During my short time in the Bennington writing program, I had the great fortune of sitting in a workshop with Peter Trachtenberg and Phillip Lopate. Peter was my advisor and later helped me navigate my writing despite my rocky personal life—all with more grace than any human being has a right to possess. And Mr. Lopate, that legend of non-fiction whose books never seem to collect much dust on my shelves; this great mind called my writing something I’ll never forget. In fact, I almost tattooed it on my arm.

“Your piece,” he wrote on my manuscript, in a beautiful, professorial hand, “is an unholy mess.”

I’ve circled the existential drain for far less than that. And yet, I was fortified by these words, and still am. Ditto the other marked up manuscripts from my undergrad years and my fellow grad school writers. Because in the workshop, kindness speaks a slightly different dialect than that sweetness of the rest of the world. But it is kindness nonetheless.

I mention all of this because as I re-enter the writing universe, I am not only acquainting myself with its romances, but also its less-glamorous mainstays. Like the workshop. And the less-than-flattering critique.

The designers I work with call it a “crit,” which I love in its familiarity. And truth be told, they’ve earned that shorthand: for visual artists of all stripes, the critique is a weekly, if not daily, part of being creative. They even do it themselves, in their heads, for their own work (!). And while I’ve heard about the woes (and weeping) that come with art school, I can’t help but think that so many of the designers I know are more strongly bonded to their work and their community as a result of this ritual.

But for writers, the workshop (that’s what we call it—a diluted label, maybe, but a friendly one, too) is mythologized. It’s extremely close-making, and as such, pretty hard to come by. We pay money (often a lot of it) for people to praise and then ceremoniously tear our most intimate, private thoughts apart. Because, being the softies we are, we believe you can only trust another writer with your verbal offspring, especially in its infancy.

This week, I received feedback on my creative writing for the first time in a long time through an online class I’m taking at Gotham. And I blanched at first, perhaps because I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting these wonderful writers in person. “Esoteric,” I was told. “Hard to follow,” I was reminded. “Necessary?” I was asked. “They’re right,” I admitted to myself after a not-short pause. But I said it with a touch of warmth and a good deal of gratitude.

And perhaps it is because writers, and this writer in particular, are self-loathing masochists. We relish abuse. But that presumes that honesty is an abuse, which certainly can’t be true. I think about growing up in the South, where plenty of folks were sweet to your face, snarky to your back. And that seems far more cruel (even as a gross, convenient generalization).

And here comes the moral: you have to care to criticize. Indifference and deception are the enemies, not disagreement. I certainly smiled when someone thanked me for sharing my work in class, and I still have my Bennington acceptance letter tucked away in a drawer at home. But the things that make me sit a little more happily are the red-lined drafts from bosses past and present, the rejection letters from programs and publications (I’ve considered framing one such note from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop), the well-founded criticisms, the heartfelt suggestions to restart—tucked away in the same drawer as my good fortunes.

This encouragement, it can feel like a mess at times. But it is the touchstone of someone who has invested enough time in your work to know what you need to hear—and someone who trusts that you can.

Ain’t nothing unholy about that.