I see you, sitting at your desk on a Monday morning with a half-gone cup of coffee in your right hand and a blinking cursor on your screen.

Actually, you’re probably not at your desk. You’re sitting on the couch while your kids watch Netflix next to you. Or you’re still hiding under the covers, not ready to face today before you write a few words. Your laptop is balanced on your stomach while you strain your neck to see the words you’re willing onto the screen.

I’m grateful for you. I want you to know that.

I was thinking about that this morning, over my first cup of coffee. About blogging. About being a writer whose words are put out into the vast internet in hopes that somebody will find them and read them and it might mean something to them.

Bloggers are a funny group, aren’t we? At first it feels so risky to tell our stories true — what will people think when they read these words? what will happen if I am honest? what will happen if everyone reads this story I’ve kept close to my chest for so long? …. and then after we’ve hit “publish” we worry about what will happen if nobody reads it at all?

People say a lot of stuff about this, about blogging. It’s the Most Important Marketing Trick Ever. It’s a Waste of Time. It’s the Key to Getting a Book Deal. It’s Narcissistic. It’s Dead.

Whatever.

I’m so very grateful for blogging. I’m grateful for a place to put my words — barely edited and a little bit undercooked. And I’m so very grateful that you’re doing the same thing.

I read your stuff, in bits and pieces every day. I see your sentences stream through my newsfeed, I watch you wrestle with your stories, I see you wondering why you’re even here half the time, wondering if anybody’s reading it, wondering if it even matters.

I want you to know that it does.

It matters.

It matters that you’re taking time to dabble in the alchemy of the alphabet, that you’re willing to give shape to the tangled constellations inside your chest.

I know you wonder if it matters, when you’re refresh the page and see that you’ve only had a dozen page views today. Again. When you carefully craft five hundred words and agonize over the perfect title and share it with the world only to be met with the deafening sound of silence.

It matters.

You are making something beautiful with your words. You are stringing together moments that add up to good story.

Every time you sit down at your beat-up laptop and pound out a few more words, you are affirming that life is more than coffee and cereal and bills and chores and never-ending dirty laundry. You are choosing a life that is more.

Life is run-on sentences and amateur poetry. Life is irreverent stories about what happened at Target yesterday and unresolved grief about the way love slipped through your fingers late last year. Life is prayers with no beginning and to-do lists with no end. And you are standing with your words as witness to it all, in its terribly beautiful textures and spaces.

It matters.

Keep doing what you’re doing. I raise my half-gone cup of coffee to you (yes you) this morning.

I’m so glad you’re here.

Love,

Micah

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