we read to know that another human has been here too.

Ask A Girl is an advice column on beauty & love, in all its forms, & anything you might debrief at a Sunday brunch. In other words: on girlhood. Explore here. Or submit an advice letter here!

Dear Girl,

As with so many people here, I was the child that read past my bedtime. I dreamed of being a writer. Today, I turned 30. I work at a publishing house, and I write short stories on the side, but I just don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.

Working in publishing, I am constantly berated with how talented people are. I think I was maybe talented on the scale of leading my high school newspaper or winning an award in college, but there’s thousands of colleges and even more high schools. I am no longer convinced that I am special in this way.

What’s more, I am constantly told that people just don’t care. I am asked again — by relatives or well-meaning friends or a stranger at a cocktail party — if I am worried that AI will take my job.

I don’t know. I still love writing and reading: it’s why I joined Substack. But it feels like no one reads what I write. Maybe it’s time to start doing something serious with my life.

Losing Hope

Dear Losing Hope,

How dare you. How dare you beat yourself down before someone else can. That is not your job. How dare you rob us of what you could have said.

I, for one, was such a strange girl, & I think maybe I still am, but somewhere along the way, flipping another page in another story, I found I wasn’t the only one. How dare you tell me that writing is not serious when you, too, were that strange girl, when you know how much reading meant to you, when it built whole worlds for you.

So many children, as you wrote, love to read. I think it’s because as children, we are desperate to feel normal. And reading shows us, maybe better than anything, that we are not alone.

A few months ago, everyone seemed to be freaking out over The New York Times’ Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans? quiz. What scared people was that, too often, they could not tell the difference.

But to me, this was entirely besides the point. I think we read because we want to know that another human has been here too. It’s why there are so many endless AI detection tools, so many essays on close reading trying to prove that AI might sound nice but it does not mean anything at all: because the fact of knowing that a person wrote something changes the experience of reading it. It changes the meaning of the work itself.

As a side note, I am also just confused by people who use AI to write because I have never once thought that anyone else — human or machine — could say what I mean to say as precisely as I can.

You wrote that you are scared you are not good enough. I am reminded of a quote from Joan Didion: “My failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough.” Which is to say I have yet to meet an artist who thought they were good enough, or if they did think so, they simply had not consumed enough art.

And does the entire world need to read your writing? Do you have to be the voice of a generation? What if you have offered just one person a little relief? Do you know what a little relief feels like when you are drowning? It feels like a lot.

Please don’t lose it. So rarely do people stick with their childhood dreams this long. Instead, they are beaten into doing something more realistic, into choosing the nine to five & the race to the top that is not really the top & told that this — this corner office, this wide window looking out into the skyscrapers — this is the American dream.

I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it even when people tell me that I am going to be artificial intelligenced out of this world. I think it’s worth it even when I am reminded of just how much I have to learn. I think it’s worth it because I am a human. To me, that means something.

Xoxo.