The One Reader You’ll Never Meet

You found the letter in a box you hadn’t opened in years. Your grandmother’s handwriting, faded but unmistakable. Three pages, folded twice, written to no one in particular. Just her thoughts on raising children, on what she wished she’d known, on the garden she planted the year your mother was born.

She never published anything. Never considered herself a writer. She just wrote it down one afternoon and tucked it away.

And now, decades later, here you are. Holding her voice in your hands.

This is what words do. They outlast the person who wrote them. They wait. They find their way to someone who needed them without knowing it.

You’ve probably thought about writing something yourself. Maybe you’ve started. Maybe you’ve talked about it for years. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself the timing isn’t right, the idea isn’t ready, you aren’t ready.

Here’s the truth no one tells you: the hard part isn’t finishing. It’s believing it matters before you have proof.

You won’t get that proof in advance. You won’t know who reads it, or when, or what it stirs in them. You won’t see the moment your words land. You have to trust that they will.

Think about the last time someone’s words reached you. Not a famous author, necessarily. Maybe a teacher who wrote something in the margin of your paper that shifted how you saw yourself. Maybe a friend’s late-night text that arrived exactly when you needed it. Maybe a stranger’s post that put language to something you’d felt but couldn’t name.

Those people didn’t know what they were doing for you. They just wrote. And because they did, you received something you couldn’t have asked for.

You hold that same capacity. Not because you’re exceptional. Because you’re specific. The way you see things, the way you’ve lived, the way you put sentences together—it belongs to you alone. And somewhere out there, someone is waiting for exactly that voice, even if neither of you knows it yet.

You don’t need a million readers. You need one. One person whose afternoon shifts because of something you wrote. One person who feels less alone. One person who keeps your words longer than you’d expect.

The fear is that it won’t be good enough. That you’ll put yourself out there and nothing will happen. That your words will disappear into the noise.

But disappearing into noise is what happens when you say nothing. When you keep the thought in your head, the story in your drawer, the letter unwritten. That’s the real silence—the one you chose.

Your grandmother didn’t write that letter for applause. She wrote it because something in her needed to be set down. She trusted the words to find their purpose. And they did—decades later, in a box you almost didn’t open, on an ordinary afternoon that became something else entirely.

What you write today might work the same way. It might reach someone next week or next year or long after you’re gone. It might sit quietly for a while, waiting for the right reader at the right moment.

That’s not failure. That’s how words have always worked.

Stop waiting for certainty. Stop asking whether it’s good enough, current enough, marketable enough. Those questions will never give you permission. You have to give it to yourself.

Write the thing. Finish the thing. Let it go into the world and do what words do—travel further than you can see, land where you can’t predict, last longer than you will.

Somewhere, someone is waiting for what only you can say.

They don’t know it yet. Neither do you.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your words could outlast the moment you write them, The Power of Authors is where that question opens up. You can find The Power of Authors on Amazon: http://bit.ly/3K6o8AM. If you’d like an autographed copy: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM

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