Writing: What a Beautiful Form of Masochism

Writing is a form of masochism in that it is the endless and relentless pursuit to create one perfect piece of writing that will reverberate to all readers. It is the pursuit of using a craft that is increasingly becoming more and more obscure within the digital age, where readers have shorter attention spans. It is masochism in that you will never please the harshest and most sadistic critic of all: yourself.

You will never be happy with any writing, as there is always a flaw. You cringe as you publish, you get rattled with frustration in knowing that you are far from being an amateur, you feel a wave of nausea in opening the criticizing remarks from others who exist to dissect your writing and by extension yourself like the worthless person that you are. You stay awake like a fiend in the oddest hours of the night because you cannot sleep with your current draft, you binge on whatever will bring comfort such as smokes or alcohol to lessen your existence in the attempt to lessen the pains of realizing that your craft is obscure, you compound your existence with doubts and self-loathing that must be released by writing… only to review your writing and hate yourself even more.

You try to laugh at the self-identified or rather self-inflicted notion that you will never make the same amount of money as friends who pursued a more lucrative career with a more guaranteed rate of success. You live in the past more than any of your friends as you must draw from a pool of previous memories, some happy and some repressed, to channel the voice that you want within your writing. You constantly click the delete or backspace button furiously to erase any existence of the remarkably horrible creation that you just typed. You crumple paper after paper that evidences your futile crude efforts now brought into life by ink.

You roll your eyes and mutter under your breath as you see several “enthusiasts” that seek to imitate your craft all for the pursuit of looking learned. You feel a sense of selling yourself out when you resort to the same methods of imitating other authors because deep down, you know their writings are better than your own. You start to understand the concept of infinity as you are always realizing that you need to become better, that you are never good enough with your writings, that you enjoy at most a fleeting amount of happiness upon creating something only to let that “part” of your brain despair.

Yet you write. You write because it’s part of who you are. You write because you can’t fathom a life without writing. You write because you have to release all of the ideas and words in your mind to stop from exploding. You write because the person who can best understand yourself is quite frankly yourself. You write because the world just doesn’t satisfy your hunger and ambition of understanding. You write because during those moments of writing, you can feel a way to channel your self-deprecation into something that isn’t self-destructive. You write because you fear that you’ll cease to stop writing: the fear of not writing is stronger the fear of writing. You write because the world is a cruel chaotic place and your sanctuary lies in the escape of your creations. You write because you feel akin to a fish drowning in the water of writings: it’s killing you yet you cannot live without it.

You write because it’s the closest thing to talent you have and damn it; you’re going to plug it. You write because under all the neurotic flaws that compose who you are, there is one redeeming quality that can only be realized through writing. You write because you have no patience for those that would belittle your craft and will only seek to undermine your determination; instead it empowers you to deny the external representations of what you struggle with internally. But most of all, you write because it’s one of the few times that you can feel human, complete with the aggregate of fear, passion, anger, despair, hope, and even happiness.

Writing is your anchor to the world, saving you from the maelstrom of chaos and desolation. It is masochism but it’s one that you have chosen and thus one you have taken command of.

Or maybe all of this in my head and I’m just a shitty writer.