Man, when I asked earlier this week for you guys to share your lists of what does not get accomplished at your houses, at what waits for the “free time” that never comes, at what is on steady stand still around your place so that maybe I could feel better about the junk lists around my own house, y’all came through.

I mean – for real – you DELIVERED.

I had more Facebook comments than usual.  I got texts with random answers.  Emails even.  It was THE BEST.

And not just because you guys made me feel better.  Because it wasn’t actually better that you made me feel.  It wasn’t entirely better that I was going for.  You made me feel normal.  You made me feel regular.  Not alone.  In it together.  One big messy pile of humanity all trying in vain to get their mess together.

And, from the sounds of it, it made a lot of the rest of you feel the exact same way.

Less alone.  More normal in your dirty laundry, Christmas tree still up, chores never completed kind of lives.

I love that.

It’s the best benefit this blog could ever bring about – a sense of community and camaraderie and in it together-ness that every single stinking one of us needs more of in our lives.

I went to my friend Katie’s house – where I have been probably one hundred times.  More than.  And I have never ever looked up at her ceiling fan.  Which, yesterday, she pointed out was inches off the wall and needed painting and I had never even noticed.  (And even better, one of our mutual friends offered to fix it  for her.  What?  The internet making kindness happen?)

Because life is like that too – right?

We’re all over here hovering around our issues, petting our secret worries and listening to our inner critic tell us how stinky/stupid/lame/lazy/out of control/ridiculous we are and NOONE EVEN CARES.  People aren’t noticing.  They aren’t sizing you up and finding you lacking.  They aren’t noticing that the toilet paper is never on the actual toilet paper hanger and then wishing they were no longer your friend.  They don’t see the glass terrarium still under the tree outside where your son in law put it last summer and think you’re a terrible human.  That’s actually not how it works at all.

When I wrote the original post I really was feeling kind of sorry for myself.  I was feeding that part of me that says, “You’re not enough.  You’re not making it.  Other people have their mess together and you just keep having a mess and making a mess and being a mess.”

And then seeing the outpouring of responses.  The sheer volume of all the regular stuff that all the regular people I love can’t put away, fix, maintain, make shiny was pure poetry to me.  I don’t care if your gallery wall contains zero actual photographs and your garage is housing two broken refrigerators that you’ve turned into tool storage boxes.  I still like you.

And knowing that provides me the space to assume that you probably still like me too.  That friendships and opinions do not rest solely on my ability to maintain order and scrub a shower daily.

All the hilarious and gracious and generous sharing of your own junk put me in such a mood all day as I read the words.  I laughed and chuckled and loved how many of you ended up commenting on one another’s posts.

It made me remember why I type and write and communicate at all.  Why I read and talk about the books I read.

There’s a favorite quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

That.  You.  Belong.

What every heart I have ever met in this life beats to the rhythm of.

Reading the posts and the comments and the pats on the backs and the “yeah, same” all across the thread remind me –

We all belong.

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