An Audience of One

It’s all about me.

Yep, pretty selfish, huh? Hardly the new age of kindness, you say. I can understand that. It’s a pretty bold headline, right?

But this is about approval. About writing for approval.

First of all, it’s about writing.

When I say “I’ve been meaning to write for a while now”, I actually mean, “I’ve been meaning to share my writing for a while now”.

I’ve been writing all my life. It was the thing I was pretty good at. Digging out my old school reports recently when we were packing to move, I see that my English teachers thought so too. So, for every comment by a Physics teacher that suggested that “Thomson is no fool, though he likes to act like one”, there was a correspondingly reassuring note about my fluency with a pen.

So, I can write.

Back in the days when I had a ‘proper job’, communication was pretty regimented … the ‘house’ style, if you will. There was structure, and a language which was impenetrable to outsiders. There were expectations about how you expressed yourself.

I bucked against that.

I used words and language to enrich my days. I wrote for myself. It still made sense; but the sentences pleased me. As I became a ‘grown up’ in the organisation, I hope my words gave the folk who wrote for me scope to express themselves more freely.

In these post-work days, I have created on outlet for the words. A weekly newsletter. A curation of positive and inspiring things being done by others. These words matter because they champion others. My words say something about people doing their thing really well. They are the words they cannot always find for themselves. So they need to count.

But then there are the other words. They have no specific purpose. They are just my words. They matter. But they only really matter to me. I am an audience of one. I write for myself. And that counts too.