Why I Write
The sky filled with fat, fluffy clouds. I could see them through the window of my second grade classroom, but I wasn’t looking out there. I wasn’t paying any attention to the way the red and gold leaves were lightly littering the ground. I wasn’t listening to the happy hum of seven year olds getting out games and preparing for recess. I clutched the long, fat pencil between my fingers, wrapping my fist around it for better heft. My head bent so close to the desk that my nose almost brushed the paper. My eyes crossed a little in concentration. Nothing else existed except for the words and me. I was writing.
This is how my relationship with writing went. As a child, writing consumed me. Writing was a best friend, as close as a sister. Despite my father’s constant threats to read what I wrote in my diaries, I trusted writing to get me through the storms of life and help me understand the changes I was going through. I needed writing like I needed air. Writing made me feel like I had something other people didn’t.
Whether writing privately in decades of personal journals or polishing a piece for sharing with others, I write to explain what’s going on in my life, to make sense of it, to put it into a larger context. I write as a release and an escape. I write to have a record of the things that have happened to me. I write to play with words like puzzle pieces, seeing which ones fit together to make the most vivid pictures. I write because it is pure fun.
I once watched an episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, featuring one of my favorite artists, Bruce Springsteen. In discussing his song, “Devils and Dust,” Springsteen carefully explained the background to his lyrics, mining his phrases to reveal multiple layers of thought and meaning. After unraveling his self-analysis, Springsteen paused. Then he said, “How much of that was I thinking when I wrote this? None of it. How much was I feeling? All of it.” I relate to this statement in my writing. As I scrawl in my journal or sneak out of bed at night to write down an idea, I am not consciously thinking of how much writing means to me, or the accumulation of emotions and ideas that I am conveying, but I feel it with every scratch of the pen or tap of the keyboard.
