A Bruise and a Bandage
The simplest response to the question of why I write is this; I love it. Now, this statement can be taken in many ways. Love is divisive. It hurts as much as it brings pleasure. Love is a storm and a sunny patch of blue sky, a bruise and a bandage in equal measure. The process of putting words on a page and giving my thoughts and emotions concrete form is like no other feeling; yet the frustration of writer’s block, the old wounds unearthed when writing about deeply personal matters, and fear of the blank page also bring a certain sense of pain to writing. No matter what, though, my relationship with the written word comes back to the central axis of a sort of gravitational pull. I cannot escape the need to write, and no matter how much I try to pull away I always find myself returning to the page. Yes, I am hopelessly in love, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Much of my love for writing stems from an unexplainable enjoyment of sounds. I have tried to understand what makes certain words sound so beautiful to my ears, and others so revolting. Of course I am never able to get anywhere and end up drowning myself in meta-confusion. One thing I am sure of, though, is that my love of how words sound stems from my love of music, wherein sound is the scaffold upon which composers clamber about to create their art. I first fell in love with melodies and rhythms in middle school, and soon began indulging in every frequency I could find. This is not to say that I did not enjoy reading. As a child I was voracious in my appetite for stories, as I am to this day, but it was not until I began my undergraduate career that I drew a connection between the sound of words and the melodies I had been addicted to for years. Stardust, eloquence, explosion; these and so many other words revealed themselves as a sort of written and spoken music, a detached sense of melody that I quickly fell in love with. Until then, my only artistic outlet had been songwriting. That year I began to write poetry.
That young man has developed over the past few years, and now when I write (even for academic purposes) I allow myself to love the process, blood and all. Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite authors, once said of his writing process “The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible”. One of the greatest parts of writing, for me, is the potential lying within the blank space of a page. Yes, it can be scary to have to generate words to fill that void, but there is a certain excitement in the process of considering what will soon be there. Ideas are cargo and writing their vessel. Writing allows me to convey my beliefs, my ideas, my fantasies, and so many other metaphysical aspects of myself out into the world for others to experience. It is almost magical to me. So, despite how much it sometimes hurts, or how frustrating the process is, it is always worth it when I see a full page of letters that I have written from my own heart.
Writing has helped me through some of the hardest moments of my life. While an incredibly cliched thing to say, there is a universal truth bundled deep within each well-worn statement. Writing has helped me work through my struggle with mental illness in a way that no therapy or medication has (while those certainly helped tremendously). It has borne me through the deaths of loved ones, the intensity of growing up, and the emotional turmoil that comes with wondering why you’re even a part of the world. It is an incredibly healthy purveyor of catharsis. When I am caught up in an emotional thrall, I often turn first to my notebook or laptop because I know that I will feel better after I write. On the flipside, writing allows me to take a snapshot of moments and emotions that I can revisit again and again. A first kiss, a trip abroad, the feeling of sitting in your family’s living room on Christmas Eve surrounded by loved ones and wishing to be nowhere else; these things fade with time and memory, but when written about, they can in an instant transport the reader back to a different time, a different place and a whole other life. In this there is incredible power and beauty, and I write to remember the good moments in life just as much as I do to fight through the dark.
All this being said, we’ll return the core question to wrap up this flurry of ideas; Why do I write? Not only do I love it, but it also allows me to work through my own existence, to translate my ideas from thoughts into words that other people can experience almost as if they were inside my head. To be able to do this while also savoring the sweetness of a well-crafted turn of phrase or a lovely word’s sound is one of my favorite aspects of the human capacity to create. Writing has given me so many gifts that I never would have received if I never decided to begin, and I don’t want to ever imagine life without being able to write. Yes, sometimes it hurts, but what is any love without a little bit of pain?
