Why write?

I've always been a writer. Not a Writer really, just a person who enjoys filling up notebooks and journals and stray sheets of paper. I started journaling very young (one of my first entries is about seeing The Little Mermaid in theaters) and my brother and I used to spend hours on stories and plays for our trolls and stuffed animals. In high school I would tune out of entire lectures to follow my roiling thoughts and emotions to their origins by pinning them down in my Biology notes.

Always, following these sessions, I felt a certain brand of calm that comes only from writing. I think it was a kind of catharsis: some people feel loose and open after they've run a mile or cooked an amazing meal, I feel comfortably empty after dumping my head onto the page.

Then I went to college and got married and while I technically had time to write and journal, in the rush of things I kind of forgot why I loved it so much. After I had Thomas and was suddenly devoid of essay assignments, needy students, and the challenge of daily human interaction, I began to feel really itchy. I needed to create.

I pulled out my sewing machine, started sketching, and glued pictures to scrapbook paper, but none of this was satisfying (probably because everything I made was mediocre to plain ugly). Journaling helped a lot, so I kept doing that, but still I felt constrained by the medium of memory preservation: record Thomas's milestones, the major events in our lives and how I felt about them, etcetera.

Then, while de-junking boxes of stuff, I found some poetry I'd written in high school and I suddenly felt excited to start beefing up my meager collection. I wrote a couple of poems, simple, short, and bad, and allowed myself to sink into the freedom that is poetry: about whatever, malleable syntax and structure, over quickly. I felt so much better, but life got busy and my creativity started to collect dust once again.

I can't remember what prompted me to start writing again this year, but just as I was beginning to write again, I somehow came across Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. The book is wonderful, and her big thesis is this: write. Write a lot, every day. Fit it in. So I did. I challenged myself to write a poem a day, which I did for a while, and to open my yellow legal pad and do what she calls "writing practice" as often as I could.

Oh, this was definitely a good move. Not only does the practice of writing explode itself into the desire to write more and more, but my crappy attempts at creation somehow multiply and branch themselves into more and more ideas for stuff to write about. It's like rolling down a hill: once you humble yourself by getting intimate with the grass and dirt and make the effort to get rolling, you get going faster and faster and you love it and never want to stop. And there are millions of hills in the world that you couldn't see or felt were inaccessible to you, but now you can see or at least imagine them all. Yeah, this metaphor is silly, but hopefully you catch my drift.

BUT, I couldn't have predicted my favorite surprise side benefit of writing a lot: I actually think all this writing is actually improving me as a person. I noticed a few weeks ago that I suddenly felt way more comfortable talking to strangers and even acquaintances (I'm sometimes deathly afraid of humans), and I traced that back to my writing, where I started to feel more at ease with my own voice. And I found that my developing social skills were just a portion of a larger phenomenon: because I was recording and actually looking at my thoughts, my goals and ideals were closer to the front of my brain and therefore more accessible for daily use.

This is not to say that writing is THE way to self-actualization and fulfillment, and it's definitely not to say that I've stumbled upon something original. But I think I've stumbled upon a thing I love that is good for me. That's why I write.