and regroup and try again. Over and over you try because stoic and tenacious is what you are made of except of course when you are not and then you are crying.

Still you keep trying. But nobody wants anything you’ve written anywhere on the whole planet. Then your friend Dennis drops off scrap lumber for your retaining wall and mentions how he enjoys the depth and positivity of your writing on instagram and you mention you’ve been thinking of writing longer essays in this blogging platform called Substack. Then he leaves and days go by and you keep thinking about the Blackhawk crash and how it made you feel and so you write about it on the blogging platform and weeks pass and you go on with your life and you are happy that eighty-seven people read it.

Then one day a week ago you wake up and a thousand people have read it. And then people begin wrapping you in a burrito blanket of comments thanking you for writing it. They say this happened to me too and I’m tired of this happening. Then five thousand people read it and share it with their friends. Then ten thousand. And it keeps going every day a couple thousand a day. And people keep thanking you for putting these words in the world and they don’t know you have been marooned on an island alone with just birds and fish sending out radio signals into the starless night for years hoping for a response and one day you wake up and the world has left you a thousand paper messages like confetti saying we see you we’ve found you we hear you. You are not alone.