I love your writing. What advice would you give a writer?

Thank you, that makes one of us. I’m so not a fan of my writing. There are only a few things — like, sentences — I’ve produced that I can reread without convincing myself I should Stop. Right… Months, years ago. I write for selfish reasons, because I love the process: I love being alone but never feeling alone as my consciousness divides into many, as I hear my favorite thinkers, many my friends (still, always, my idea of them), think alongside me. I love researching. I love arranging words. I LOVE punctuation. I love learning through writing, following curiosities with some notion that it’s work; getting paid helps, but not as much as having an editor who’s better-than but also invested-somehow in you. I love the opportunity to go through this process again & again. But the rest — I smoke a lot of weed, party, fuck, care for my friends, think constantly of death & the smallness of my being, go the cinema alone, & read read read read — all & anything to get outside of that part of myself that I’ve put out into the world as “my writing.” My lips disappear into my jaw clenched whenever someone introduces me as a writer or speaks of writing in some possessive w/r/t me…

The only advice I have to give is to be mindful of the pleasures & pain, sacrifices & gains, that writing, professional or not, brings you… weigh them & accept the shit, like everything is a comprise, all jobs/relationships involve compromise. Life is a compromise. For an atheist-leaning agnostic like me, with the rigged absurdity of life like Tinkerbell always giggling around my head — that perspective keeps my anxieties universalized, rather than in individual concerns like one’s career or success or wtv, and I think that helps. At the end of it all, only our relationships with one another matter, that I believe. I believe that writing is a means of communication, that it’s only good when it’s designed foremost to communicate with someone(s) (Too little writing is attentive to this. Assembles words in vacuums.). I believe that I’m a better friend, lover, and family member when I’m writing regularly, because it fits me better than anything else I’ve tried (I’ve tried many), and, happy … or emptied of myself, I can be with others better.