Writing Is Like Breathing
I Need It to Really Live
“Don’t stop writing, Pete. If you do, those words will just come exploding out of you, anyway. Keep writing.” — My little sister, Mary
Writing can certainly be a blessing at times, but it can be a curse at other times. I do believe the blessings outweigh the curses, but that will depend on when you ask me!
When I first joined a robust storytelling community a number of years ago, one of the more prolific and profound writers there talked about writing being like breathing. She needed it to live.
When I first read that, I thought to myself, “Well, that’s not really true for me. Writing is simply one of my many and varied interests. I could live without it if I had to.” I had, in fact, been living without it for many years, by choice. Looking back, I ask myself, “But were you really living when you were, by choice, not writing? Or, were you living in fear?”
You see, in younger days, when I was dealing with a lot of mental health issues, as well as with recovery from addiction, I also wrote a lot. Writing helped me to deal with those issues. I’d reached a point where I associated writing with the mental health issues, and decided that I needed to put it on the shelf, and focus on what I needed to do to live a healthy and productive life.
As time went on, writing became associated with those issues, in my mind, and I developed a fear of writing, that it would kick the hornet’s nest and reopen those issues I felt I had overcome.
Zita Fontaine’s recent article on this subject helped explain why I associate the two together.
I am writing this piece to help me sort it out in my own mind, how they are interrelated. In a way, writing is very much like an addiction with me. If I stay away from it, and build a life that doesn’t include it, I can survive, and even thrive in that writingless life.
But, I can’t just dip my toes back into writing, and go on with my writingless life. Once I started writing again, about nine years ago, I went all in. It wasn’t long after I read that article by Alex Noble on Cowbird, that I found myself writing like my hair was on fire, and had to begin, and many times end, my days writing. I just had so much I felt I needed to say, and writing had provided the avenue to say it. I found that I did need it, like I needed to breathe, to live.
For the next five years, I wrote all the time. When Cowbird shuddered it’s site to new material, and lost its interactivity, I went through some serious withdrawal. Clearly, I had become addicted to writing there. It took me a year and a half to recognize that Medium had all the same ingredients as Cowbird had offered, to feed my addiction to writing.
I now have a little more perspective on it all, and live under the illusion that I can control it a little more than I did in the past. There’s more of a variety of platforms within Medium in which to ply one’s craft of writing, so more thought is necessary to where, and how, I will publish or submit my work for publication. I even like to think I’ve gotten better at editing my work before I publish, though sometimes I do wonder about that.
I certainly have had more moments of questioning my sanity in these past nine years or so, than I had previous to that, when I was not feeding my writing addiction.
But, it seems that’s all a part of the deal. Creatives are crazy sometimes. It goes with the territory. You have to be crazy to even want to do this, I think.
But, I think I can live with that. As long as I don’t get too crazy to live my life, to keep other aspects of it in proper perspective, I’m good with this addiction. I need it like I need breathing — to be fully alive, that is.
There is life without writing — but not life as I love it. I need to write to be whole.
