Love letter to the writer who feels invisible
Dear writer,
You’ve done a lot of good, hard work. Quiet work.
Maybe your notebooks are soft at the corners, their spines giving out from years of use. Maybe some of your best lines live in the margins of grocery list, or buried in Word docs. that go back more than a decade.
Maybe you’ve even written a book—drafted, edited, shaped—doing it all without an audience.
A book is no small deal, even an unpublished one. And yet: the world around you is quiet.
You might’ve shared your work with others, sent it out, faced the long silence or the short rejection. You might wonder, Now what?
The truth is, we’ve been taught to think our work isn’t finished until it’s public. That publication is the finish line—the moment our art becomes real. But that’s not part of the artist’s contract with life.
I don’t want to pretend it’s easy not to care about these things, nor that community and dialogue with others doesn’t matter. That’s not the goal.
But I am nearly feverish to tell you this:
The private pursuit of your creativity is more than enough.
The essays you’ve written, the poems you’ve tucked away, the notebooks you’ve kept—these acts are not waiting rooms for success. They are the success. The act of making is what nourishes you. The rest is noise, and you get to choose when you’ll listen to it, and for how long.
When we center the wrong things—validation, publication, visibility—all our work ends up growing in bad soil. But when we let making itself be the point, that’s how we build a sustainable creative life.
It’s climate literacy for the soul: long-term nourishment over fleeting weather.
You have to remember this: writing is thinking, and self-expression is a worthy end in itself—a way of thinking through this experiment called life.
~~~
Once, when you were young, you made things from a spontaneous impulse that reported to no one, not even you.
You are allowed to return there.
To make stuff is the point. Don’t let your validity slink away because you haven’t met some arbitrary metric.
Your creativity is both gift and grounding. Let it keep you steady. Keep walking.
Love,
Sarah
