Asking For Help

Good golly - just writing the title and subtitle to this piece grabbed me by the throat. I took those redundant, yet can be activated by archaic shame, claws from my neck by putting this extraordinary photograph my desert friend, Fee took of me only a few weeks ago, right here, where I can see it. Feel it.

Needing support, and asking, is the theme of right now.
I’m mid essay for Advantages of Age on this very same subject.

This though, is me asking you to help me grow my book.
It strips me to the bone in a way even asking for money in 2020 for my spinal surgery, didn’t.

I dive deep into this.
I will probably write more.

But for now I just stand in the desert sunrise of this asking - I am fiercely committed to growing my readership of Postcards From a Little life. It is fierce, not desperate, and there is a whole pilgrimage of difference.

I do know who I am when I write. I know why those that love to read me do, the same way I know why I am the only breed of psychotherapist that will cut it for some. I know what it is that I am offering. In a nutshell, my lyrical and undefended self. When I write, and when I hold safe for another in the exchange of my work, I have learned to trust. I am practicing trust in the places where I used to try. It closes distance. It opens up wide barn doors.

It is, I have discovered, where I live.
Not the easiest of home address, yet I would not trade it for anything easy. I am always going to choose real. Maybe because the nice on top, not real of my micro lineage nearly killed me, just as much as it brought me to the home ground I built my house on.

I mentioned shame and desperation.
Needing to ‘be read’ in its first iteration, and landing in absence and a lineage of violent toxic shame, well, dear reader, it nearly did for me.

Now, I can stand in my boots and heart and ask you to help me. I can do this, tell you what I am really asking for, and trust my direct experience of feeling freedom as I ask. That is one mother-fucker of a trek from desperation to be read because otherwise I am alone.

I am not alone.
I have been feeling very alone with some frequency of late - mostly in the realms of practical support. I have a global village of heart-kin but no-one is actually very local, and as my pain and physical instability increase, being a single human, accountable to two non-humans, and herself, in the day to day of it, is a bit stormy right now.

I am not alone like I was nearly sixty-seven years ago.
I have walked myself, with immeasurable help, right back to the place I needed to be read - and here I welcome, receive and read the one I’m with.

This informs my asking, even though it is edgy, it supports me to ask, to even remind, to ask again, because I don’t actually need you to buy and/or review my book, which is me as a book, to know deep in the baby-dust of my beginning, I am not alone anymore.

So, I will now and then ask again, remind and nudge.
In order to grow my readership out of the arena where being read already happens, I need verified purchase reviews. Many of you have said: of course. I understand - I know every ‘of course’ is sincere, and I also know we are busy, that though it’s a small thing, it requires we remember and actually do it.

These are the actual factual nuts and bolts.
If you were willing to purchase a copy if I have gifted you one, or even a second one to pay it forward, you can do that via Amazon, or through York Online Books.

I have also a page on Goodreads that is remarkably desert like at the moment, as I have never belonged to this platform, and don’t know the lay of the land. It is going to get some mojo when I work out how to breathe life into it. It is though, a place that people can review, rate and recommend without needing to verify a purchase.

That’s it really.
Just me asking, reminding, nudging, requesting, all with this hard-won lightness of touch. Maybe you don’t have the willing, or the time? Maybe rippling ‘me as a book’ into the wider world doesn’t matter to you in the way I wish it did? What if there is spacious around these maybes, and I can feel what I feel, and you can too.