Today I published my 100th post on Substack.
Milestones are weird. This is one of them.
Sitting in the driver's seat of my truck, I looked out the window. Split concrete led to a green field on the other side of the parking lot. Vermont's green mountains sprawled leisurely beyond and maple trees framed the grass within. Dead air hung between us. Well, it wasn't so much "dead" air as it was "air at rest."
I was on the phone with my step-sister, Ali. It'd been quite some time since we caught up. Families are weird, too. An upbringing spent walking on eggshells turned into years of dancing on cracks thereafter. It's a choreography we share.
"Is part of why you like to write so much because it lets you tell your story on your own terms?" she'd asked after a bit of catching up. It was a good question. Like, a really good question. After some back-n-forth about a piece I'd published recently, catching up turned into catching glimpses—of each other and the paths we took to the lives we lead now. And while her question settled, I thought hard about why it is I like to write.
It brought me back to a couple of moments. The first, I'm 22 years old smoking a cigarette outside of a college town bar at 2am, wondering what life might feel like if I didn't perpetually numb myself to it. The second, I'm 27 years old running an ultramarathon in the Tetons, conflicted between how I spend my time and how I pay my bills.
"There's a difference between liking an activity and liking that you've done an activity" I said, finally. "I like to write because it's how I like to spend my time."
It's not about having written or having a story to tell on my terms. It's for me.
Walking on eggshells and dancing on cracks wired me to tread lightly with others. And that's the kind of thing that strains relationships before they even exist. So I knew that in order to live a fuller life where I could actually connect with people, I needed to learn how to communicate differently. Facing that discomfort would be hard but worth it, I figured.
And so I started, one post at a time.
Today I published my 100th.
I smiled as we said bye and hung up. Then I followed that crack in the concrete toward the grassy field, proud of how far I've come by not taking shortcuts.
onward.
-dmac