Connect, how?

A sense of connection — whether to another person, a time, a place, an idea — is as important as water, food, sex, and sleep.  Even hermits, loners, or those antisocial family members no one quite understands need to feel connected to someone or something.  We read and write, paint and sing, make friends and flirt with strangers — all with an eye on somehow easing our ultimately inescapable loneliness.

No one knows everything about us. It’s impossible, when we don’t know all about ourselves that there is to know. We are, then, left to try to know ourselves and all the fragments that define who we are as people. It’s up to us to construct bridges within ourselves and between ourselves and others. Isn’t that what E.M. Forster meant by ‘Only connect!’ in Howard’s End, to connect the prose and the passion within us, to connect the fragments?

This site is my attempt at constructing bridges inside and outside of myself, to assuage that elemental isolation — my own and, hopefully, others’.  A character in a book or movie, a stranger in our favorite cafe, a lyric in a song and so much more. There are as many opportunities for connection as there are for isolation; and OnlyConnect is my attempt to seek out and explore those connections. I invite you to come along.

And a little about me… 

My husband took this photo of me on the Pont Neuf during a recent trip to Paris, our favorite place on earth.

My name is Renee Pettit, and I am a freelance writer and editor from Albany, New York.  As well, I am a fiction-writer-in-search-of-an-agent, the wife of my handsome best friend and stepmom to two beautiful girls.  When I am not making a mess in the kitchen or working or yoga’ing or taking a leisurely walk with my husband, I write.  I have just completed the novel I thought I had completed two years ago, but after much obsessing –– another of my pastimes –– I held my breath and jumped back into the revising process.  I’ll keep you posted on this blog as to how that’s going, along with whatever else lodges itself in my brain, exhausting me during the day and keeping me up at night until I write it out of my head.  Drop me a line in the comments section, if you’re inclined.  Until then, thanks for reading.