Wanna Be a Better Something? Find Your People and Lean Into Your Community

Connecting with others with similar interests — regardless of what they are— can change your life.

Susan Poole
5 min readOct 9, 2023
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

The friendly-looking woman beside me leaned over and whispered, “We should’ve been sitting in this room 20 years ago, right?”

I looked around.

She was referring to the fact that we were surrounded by people who appeared younger than we did, many of whom were aspiring authors at some point in their “I’m trying to get published” journey. We’d come together at a conference for women’s fiction writers, presumably with the same goal — to learn how to become better writers and figure out how to see our words in print someday.

But why had the woman singled me out? Did she make that comment solely because we looked to be about the same age, or was there more to it? Could she tell by my deer-in-the-headlights expression that I was still unpublished? That I’d never attended a conference of this scale before and felt uncomfortable in my surroundings?

I nodded and agreed with her.

Of course, I wish I would’ve taken more initiative earlier in life. I’ve always loved to write fiction and dreamed of becoming a bestselling novelist for as long as…

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Susan Poole

Mother, lawyer, nonprofit executive, breast cancer survivor, and aspiring author. Recently left her day-job to write about topics that she’s passionate about.