There are a few people in my life who inspire me back toward certain parts of myself, reliably and over the long life of…well, my life. One such person is Michael K Dean.
His help is bringing me back toward the very thing i’m doing right now, writing, or ’logging’ as he calls it. Not for the orange stage of Substack and the millions of readers who eagerly await every word (sicc), but something more personal. Just thoughts, dumb little ideas, nothing more but also nothing less - meaning, they can and perhaps must be available for at least someone else to read. Whether or not they’re actually read by anyone doesn’t matter, but they could be. That matters.
I was interviewing Henrik Karlson the other day - Friday - and I told him how I don’t really get the whole “I write only for myself” thing. In comedy, you don’t just do the work for an audience but with an audience. Their laughter or lack-there-of is like another character in the show. It shapes you and gives you something to react to, thus guiding the show wherever it’s meant to go. And so too, at least for me, with all writing. You write for someone and thus, by definition, with someone. They are there, present and alive, in the work, whether you want to admit it or not.
And by ‘you’ here, I mean me. My latest therapist with whom I am no longer meeting except when we see each other at the gym almost every day, called me out on my use of the 2nd person. He said his therapist, a gestalt guy, used to call him out on it. “You don’t know what I’m like, so why do you say ‘you’”. I use ‘you’ a lot in writing when I mean me but perhaps really I mean, or hope to mean, ‘we.’
Which is, again, the point. When the words flow, me is you is we.