For me, It didn't start with words, unlike what most would expect, writing for me never started with a writing but with thoughts, my head was always full as it still is, occasionally my memory could not hold in all the crazy stories I had, and I couldn't remember my quotes and theories I had in the middle of starry nights, I couldn't keep up with what I was creating, I had to put it into reality, so in the mid of my teen years, I started writing here and there, stories, poems, quotes, and drawing inventions that probably will never see the light of day, I was this soul that wanted it all, I wanted to live in my world, but I also wanted to make memories with my family, I wanted my stories to be shared with other people because it felt more right, I wanted my inventions to become real because I was curious whether they would work or not, years later, and I am now in college, still the same, I wanted it all to the point where it started breaking me to pieces, in between insomnia, depression anxiety, hallucinations, the dreams and genius ideas became torturous thoughts playing in loops in unending agony, here I was that genius who started going mad, i never really saw myself as a genius only how others saw me, but I do acknowledge that those ideas did make me go mad, they still do, it turns out trying to understand life, will make life worse, in my small dorm room I set in silent while my head was emerged in this war between surviving the suicidal thoughts and not becoming mad, that's when the emotion started becoming words, I wanted the pain to end, I wanted it out of my chest, so my head started organizing these words in order, like music notes creating a symphony, every sentence had a rhythm, and at times I would not realize what I am writing until the final point, you can say that I was possessed by the same emotions that in other times had paralyzed me, I started writing because I wanted my brain to be a little less loud, and I wanted my madness to make sense, there were moment were my writings felt loud enough to be read by others, but at times they felt as a part of me, too painful and maybe to mush reflecting of my heart that I wanted them to stay hidden, I know I may not a good writer and obviously not the best, but my words are for me like the first baby steps, they are not unique nor are they the last, but they have a unique meaning to the heart and the moment they were written in.

i always meet people who ask me,

“why the hell do you write.”

“why do you waste your time reading novels.”

well, i don’t have answers to their questions,

because they’re comments...

they end with full stops, not with question marks.

why do i love art?

is it because i love million dollar bills?

but so many great artists died poor. economically.

is it because it helps me heal?

but death and love always hurt. even in literature.

but why do i love art?

i

need

to

answer

it.

because i love listening to stories,

of life.

of people who are lost in the maze of life.

of incidents that i won’t live long enough to experience.

i read to learn.

i read to live.

i write to tell stories,

of my own,

of my beautiful ghosts,

of my dearest love.

if i could tell you what i’ve learnt so far;

a mute girl taught me

how she can’t lie but her life itself was a lie,

a queer cowboy taught me

how life is so much more than tags.

a doctor’s last day at college

taught me not to have any regrets.

a failed artist taught me

the beauty of the world is in its complexity.

a blind guy taught me

how he can see everything, just the way we can unsee.

there are so many stories to be told,

like never before.

i have words.

so many of them.

even if i had just a few;

i’d have shuffled them

switched them,

to write poetry.

why?

Because i want to live life....

I often ask myself the same question, especially since I keep most of my writings to myself. I even bought a domain to start a blog and haven't posted a single thing. To afraid of the insults to be vulnerable and put my words out there.

Regardless of that, first off I write to heal. To let out all my pain, sadness, anger and disappointment of self and humanity. I write mostly because I am filled with sadness and pain that never eases or fades. Tears fall daily from my eyes and most of the time I couldn't tell you why other than my heart and soul aches in a way I can't write on paper.

Secondly, I write in hopes to reach someone who is aching like me. To let them know we are all alone and feeling lonely. I want to touch a heart or soul of someone who is at the point of giving up and ending their suffering. I want to be the light in someones life that gives them hope in that exact moment they need it.

I live my life with BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) struggling to make it through each day. I am judge, to difficult to be around, and have no interpersonal relationships so I know lonely. I know I am no John Gresham, shit I an not even a Dr. Seuss, but writing has saved me and I will continue regardless if I reach zero people of million.

#lonely #keepwriting #makeadifference

When you’re a kid, you’re relatively powerless. Add being an only child, having a painfully bashful predisposition, and having an eccentric personality that you’ve yet to really grow into, let alone embrace—and you have younger me. I had a crippling phobia of ball so gym became a nightmare. It was a required class too, thus I’d often find myself stranded amid a cacophony of balls flying, kids screaming, and teachers perhaps too distracted to manage the chaos. I’d sag off into my corner and watch, hoping for the chaos to keep at bay. Feeling like a coward. Cultivating a complex that would morph and lead to a smatter of other insecurities. At the core was powerlessness. I was small, even for my age. I knew death before I should’ve, maybe. And then again. Again. Again. Powerlessness became a fixture. And there was no friction to be had outside the escapism provided by creativity. Television. Movies. Other people’s fantasies laid out for me to watch and enjoy.

So I tried my hand at drawing up worlds of my own, a bit more intricate than my past scribbles. Being slightly older, I started putting words to my worlds, serious words—keeping record of the movies that played almost constantly behind tired eyes. They’d fall together, in vague semblances of coherence. They’d give shape to characters, dialogues. They’d imbue in my small hands a sense of power, something I was at a loss for in reality. And for however long, I’d immerse myself and play with my friends my allies my words.

Words were a foothold against the hurricane of early preadolescence. I would hold bouquets of dreams between little ears, given life by my hands, if only on paper. I’d create a role model, an alter ego, a nemesis. I’d take the things that scared me, make them a character beholden to my will, and fight back. In my head I had power. My notebooks were the exhibits.

