The Best Feedback a Writer Could Receive

When I was 16, I ghosted one of my best friends. Her name was Hailey. I had spent the last three years of my life pretending not to be in love with her. Yes, this is cliche, but it’s probably relatable to somebody. And there’s a little pay off at the end, so keep reading. 

She was one year ahead of me. By the time she graduated and was ready to leave for college, I had been not-so-secretly avoiding her for almost 8 months with no explanation. It was kind of dramatic.

The night before she would leave, I stayed up in my room and wrote the most compelling, epic, 9 page front and back, hand-written confession of love ever conceived. In 3 hours, I unloaded 3 years of romantic frustration onto 9 loose leaf sheets of physical paper.

Just as she’s leaving campus on her last day in Hawaii, I find her and put 9 pages of raw truth, enclosed in an envelope, in her hand. She’s relieved that I bothered to say goodbye. I look her dead in the eyes and instruct her to wait to open it until she’s on the plane.

And she does. And she’s with her mom. And her mom tells me that she was sobbing violently the entire time. I don’t know if that was my intended effect. I don’t know if they were good tears or bad tears, or the tears you might get at the end of a movie when one fact is revealed and it ties everything together, simultaneously exposes something awfully, deeply sad.

7 years later, I return to Hawaii to renew my drivers license. I am an infinitely more confident, open, and secure version of myself. Hailey is the head coach of the High School Cross Country team, the original source of our now-long-dead friendship. 

I message her a couple days prior asking if she still has the letter. She does. I take writing somewhat seriously now, and I am seriously interested in what my 16 year old self had to say. We coordinate that I show up to a track practice, mingle with the kids, and she lets me take some pictures of the letter. She wouldn’t dare let me have it. 

Those things happen, and the practice has ended and all the kids have left, and it’s clear to me how precious this letter is to her by the way she freaks out when I drop a page and it makes me a little too pleased with myself. 

But here’s why I wrote all this:

We’re discussing the letter, pretty candidly, kind of like a book club for the only two people who have and ever will read this thing, and she casually drops this:

“You know that part at the end about not taking things at face value and how if you dig a little deeper you might find something really valuable?” 

I nod, pretending to remember anything that my sleep-deprived, manic 16 year old self puked onto that page on that night 7 years ago. 

“That paragraph made me give my current husband a chance and I probably wouldn’t have gotten married without it.”

I say “nice.”

And think that… that is about the best feedback a writer could receive.