A little over a week ago, my publisher emailed asking me to come up with four possible endorsers for my upcoming February release. It should have been an easy task, but instead I completely shut down. Every person I thought of immediately came with a reason not to ask. They were too well known. They were too busy. We didn’t know each other well enough. My brain had no trouble talking me out of every possibility.

Eventually, I posted about my frustration on Threads. It wasn’t an ask for help, and I wasn’t looking for recommendations. In fact, by the next morning I had already worked through it. I had a plan, a list of people I was going to contact, and I felt much better about the whole thing.

Then I opened my inbox.

There was an email from Librarian Mychal Threets saying he would love to read the manuscript and consider endorsing it. Before becoming the host of Reading Rainbow, Mychal had actually led a staff training for us, so we weren’t complete strangers. At the same time, I don’t know whether he recognized my name when he saw the post or whether he simply responded to what he was seeing in that moment. What I later learned was that people had started tagging others they thought might be willing to help. One of those tags reached Mychal, who reshared the post before reaching out.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that the remarkable part of the story isn’t that Mychal emailed me. It’s why any of it happened in the first place.

The people who started tagging others didn’t know my book. Unless they had followed previous posts, they didn’t know what it was about. They didn’t know whether it would be successful or whether they would ever read it. They weren’t trying to attach themselves to a project they believed would succeed. All they knew was that someone had shared a moment of frustration, and they decided to help simply because they could.

That has stayed with me.

A few weeks ago, a literary agent passed on a different proposal because they didn’t think I had enough of a platform. I understood the decision. Publishing is full of difficult choices, and “not for me” doesn’t mean “not good.” But this experience has made me think differently about what a platform really is.

We spend so much time talking about platforms that I wonder if we sometimes forget about communities. A platform certainly has value. It helps people discover your work and gives your ideas a place to be seen. But what happened over the last week had very little to do with numbers or reach. It had everything to do with people choosing to show up for someone else. No one stopped to evaluate whether my book was worth supporting because they didn’t have enough information to make that judgment. They simply saw another person who had hit a wall and decided to lend a hand.

I’ve written before about Shine Theory—the idea that when one person shines, we all shine. It also reminds me of something Sheryl Sandberg writes about in Option B: when people are struggling, one of the most meaningful things we can do is simply show up. Neither of those ideas is really about networking. They’re about generosity. They’re about believing there is enough room for all of us to succeed and understanding that helping someone else doesn’t diminish our own opportunities. If anything, it strengthens the communities we all belong to.

Looking back, I don’t think what happened was extraordinary because one well-known librarian reached out. It was extraordinary because of all the people whose names most of us will never know. The ones who tagged a colleague, shared a post, or made a connection simply because they could. None of those actions seemed particularly significant on their own, but together they created an opportunity that none of them could have created individually.

That’s how communities work. One small act becomes another, and before long, kindness creates a ripple that reaches farther than any one person ever could.

Maybe that’s the thing about communities. They’re rarely as small as we imagine them to be. What began with one post was carried by librarians, authors, readers, and people I may never meet. Different backgrounds. Different experiences. The only thing they really had in common was the willingness to help. They reminded me that community isn’t defined by who follows you. It’s defined by who shows up.

Mychal often ends his posts by reminding people, “I’m thankful you’re here.” I’ve always loved that because it’s such a simple acknowledgment of another person’s worth.

After this past week, those words feel even more meaningful to me.

I’m thankful for every person who added to the ripple, whether it was by tagging someone, sharing a post, sending an email, or simply choosing kindness.

And I’m thankful you’re here.