Knowing that someone could understand you makes it possible to think deeply

There’s something about knowing that it’s possible to be met in the depths of your thinking by another that gives permission to go to those depths in the first place.

It opens up the possibility that a response is possible, that someone can confirm that you’re not crazy, that you’re not writing into a void. That your thinking is useful to someone, somewhere.

He went on writing letters to Urras, even when he mailed none of them at all. The fact of writing for someone who might understand—who might have understood—made it possible for him to write, to think. Otherwise it was not possible. – Urusula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

zettel: 3.4c