If reading has always been the way that I make sense of the world, writing has always been the way I understand how I feel in the world. Why one writes is a question that arises at a point in every writer’s life and has been often presented as a classical writer’s essay that attempts to detail what fuels their writing. Naturally, I found myself spellbound with discovering why it is I write and what it is that fuels my writing. Ultimately, I have concluded that there is a never-ending answer to the question of why it is we write. But what I do know is that pen and paper have always been the way that I have gotten to unequivocally know myself. By employing my thoughts and emotions as subjects for my writing, they have continuously created opportunities to discover myself deeply. As a writer, I believe it is important to at least make an attempt of personally writing one of my own.
“Why I Write”
My thing is life’s intensity, experimenting with deep sensations and big stimulants. My hyper-sensibility allows me to be a warm person, to be realistic and intuitive. If I put my hands up and reach high enough I can touch a whole spectrum of emotions with much more depth and perception than others. My emotional richness enables me to grasp more than that that exists. I always feel first and then I exist. My imagination is so much quicker than my reason. I have been given a gift with words, a gift to express the inexpressible. I like speaking with the truth, uncovering the reality of things. I have the ability to take experience and express it with clarity through words, writing, metaphors, images, designs, or music. — I write as a never ending way to express myself.
When I am relaxed, I am creative, productive, organized, and hard working. I think clearly and I can balance my emotional up and downs. My energy is centered in my heart and it’s contagious. I’m addicted to love and romanticism, I can create a beautiful room with anything around me. Love and feelings are everything to me which is why I always speak from the heart, about the heart and wear my heart on my sleeve. When I am happy sometimes I fear the sadness will come and I start putting up defense mechanisms. But I am learning that overthinking mimics overcooking and at some point it’s not going to be edible. The depth and complexity of my feelings is what makes me feel misunderstood in the world.— I write to be understood to pour the feelings out of me.
My hyper-sensitivity enables a simple change of tone, look, or a smirk to hurt me easily. It exhausts me and causes a lot of ache in me that sometimes I cannot balance the duality of my emotions. When I am sad, I am subject to emotional paralysis and can stay numb for hours, days, or up to weeks. When I am tense I can be spiteful and in that moment can become the sole owner of the truth. When it doesn’t go my way, I know I can seduce or dramatize myself into anything I want. At times this can make me feel confused, lost, vulnerable and it makes me feel like I don’t really know myself. I don’t have all the answers but I have all the questions and this gets me closer to the answers. — I write to discover my truth and know myself better.
I spend a lot of time in my head remembering and fantasizing about people, moments and conversations in the past or in the future that I haven’t yet had. I can move with ease from heaven to hell or from love to loathe in the blink of an eye. It is of great distress to not be able to express the depth of the world inside myself. I can’t control reality but I can take control of my reality by writing out what is going on in my world. I am learning that the only things under my control are my attitudes and my reactions. I can’t control my intensity and I’m well aware it isn’t for everybody. Writing enables my thoughts and emotions to be presented back to me in a new way that lets me asses what I’m dealing with inside. — I write to put order in my world and discipline my intensity.
Writing provides me with a pen of expression to write the thoughts out of my mind and the feelings out of my body. It is a self analogy and an opportunity to review what parts of myself I am feeling particularly moved by. Through this, I can discover myself, preserve versions of myself within time, and I am able to hold a narrative of who I was then and what I have come to be made of now. As much as my personal discomforts call for instant change, there is no need to change it all. I am learning to stay still and wait, to contemplate and not judge. — I write to let go and keep moving forward.
Endlessly I have heard that one must edit their writing until it has nothing left to say back and until the emotion has been worked out. Writing is a way of expressing what is inside, thereby eliminating all the various ways we can be wrong-headed. Once it’s written out, it tells you, you don’t tell it. I can see that I am as good as I am bad, I am as vulnerable as I am human, and I am not different nor defective. I am just a deeper and more intense human being than most. I recognize these things in me, I am able to laugh about them and find a meaning to life day to day. I am able to step back see: There I am! That is who I am! — I write to trust myself.
As I step back and look at the mosaic of reasons why I write, I find a common thread: all for the purpose of self-discovery, preservation of essence, and as a way of presenting myself to the world. Writing has granted me the ability to share my truth, and express the inexpressible for others and myself. It enables me to translate emotions into words and show others how to do it for themselves. In this same way, I attempt to capture what is is that fuels my writing with hopes of raising questions of why it is we do what we love. Truly, if I had all the answers, there would be nothing left to write!
Further Readings and References
“Why I Write” by Joan Didion
“Why I Write” by George Orwell
“What Is It I Think I’m Doing Anyhow” by Toni Cade Bambara
“On Writing” by Anaïs Nin
“Why I Write” by Phoebe Lovatt
El Eneagrama by Andrea Vargas