Our theme for the month of March is “How to.”

My husband does “computer stuff.” When we first started dating, we laughed over one another’s chosen careers, puzzling over jargon at Red Robin during what was otherwise simple dinner date conversation. Even now, after four years together, I find myself sometimes struggling to imagine what in the world he’s talking about while we decompress, nose to nose, on our pillows.

Most of it is work like restarting printers (the good ol’ turn it off and back on again) or acting as computer guide for lost HR employees who work from home and really shouldn’t, but sometimes his work looks like typing at his desk for hours, glancing between three different screens, and not speaking to anyone. The summer before we got married, now two years ago, this aspect of his job caught me: it felt oddly familiar.

Initially he had laughed it off that I wanted to know more, but after I promised that (truly) I did want to know, he began to try to explain SCADA software to me. Forgive me for the subpar explanation, but from my understanding, SCADA is a data-driven platform that he uses to build custom projects for specific uses within his organization. For example, recently, he built a project that completely replaced the existing software on a machine that programs the control units for his factory’s product.

Reader, if you hadn’t realized by now, I do not know how to code. But Caleb’s work of beginning with nothing and ending with details like choosing the right screen layout for maximum user comprehension is, in fact, deeply familiar to me. Like many of those in this little post calvin community, I share that deep love and hatred for the blank page that stares at me on the eve of my musing’s due date (noon on the sixth of the month), because without it I would never write anything, and with it, I must write something.

Mitchell’s February 23rd post has been sitting open on my laptop for quite some time now. I, too, would love to write a short story this year, and I hope I will, but here I am on the fifth of March, feeling proud of myself for not writing my post the morning of the sixth. I, too, feel void of ideas and often have only half of a beautiful sentence floating in my mind about tulip petals, or my cat, or the weather. I, too, feel that I am becoming a lazy writer.

And frankly, reader, being a writer is terrifying. Someday, I fear, someone will root out the fact that I am an awful  and lazy writer, and, worse, that the stories I wish to share are not worth telling, and so I hide away those sins committed in first and half-finished drafts, knowing that they will reveal me as amateur, lazy, or outright bad. Joining the post calvin, then, is a beautiful step, if only for the fact that this community makes sure that I write. But I would venture to offer another, beautiful, next step.

A few months ago, Caleb asked me to help him decide how to lay out a user interface, and we talked for over an hour about the pros and cons of different types of graphs for clarity and/or visual appeal. The next week, I asked him about an idea I had for the story I was submitting in my application for grad school, and he has since texted me a minimum of four Wikipedia articles on atmospheric currents and gravity tractors among other texts like the New York Times Mini scores and “omw”s.

Of course, Caleb’s creative work looks very little like mine does. He calls his audience users, and I call mine readers, and on a deeper level, he creates as an act of problem solving while I create for the act of creation. But he and his work are familiar faces to me, and with that has come the frustrating and fascinating opportunity to share in one another’s blank pages, bar graphs, and sci-fi deep dives.

I have found that as humiliating as it may feel to allow his access to those drafts that prove my worst fears, if I clamp down on my work and hide it, the outcome is debilitating. However, if I share my half-baked musings, especially with the one who loves me the most, the next stage is more explosively generative than what I could cover within my allotted number of words.

I am not—you are not—a lazy writer. I simply have been trying to do it alone, and I was never meant to.

Kate Wilmot

Kate Wilmot (’24) is a Grand Rapids resident who has found herself in the in-betweens of undergrad and post-grad life. She is an avid children’s fiction reader and a globally-minded cook who will feed anyone that walks in her door. You can find her losing to her husband in pickleball, weight lifting, or getting coffee with her mom.