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{{first name | friend}}, there's a question that shows up most nights, usually around the point where I should be asleep and am instead lying there reviewing the day like it's a document I can still edit.
Would she be proud of what I did today?
My mother died in 2006. I was 18, an only child, raised by her alone, and I stood over her casket in a room full of friends and extended family feeling more alone than I have felt before or since. I remember where I was standing. I remember what the room looked like. I have remembered it for twenty years.
And this is not a diary entry, I promise, so stay with me, because there's something in this that's actually about writing.
The question doesn't ask about the businesses. It doesn't ask about the year things finally started working, or the clients, or the numbers I'd put in a bio if I were the sort of person who puts numbers in a bio. It asks about today. The ordinary Tuesday version of today. Whether the small thing I did at 3pm would have made her nod.
Which is interesting to me, because none of the stories I actually tell about myself are the ones that turn up at midnight.
I have written about getting fired twice from the same industry. About quitting journalism in 2017 with no plan and a confidence that turned out to be entirely unearned. About a missed internet bill, a cassette tape, a client's yellow legal pad. Those stories are smooth now, the way river stones go smooth, from being handled so often.
The one that runs me has never been in a single opening line.
Here's the part I keep turning over. Some stories are useful and some stories are true, and most of us lead with the useful ones because we know what to do with them. Then we sit there wondering why the writing feels slightly hollow even when every word in it is accurate.
I assumed for twenty years that this one didn't qualify, because it doesn't resolve into anything. There's no lesson at the end. There's just a question that comes back most nights and a version of me that answers it, badly, and then goes to sleep.
That was the wrong test entirely. The test was never whether a story teaches something. It's whether it's true, and whether it's yours.
Stephen
P.S. What's the question that finds you at night? Not the one you'd put in a bio. The other one. Reply and tell me.
P.S.S TMRW, I’ll tell you the three things I do now on purpose:
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