The Things That Keep Me Here
Not a list. Just the honest account of what actually helps.
I want to be careful about how I write this.
There is a version of this post that tips into something instructional — here are the things that helped me, perhaps they will help you too. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is simpler and more personal than that. Just an account of what has turned out to matter, arrived at slowly and without planning, through the ordinary accumulation of days that needed to be lived through.
Writing is the first thing. It insists on my presence in a way that nothing else quite does. Sitting down with a blank page is an act of showing up for yourself. It says: what I think and notice and feel is worth the effort of being put into language. That is not a small thing when the world has been suggesting otherwise.
The world has opinions about this, of course. Writing, I’m told, doesn’t go anywhere anymore. The advice arrives kindly and with good intentions — make something tangible, sell something useful, turn what you grow and cook and know into a product with a price attached. Your hands can do things. Why not use them for something that counts?
What nobody mentions is that making something and selling it requires writing too. The Instagram caption. The product description. The newsletter about your pickle business. The social media presence that turns a hobby into a brand. All of it is writing — just writing in service of a transaction rather than a thought. That version, apparently, counts. This one is harder to explain.
I understand the logic. I even appreciate the reasoning behind it. But the writing is the thing. Not the destination. The thing itself.
The writing also keeps me honest. It won’t let me be vague about what I actually mean. It pushes back when I’m circling something without landing on it. It has taught me more about what I think than thinking alone ever did. And it produces, at the end of a session, the particular satisfaction of having made something, however modest, out of nothing but attention and time.
Reading is the second thing. Good writing keeps you company in a way that is different from the company of people — quieter, less demanding, and in some ways more sustaining. The sense that someone, somewhere, understood something true and took the trouble to put it into language for you to find decades or centuries later. On the days when human contact feels thin, a book that knows what it’s doing is its own form of rescue.
The silence itself is the third thing. I mean this genuinely and without irony. The unhurried morning. The empty diary. The day that belongs entirely to you and makes no demands. I spent years treating silence as something to be filled, a problem to be solved with plans and company and forward momentum. I understand now that it was never a problem. It was always the point.
And then there are the smaller things that don’t fit a category but matter anyway. The message from someone who was thinking of you for no particular reason. The reader who writes back to say something landed. The friend who calls without agenda. The dog you still miss, whose absence has its own quiet presence in the house. The cup of tea made exactly right, drunk slowly, without doing anything else at the same time.
None of this is spectacular. None of it would make a compelling highlight reel. But it is what keeps the days from feeling empty — what fills them, not with noise or activity or the performance of a life well lived, but with something quieter and more reliable.
The things that keep me here are not the things I expected. They arrived without announcement, mostly. They stayed because they were true.
None of it is spectacular. All of it is enough.