The Story of Showing Up

Two creative projects, one friendship

My best friend and I are doing a creativity accountability project this summer. We started last Friday. She is publishing a post every day, so I’ve made a chart where I add the essay titles and a star every time she’s published. I’m committing to a daily creative habit and I text her every time I sit down at my desk, usually early in the morning right when I wake up; she makes a large green check mark on a chart she’s attached to her fridge.

Some mornings, like this morning, I am very tired and I don’t want to get up, but it helps to think she is waiting for a text and there will be a large green check mark on her fridge just for me.

In 2020, my best friend and I were not best friends. We hardly knew each other, but we had committed to a writing project. Late December 2019, driving home from the movie theater after watching the new Little Women movie, past snowy fields spangled with sunset light, an idea appeared in my head, fully formed.

It was magic, the way I could see it all laid out before me. A podcast about Louisa May Alcott, exploring her life from different angles. Scripted essays. Conversations.

But this wasn’t something I could do alone. I thought of the person who is now my friend, but who was then only someone whose essays I had read online. A few days later, I emailed her with my idea.

We spent most of the pandemic writing essays for the scripted parts of each episode. The podcast would be one season, eight episodes. It would launch July 2021. As the loneliness and uncertainty of the pandemic squeezed harder with each passing month, I clung to Alcott, to phone calls and plans with my new friend, and to my research and writing like a lifeline.

I wrote on our screened-in porch during thunderstorms, up in my office, even in the local cemetery, seeking a quiet place alone. I spent long nights at our kitchen table, sifting through Alcott’s letters and journals. As the dark settled over the house and my family slept, I unclipped the fear and loneliness from my shoulders and draped them across a chair, settling into 1870s Boston with a sigh of relief. I had somewhere else to go. Someone to meet.

Now it is early morning, mid-summer 2025. I am at my computer, my striped orange tabby cat on my lap, purring because someone is awake with him. I text to check in, send a picture of the cat.

I put in my earbuds, open my audio editing program. Click the file. My ears flood with voices- mine, my best friend’s, and the guest we recently interviewed for the next season of our podcast. I sit patiently as the blue track lines in the audio file float by, listening for pauses or mistakes to delete. The room brightens infinitesimally.

Five years later and we are still creating together. We are still showing up.