Why I Write

I've had an adversarial relationship with writing nearly my whole life. When I was in 4th grade I squarely declared to anyone who would listen that I hated to write. Hated it. Why? Looking back (ah, the blessings of hindsight) I think that my experience of the world--both internal and external--was so textured and complex, and my ability to translate that onto the page so...4th grade. I have a box with journals I started at various phases of adolescence, with the intention of keeping careful track of my life. And every one of those journals peters out after the first several beautiful pages. There was angst there, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

Writing is messy: it shows me things about myself and the world that sometimes I would rather not see. Lots of the time. I can’t carefully manage my world as I learned I needed to do growing up. There were scaryamazing things inside of me that I learned to be afraid of, not to accept, or to cultivate. Better to shut the door, turn the music up louder and not pick up a pen. But now I’m learning a different way.

Perhaps my journey isn't so much about becoming a writer, as becoming a more authentic version of myself. Writing is something I do to work out my understanding of the world, to bring order out of chaos, and because I get to feeling like a pressure cooker over high heat inside when I don't. And because at times people tell me that I help them put words to things they lack words for. I can't but help believe that if my writing helps bring contours and shape to someone’s reality, it’s a good thing.

It's important for me to distinguish between what I do, and who I am. Writing is a precious, valuable opportunity to tell my truth, to dwell in possibility, to fill my unique niche in the world. It is a means of expression, but not my mode of being. But it is a means of expression that, as I practice it more and more, becomes woven into the fabric of how I experience the world, and how it experiences me.

If I AM a writer--holding this as the ultimate statement of my being--then when a critic has a bad day, or when I am not performing at my best, the core of my very being hangs in the balance. I've walked that road with other things--including a stint in teaching--and offering my very self for others judgment and critique is not the way to live. I have a choice of whether or not to do that, I have realized. And I am learning to choose not to give another that kind of power. I don’t want to live in pursuit of someone else’s validation, of letting someone else name me. Nor do I want to live in reaction to prove to someone else what I am or not. That is not the way of freedom. Although I'm not free yet, I don’t hate writing anymore. I’m writing. It's all intertwined, and it’s good journey.