Why I write.
George Orwell, in his essay titled, Why I write summed up with great flair, the reasons behind why he did what he did, “…I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew I had a facility with words and the power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”
Having read the said essay and a lot of Orwell’s works, my natural proclivity towards asking questions, specifically the why – called for some introspection. As a kid, there were more imaginary people than real that I remember holding conversations with. It was about the failures in school life – the inability to get over social awkwardness (something I still have trouble with), it would be about something mundane that was said or done, or maybe an intuitive way of articulating what went on inside the head. I don’t know have an answer for this. But looking back, I think my struggle between loneliness and being comfortable on my own, and the urge to seek depth in everything have been part of me as far as my memory goes. The only thing – it has taken me a long time to accept that about myself. Sometimes, I think about the time lost being somebody else, other times I think it was necessary.
I’ve always liked listening better than speaking. Voices have an endearing quality about them. They annotated the stories people told. They would give you clues to the parts they doubt, the parts that excite them, the parts they’d rather not talk about. The voice revealed as much about the person as the story itself did. Listening made it easy to stay inquisitive. Unsettling curiosity drove me to explore the line between imagination and reality, to seek connections between things otherwise disparate, to be drawn inwards, to find strength, to understand those around me. I never did well with order. For someone who values aesthetics, I do not function well with structure – instead, it is the fluidity of thoughts that drive me – like the colours spread across the sunset sky – without a form, yet serving their purpose.
All of this pushed me to learn more about myself. Writing started as an intuitive exercise in self-awareness and I grew to enjoy it, argue with it, question it, or even hate it. Nevertheless, it belongs to a part of me that I’ve made peace with. Now it’s more than that. There’s a sense of originality and a sense of familiarity that comes with it, an impulse to be myself, though I am still finding out who I am, the courage or maybe even the foolishness to do what it takes to pursue the truth.
As human beings, we want to be impactful. A relatively worse way to live would be to create no impact at all, to have no memory of you etched in anyone’s mind, to owe and be owed nothing. Nothing built, nothing broken. Having lived like that, spending most of it in self-loathing, and losing people who mattered to me, one thing I could do to become better was to create – from depths of my mind I didn’t know existed –to seek the good in it, and make it part of my everyday existence. Something to impact the little corner of the world that I live in, leave it better than how I found it– and this is why I write.
