Your Ordinary Is Saving Someone You'll Never Know About

You don't get to see every life you touch. That doesn't make the touching any less real.

The Thing That Happened at the Grocery Store

I was having a bad week.

Not dramatic-bad.

Just the grinding kind.

The kind where nothing is catastrophically wrong but everything feels slightly too heavy and you’re moving through days like you’re walking in wet sand. I was at a grocery store, running on four hours of sleep, holding a basket with three things in it that I couldn’t remember why I needed.

The cashier...middle-aged woman, name tag I didn’t read, clearly running on her own version of wet sand...looked up when I got to the counter and said, “Hey. You look like you’re doing the hard thing today. Good for you.”

She didn’t know me.

I didn’t know her.

Have no idea what she saw in my face or why she said it.

…but it completely changed the trajectory of my day and how I was able to cope with the continual challenges.

Problems became ‘challenges’.

…and I’m usually up for a challenge.

The Ripple You Can’t See

Here’s the thing about impact.

We’re terrible at measuring it.

We assume the moments that matter are the ones that feel significant while they’re happening...the big conversation, the speech, the perfectly timed piece of advice.

The moments with weight you can feel.

But most of the ripples happen quietly.

In the margin of someone else’s day.

In the small thing you did without thinking because it’s just how you move through the world.

The writer who shows up in someone’s inbox every week and keeps showing up, even when the numbers are small...there’s a reader out there who opens that email before they open anything else. Who has never commented, never replied, never given any external signal.

But they’re there.

And your ordinary consistency is something they count on in a way you’ll never fully understand.

The creator who almost quit last year and didn’t...someone found that work during their own worst week. Someone needed exactly that story at exactly that moment.

You’ll probably never know which one or when.

That’s not a reason to inflate your sense of importance.

It’s a reason to stop underestimating your ordinary.

What Writers Get Wrong About Influence

Most writers I know are waiting to matter at scale.

Waiting for the big numbers.

The viral post.

The moment the audience is large enough that the impact feels real and visible and provable.

Until then...they’re not sure it counts.

But influence doesn’t work like that.

It works more like water, as it finds the cracks.

It goes where it goes, often sideways, often in directions you never intended, often years after the thing was made.

I remember getting an email from a young lady, thanking me for the Wanted Hero comic books. She’d been introduced to them by her little brother. I thought that was sweet, but the message changed.

This young lady had been in a car accident.

She was never going to walk again and was living at the hospital, refusing to go through physical therapy.

Her little brother showed up with my comic books to show her a hero that did hard things, even when he didn’t really want to…to try and motivate her not to give up.

It had worked. She was emailing me to tell me so.

She told me her therapy was going well and she was adjusting to her new life in a wheelchair.

Told me Wendell helped her find hope sprinkled with laughter.

Think about the post you almost didn’t publish because it seemed too small. The chapter you wrote on a hard day when the prose felt flat and serviceable and nothing special. The offhand comment in a reply that you don’t even remember making.

Someone built something on top of one of those.

You just don’t have the receipt.

The Permission This Gives You

If your ordinary is already landing.

If the ripples are already moving, whether you can see them or not, then the pressure changes.

You don’t have to manufacture significance.

You don’t have to wait until the work is impressive enough to matter.

You don’t have to build the audience to a certain size before the thing you’re making counts.

It’s already counting.

Right now.

In a room you can’t see.

That doesn’t mean stop trying to grow.

It means stop using smallness as an excuse to hold back.

The reader who needs what you have isn’t waiting for you to go viral. They’re just waiting for you to show up.

So show up.

Write the ordinary thing.

Publish the imperfect thing.

Send the email on the week when you’re not sure it’s good enough.

Someone’s light is waiting on the other end of it.

...and you’ll probably never know their name.

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“Somebody’s Light” is Track 4 on the Gear Girls album Wide Open. This article is part of a ten-piece series built around lines from the album.

Have a listen: SOMEBODY’S LIGHT