We met… about 2 and a half years ago. You came to talk to the short story writing class I was in and then you helped me get an internship. We havn’t [sic] communicated in ages but I was thinking about you yesterday after I dropped off my first ever writer’s contract with a magazine. I am now a working freelance writer who gets paid. And I was just thinking about how everything had worked out and I realized what a big part of that you were. Just having you talk in class was really helpful but then you actually helped me find internships to apply for and it is from that first internship, the one you helped me get, from the contacts I made there and the experience that I’ve got this job. It’s a little job. I do movie reveiws [sic] for ________weekly newsletter and get paid very little, but I used to do it for free. They have a readership of 80,000 so it’s pretty good. The summer that I interned there I worried that I had wasted my time working for free but as I’m learning any contact is a good contact and every experience is helpful. So I just wanted to say a very sincere thank you for the help you gave me a few years ago. You helped me find internships to apply for and just showed me a couple things I could do to really start thinking about a writing career as a goal and possibility instead of a pipe dream. Plus you introduced me to craigslist which has been both helpful and entertaining ( I love thier [sic] best of section). The internship I have now I also got from there. I’m interning at ______, a small independent liteary [sic] press here in _______. So basically life is good and you helped make it so. Thank you very much. I really appreciate the help you’ve given me. Really you changed my life.
I don’t really know how to end an email like this, it seems silly to just wish you well but I do. I hope everything is going well in your life and that you’re still writing, which I’m sure you are. Thanks again for everything.
I genuinely hate the phrase ‘pay it forward,’ not only because it inspired a movie which features Haley Joel Osment (I refused to watch — when I look at him, well… I see dead people — not that I watched that movie, either), but because I just … hate …phrases. This ‘pay it forward’ thing especially seems cheesy and contrived and I prefer to do things that don’t require me to whisper slogans to myself. (Even ‘Brighten the Corner Where You Are,’ a little song we sang at church when I was a kid, got on my nerves. At six.) (Which is obviously why I still can sing the whole thing. Sigh.) But this email I got today… and another one from a former student last week… sort of shocked me. I mean, no, I don’t take credit for this person’s success or that student’s understanding certain things better now, no – that’s maturity. But — wow. She sure feels like I had something to do with it, and that makes me think.
You know, I hate speaking to writing groups. Knowing we are moving to the UK, I feel I can breathe a sneaking sigh of relief, because I have, for a bit longer, the luxury of anonymity. No more old college professors asking if I’ll speak to their evening classes. And, once my book comes out, I’ll be – oh, so sorry! – unavailable for anything like book signings, which I never do feel sells more books anyway. But, after this, I’m having second thinks. Should I do more …civic minded type of stuff? Should I speak to classes, seek out young adults and …I don’t know, try and interact? Teach? Mentor? A friend I quite like has a blogger list called The Very Big Good Deed List. You can Google it – I won’t link to it with my horribly cynical self – but she’s called on all kinds of people in the blogosphere to do good things, and people are going out and doing things to lighten the world. It’s a great effort.
But for me? Honestly? I just can’t see it. For one thing, I’m too lazy to get dressed up enough to go out of the house and do these types of things (There’s apparently a rule somewhere that you can’t do it in oversized red velour sweats your S.O. calls your Santa Suit.). For another thing, I realized a long time ago that the time I take away from my inner life to exude an outer life… is time I don’t have. Translation: I am an introvert, getting weirder and more hermitlike daily. It’s a God-given blessing to stay home and bash away at novels. I could maybe even work in a cubicle – but I can’t DO people much anymore. Which makes me wonder about myself, in a country where I am a minority and won’t know a soul. I will have to make a conscious effort to avoid agoraphobia…
Anyway, I suppose interactions like this just …come along as they do, and you take them as they come. With no false humility, I am glad to have been the person to say the thing that this girl could hear to encourage her to do what she wanted to anyway. I suppose there will be other ways and other opportunities to do something …helpful for someone. And I hope I’m keyed in enough to take those opportunities. And really, that’s all anyone can do.