Fortified by comfort
When you think you’ve had too much of this life to hang on... Hold on
Hello everyone! Three in a row….
I have so many things I want to write about. Everything is either tangled up in my head or written in dozens of notebooks, in Word documents and in Scrivener projects. This week I am drawing out one thread from this snarl of thoughts, something that has been on my mind for a while: comfort.
There is a reason why the hurt/comfort trope is so popular with fanfic and genre writers. Like the R.E.M. song says ‘Everybody hurts’.1 Editor Kate Marope describes hurt/comfort stories as being about ‘the reciprocal nature of hurt and comfort, neglect and nurture, and weakness and strength.’2 And because we all experience hurt and neglect (often from ourselves) we all need nurture and comfort. The R.E.M. song tells us, rightly, to ‘take comfort in your friends.’
But what do we do when we are alone, or lonely? We turn to (creature) comforts. The OED describes these as things that are distinct both from necessities and from luxuries.3 The necessities of food, drink and…