I write because life is too fleeting to get comfortable in our pretty boxes, yet outside our own heads, and hope things stay tidy. No, the only way for me to assure a full and joyful life, minus a cocktail of psycho pills, is to put on my gloves and rummage through my head and heart, past and present, until I discover all I believe and why I believe it. That way, when something happens to unsettle my foundation, I know where to tweak without complete disassembly. Or rather, I can skip the need for someone else’s attempt at taking me apart and putting me back together. My written words are the notes taken during my examination.
Success, in the process and end, drapes a translucent silence over the world’s hum of readily available bitterness. Writing affords me unparalleled freedom in that it doesn’t dissipate my mind’s chaos, but simply translates it, bringing a clarity that breeds control. Such is the necessity in why I write.
I write because language puts a face on emotion. There are some things that seem to defy the existence of words. “Love”, for example, is such an empty collection of letters relative to the frightening, wonderfully dizzying and wholly fractured feeling of its purest form. Similarly, “heart-break” does little to convey the acute, self-renewing agony of the actual experience. Yet we use them on a regular basis to describe such benign happenings that we become desensitized to the intensity of the real thing.
But as a writer, I embrace the challenge of wrapping word combinations around occurrences that seem to resist explanation, and then placing that perfect word-gasm in such a way that it competes with the multi-dimensional giant of experience. I appreciate how a single, correctly positioned word can summon an image, and ideally a physical sensation, in the mind and body of its reader. Such is the vanity in why I write.
I write because I have entirely too many opinions to keep them confined inside my brain. Even if no one reads them, at least they’re out in the open air and floating somewhere, free. It’s a worthy end in itself, considering my own feeling of freedom usually seems to mirror theirs.
But more often than not (to the relief of my ego), people do read my rambling contemplations. And with that brings the power and responsibility to inspire thought and discussion, to change beliefs and consequently lives, one person at a time. The ambition of using words to help facilitate reflection, passion, and transformation in others, no matter how minute, forces me forward. I enjoy tailoring inspiration to a blogging, sports fanatic audience, or squishing it into a hundred and forty characters. And the warm feeling of brightening a stranger’s day has a special place on my list of favorite things. Such is the service in why I write.
And most of all, I write because I’ve survived a lot in my 29 years. There are perhaps just as many tales of discarded talent in the face of tragedy as there are of triumph over adversity on the way to success. I’ve wondered so many times why I didn’t quit; why I didn’t let the abuse and the drugs, and the heartache and the pain just steal me away, and stash me in a ditch somewhere. I don’t think I’m any stronger than those who have encountered such a fate. And so I’ve had to ask myself, what makes me different?
The only conclusion I can think of is that I was meant to tell the world something. And if that is the truth, then I thank God for picking me, and to prevent negligent irresponsibility, I will do that. I will do it with my words, and my voice, and my life. Such is the higher purpose in why I write.
Writing is the action that embodies the whole of my experience. My prose and my life simultaneously provoke and perfect each other. I am my words. And they are me, on paper.
