Being Chosen

On writing, dignity, and being seen

(This is not one of my usual essays. It felt like something that needed to be written plainly, without structure, because anything more formal would have missed what the moment was asking of me.)

When I got on the phone earlier, my wife read me an email that had come through my account. One of my subscribers had pledged eighty dollars to support my newsletter. I did not say anything at first. I felt the moment settle in my chest before words could reach my mouth. My first thought was disbelief. Someone was willing to pay to read my words. Not out of obligation. Not out of pity. But because something I wrote mattered enough that they wanted to keep reading.

That realization stayed with me longer than I expected. Writing has always been my way of marking time, of leaving proof that I still exist, still thinking, still reaching outward from a place designed to shrink people like me. But this was different. This was not simply my words being read and passed along. This was someone saying, I want more of this, and I am willing to invest in it. And in that choice, they reflected something back to me that I have not always allowed myself to see.

If I am honest, it stirred something in me that has been absent for a long time. Pride, yes, but deeper than that, a sense of purpose I thought I had trained myself to live without. It reminded me that my voice still travels beyond these walls, that my words do not dissolve the moment they leave my hands.

For many people on the outside, a gesture like this might seem small, maybe even ordinary. For me, it felt enormous. It felt like a breach in the quiet, like a hand reaching back through the distance to say, I hear you.

It also left me sitting with a question I have not yet answered. What does it mean to make this work paid? Would it change the relationship I have with the people who read my work? Would it change the way I approach the page, the risks I take, the truths I allow myself to tell? Writing has been one of the few spaces where I do not feel reduced to metrics or outcomes. I do not want to lose that. I do not want my honesty to feel negotiated, or contingent on anything other than what comes from my heart.

So I am still sitting with it. I am letting the question breathe. What I do know is this: moments like this matter to me more than I can easily explain. They remind me that I am not writing into an abyss. They remind me that what I offer lands somewhere real, with someone who is paying attention, someone who sees me not as a number or a circumstance, but as a voice worth listening to.

To my subscriber, you know who you are. I just want you to know how much I appreciate your support and the reassurance that I am seen. That is all I want in my writing.