#5 - Understand Me

Some months ago, I started reading a collection of Sylvia Plath's journals. "Can you understand?" she wrote at 18 years old, during her first semester at Smith College. "Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little?"

I thought of a... well, a Something I wrote even longer ago:

Rose likes books with writing in the margins.

Do you? Do you?

(Say no. Let me like them.)

(But understand why, if you can.)

It's an impossible, selfish(ish) request. "Understand me." But we ask it anyway. We ask it of our readers every time we write. Funny, funny. I've been telling myself an author's single, brightest, most persistent hope is that someone will read her words and feel understood. Will read the words, breathe them in, and sigh them out. Relax the shoulders. Shudder out the creakiness in the body. Look up, or out the window. Feel wonderfully okay.

All of that, I've told myself, is the greatest hope.

But I've overlooked – literally, "looked over," above, the thing underneath that oh-so-noble cause. The writer doesn't only want the reader to "feel understood." The writer wants the reader to understand.

"Understand me."

That's where writing begins. That's what it is.

An impossible request.