Tammy Letherer So I opened my laptop this morning and found that the battery was nearly dead. The power cord wasn’t in its usual spot and as I started looking for it I realized, with a sinking feeling, that I must have left it at my mom’s house over the weekend—three hours away.
While I was trying to work out how to replace it before a client call, my phone died.
I know this is not necessarily an interesting or unusual story. But it struck me as curious because just before this sudden loss of technology I was feeling a profound loss of connection. My boyfriend has been away traveling for weeks, my son just left for Amsterdam, my other two children are at their dad’s, and most painful of all, my mother has just been diagnosed with a degenerative illness.
This all seemed manageable until, faced with no way to reach anyone or for anyone to reach me, I had a flash of panic. I knew, logically, that I could solve the dead battery problem and reconnect with the world in less than an hour, but that didn’t matter.
My loneliness was pervasive.
My desire to connect became desperate.
I came through it, of course, but it left me pondering the power of connection and how it’s the driving force behind why I write.
So many aspiring authors I talk to have the same desire. This week alone I’ve heard it described in various forms: one woman wants to connect with people who have had a handicap misdiagnosed; one wants her children to understand why she had to leave her marriage to their father; another wants to connect the dots between the traumatic events in her mother’s life and in her own.
It makes sense: we want to feel that our stories are bigger than we are, that they can comfort, educate, inspire, or forewarn someone else.
The bad news is that you may never know if or when that happens. You have to ask yourself: How will I feel if I never connect with a single reader?
The good news is that writing connects you to so much more than other people.
It can connect you to a higher power. To a sense of purpose. To the flow of creativity. To the sense of accomplishment that comes with achieving a goal.
You may think, sure, that’s obvious. But I guarantee you, it’s not. It’s rare that someone says to me, “I’m just writing this for myself.”
Usually, motivation comes from wanting to be praised, or understood, or vindicated, or loved.
I get it. Those things drive me too. But there’s something else I find curious: why is self-expression never enough? Why do we put the goal of connecting with ourselves at the bottom of the list?
Whatever happened to a simple, “Because I want to” as the best reason for doing something?
I ask because I gloss over this perfectly good answer myself. I push it away as “not important enough.” Until days like today, when all distractions and external voices are absent, even temporarily, and I’m forced to sit with me. Just me.
In that aloneness is where real inspiration is found—it’s the only connection you need; ultimately it’s the only kind that can keep you going.
That’s reason enough to write, even if no one else ever reads it.
