Do you ever feel lonely, only to be comforted by the writing of another?
A few nights ago I started a book called Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan. It’s historical fiction and centers around the person of Joy Davidson. If you’re familiar with C.S. Lewis at all (think The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe or The Screwtape Letters, two of my personal favorites), this happens to be the woman who would become his wife.
Though I’m only 50 pages in, the sincerity, intellect, and ponderings of Joy are not unlike my own. Her curiosities about life and her unwillingness to be what society expects of her are interwoven with her feelings about how to break free. How to trust that tomorrow will worry about itself.
It is while reading books like this that I wish I’d had the chance to meet the protagonist, in this case, Joy.
To talk with her, wonder and question with her, and most of all to learn from her. I often feel lost, and somehow it’s comforting to know that someone like Joy felt the same way.
Rachel Held Evans is another who I think of for my list of people I wish I had crossed paths with. Her book Searching for Sunday has come into my library at a time where I’ve needed it most. Interestingly enough, the foreword author writes about how she feared a world where Rachel stopped writing. Rachel passed away just over a year ago from complications due to a freak illness, and though she may have stopped writing, her writing has not stopped speaking. It says all the things I wish I had come up with, agrees with me in my frustrations around this and that, and ties it all up with a good dose of “we’re all in this together.”
I’ve not often felt proud of my writing.
In fact, I had an English professor in college who told me I needed to take a beginning writing class (because apparently my writing was that bad?). It isn’t nearly the work of beauty and grace of these women I’ve mentioned; it doesn’t feel polished and it isn’t filled with stunning words or “poetic prose.”
But I write, in case there’s just one person out there who needs to be reminded that their thoughts are not crazy or unusual. That your desire for simplicity and a slower pace of life in the midst of a world running faster than ever, is actually more common than you think.
I write because of women like Joy and Rachel, who bravely put pen to paper to bring thoughts from their minds and their souls into the world so people like you and me could read and critique their ideas and stories. They have given me courage.
I write to let my thoughts flow in a world that feels big and lonely, only to be reminded at the end of my piece that maybe the world isn’t so bad after all.
I write for those who do not or cannot.
But most of all, I write for you. The reader. To remind you that you are not alone.
You are seen, you are heard, and we are in this together.
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