Today I’m sitting down in my writerspace to work on my book for the first time since early August. In the weeks since I last dove into it, I’ve let go of my hometown and my heart has broken. Sitting with this quiet is painful–the solitude of writing feels especially acute–and I keep flashing on something my friend K, an artist of no small repute, said this week as I wept to him in the middle of the night. I had been devastated by how little I felt I or my work mattered and he had exhaled audibly. “No matter who you are, the act of making art is incredibly lonely,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how successful you are, nor how much support you seem to have. You don’t know if anyone will care about it. You don’t know if it matters at all if you do it. You do know you’ll probably go broke before all’s said and done. But you do it because it’s inside you and it needs to be born, and the world needs as much of the light of creation as we can offer it.” He was right. So I ate this morning and slept last night for the first time since Monday, when things fell apart. And today I am trying again. Because, really, as so much cold-heartededness abounds around us, it’s the only thing we can do. Own our actions. Bear some light.