Why You’ll Write
To think, understand, love
You’ll write because for the first twenty or so years of your life, you will be painfully, painfully shy. You will worry constantly about what other people think, about whether what you say is valuable or boring and dumb. Your mom will be asked at every Parent Teacher Conference why you never talk (the answer: because thinking out loud to other people made you paralyzingly nervous). When you are young, you will want to grow up to be a writer, because writing will be the only way you will know how to think.
You will write because you will want to be understood. You will write for the future. You will document all of your heartbreaks, your triumphs, your doubts, and your questions, because you hope—you think—you pray that eventually you will meet someone who will care enough to peer through the book of your life with you.
You will write to understand. You will write to get to know yourself.
You will write because writing is how you will learn who you want to be, what you want to believe, and how you want to love.
See, here is when you realized (decided) that you get to decide what you believe about the world.
And see, here is when you realized (decided) that actually, what determines when you are really, truly in love is not some inexplicable biological, emotional, or cosmic force. Rather, you get to decide when you are (what’s the difference between being in love and believing you are?) so why not just love?
And you will write because it is through writing that you will learn how to comfort yourself. Through reading and rereading what you will write you will learn how to love yourself. You will write to create the story of your life, and you will write to revise your self-defeating internal monologue.
You will write because you will be glad that you did. Because you will be grateful that you have a record of all of your weakest and most life-defining moments. Because you will be glad that you have a record of the mental, emotional, intellectual evolution of your teenage years. Because you will be glad that you can look back on yourself figuring out, haltingly, who you are, with both the objectivity and the tenderness of a reader dusting a beloved novel off the shelves.
And one day you will write because it will scare you to do it. Because when you turn twenty-six, you will start to miss it. Because one day you will realize that you have traveled leaps and bounds from where you were three years ago but you will have no record of it.
But now that you are older, you know the stakes will be higher. You think you will be expected to know who you are and what you want to say.
But you will also know that the only place you’ve ever known those things is in writing.
And so you’ll write.
“Why am I compelled to write?… Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger… To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispel the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit… Finally I write because I’m scared of writing, but I’m more scared of not writing.”
— Gloria Anzaldua
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