There are a lot of things in my life that give me solace. Books, food, desserts, looking at pretty things on Pinterest, a good shopping sesh, a very specific group of people. But if there’s one thing that makes me feel like I matter, like I have value, it is writing.
I have always felt that writing is my way of understanding myself, how the world works, what I feel about things that make me angry or sad and thus come to an equilibrium within myself.
But I think writing helps with more than that. It gives me power over my story and thus, it gives me a sense of safety. It helps me to witness myself: whether I’m strong or weak, smart or foolish, successful or not.
My journal writing helps give me space to feel whatever I want to feel. It’s been a revelation how putting a pen to paper can help me shed the noise so I can focus on what is troubling me truly.
My creative writing though…that gives me space to play.
I remember when I was younger, at one point I had wanted to be an actor. I thought, here’s a person who gets to be anyone and no one. They get to play, step outside of themselves, come home to themselves and really live life.
Then I started to see the amount of work that actors put into being an actor. The dieting, exercising, schmoozing and the horror of all horrors, living very public lives. I was so dejected that I started to look for another way to get what I wanted without the things I didn’t want.
That’s when I realized writing would give me all of it without the dieting, exercising or talking to people. I could make up stories and who would question them? If I said something was so, it had to be so. There was no one who could deny me power in my own space.
And so, I chose to become a writer.
I have been writing for close to a decade now. Every time I think of the relationship I have with it; my first response is always I hate it. My next response is, out of some dysfunctional sense of loyalty, I love it, cannot imagine life without it.
The thing with writing that I am realizing more and more, especially since I have read Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, is that it does not suffer fools. It does not allow you to hide behind pretty words, exotic sentences and lovely prose. It strips you, to your bare bones, and challenges you to show everything you have kept hidden under layers and layers and layers of veneer.
And perhaps that’s why I find it difficult sometimes to go back to my creative writing. It does not let me keep my comfortable masks. It asks me, politely, to leave them at the doorstep, wipe my feet on the mat and only then enter.
There is a stillness that comes over me when I open a word document, engage with my characters and listen to their stories so I can faithfully reproduce them on paper.
As I write this, it occurs to me that writing, for me, is an act of self-love. To remove time from the daily mundane world and spend it with myself.
No matter how much I love or hate writing, it is a part of my processing. Without my words, I wouldn’t be here.
Every time I have contemplated this beast of writing, whether on my blog or in my journal or through self-conversations, I have discovered new ways to answer my favourite question: why, why do I do it when it pulls me in so many different directions? And every time the answer evolves.
I come back to writing because I find I must keep writing if I want to find an ultimate answer, if one exists. It is no wonder then that my favourite quote of all time is life is a journey, not a destination. Because writing too is a journey. A journey that has the power to shock and soothe whenever I feel courageous enough to embark on it.
This post is part of the ‘The Write Path Blog Hop’ hosted by Swarnali Nath.
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