My worlds collected nuance with age. I’d find myself trying to understand rather than vilify. I think watching and reading and writing has expanded and honed my empathy like little else. As a writer, you become every character, however shallow, one-dimensional, or wicked they may be. You try to find the anatomy of an emotion, the color, the flavor.

You learn there will always be beautiful things to do with words, even when you don’t have much to say. You can talk forever about nothing and, if you’re talented and practiced enough, make it beautiful.

Or on the days when you’re at your most charged and electric and genuine, you can hold a body’s worth of emotion in a tiny sentence, and make it say everything. Words are catharsis. Words are release.

I have to write because if I don’t I get down. Bummed. Overwhelmed. It’s just one of those natural, inexplicable drives that I have, and not everyone has it so I can’t expect everyone to understand. I have been through phases where I hate writing as much, if not more, than I love it. That’s probably in part due to my OCD, and in other part due to feeling like I’ve wasted my time. It’s easy to feel like you’re wasting your time when you write your heart out to little or no applause. When the validation just isn’t there. It’s not so much that you want to be the shallow archetype of “rich and famous”, but you want people to appreciate the results of your labor, the baring of your soul. There’s nothing shallow about that, in my opinion. And I understand.

Why did I write, then, back before I had a place to publish?

I guess...hope. It’s how I am—I have to have something to wake up for, something to chase after. To borrow a phrase from Nolan’s Joker, “I’m like a dog chasing cars; I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one.” It’s the thrill of the chase. I’ve chased recognition since I was young, perhaps too young to even grasp what recognition truly was. All I knew was, whenever the teacher would let me read one of my stories to the class, whenever I’d get to share the thing that I wrote with another person—I don’t think you can really put *that* feeling into words, and I wanted more. Now I’m here and I have 586 followers and that’s amazing to me. But the aspirational side of me tells me to keep going. The day I stop chasing bigger cars is the day I stagnate, and that’s a bit too close to giving up for my tastes.

I found power in the words. I find life in the chase. And really, what more could you ask for?

Each door appears, creaking to open an inch, but it closes unexpectantly. It happens often, should I be surprised. Each opportunity to unveil a burning desire to prove a life-long passion, to belong.

Writing a form of therapy, I wish could become my life, to write, to create, to form a craft. But at each entrance to progress, to develop and the same obstacle appears. It’s a bind I cannot shake, a critic I can no longer take.

The thing I cannot change, my age, my home, the colour of my skin, or my heritage, or my apparent lack of it.

As I stake my pencil to the page, the blank canvas a reminder, of my failing from birth. Is it worth it, even taking the time to imagine, to fall in love with crafting a space that is product of the unbound mind?

When my efforts are left unchecked, unguided. Each research into connecting with others, falls away, to be smacked in the face by the application criteria.

I’m getting the feeling,

I am walking again.

The pencil turns, a smile returns, I write.

A Walk In The Wrong Shoes

I write for myself. Whether to sort out my mood, tell stories I may forget or become warped in the mind; to see progress or regression in my writing. The point of view that is never seen by anyone other than me probably because it was only meant for me to see. Back then there was a drive however now I simply write because I choose to. It helps me so why not? If tough criticism, rejection, or doubt is present then accept it and remember you do it for yourself before anyone else.

I realized I was a writer when I was a senior in high school. I'm 43 now, and am just now taking it seriously. I could never find the courage to even try because I was afraid of rejection. It wasn't until last year that I realized I needed to be writing for me. While we all love to hear positive feedback on our creations, that should not be your focus. Your writing is a part of you, who you are. You should be writing for you, and you alone. Who cares what other people think? Find your courage!

Since I was eight years old, the dream of being published & paid for my work, is similar to a relationship with another human being- except, the struggle is within.

My Writing:

*has, come and gone

*returned

*crawled back- begging for mercy- with speeches that have earned me standing ovations.

A eulogy so moving- someone wanted to borrow it?

(weird, I know, but it happened in 1999)

My writing has brought comfort to the grieving, tears of joy to those achieving milestones and recognition to the humble, under appreciated and overlooked.

Although it’s been a long tumultuous relationship with my writing- after 4 decades, I wouldn’t change anything.

Still, unpublished and unpaid-

the deep emotion I can read on their faces...touch’s my soul.

To my disbelief, years later, they still remember.

I’ll never know why...

My writing, does not need me!

I need my writing-

(and sometimes? They do too.)

God Bless ❤️

Benz 5:30:21

I love to write because it takes my mind to a place of stories, miracles, mystery, enchantment, misery, joy, hatred, fascination, question, education, and intrigue.

My mind contols the output, and no one else.

Your story is built on what you see and what you believe. While you write, you're releasing an anger or an emotion that has trembled inside your mind with every waking moment. To surface it to a pen, puts you in control of it's appearance. The way you write your emotions on paper give you the option of keeping it personal or drawing in another mind to capture the output as you saw it. You reading this far symbolizes the effort I used to intrigue the output. I love to write.

Writing is purely an art of instruction.

In March 2020, I wrote about how I had one more month of Covid-19 to get through before it could all go back to normal. I was wrong. In a long short, autobiographical piece to become typical of me, in April of 2020 I wrote my first piece for Prose in three years. I pressed publish, hoping beyond hope my pain would be recognized by the internet.

March 2020 was a weird month. Fresh out of a psych unit, broken-hearted, and having quit my job (the first day Covid hit the west coast - Seattle - and I thought, whatever, that's like forever from here, what can happen?) I was rather desolate. My sister had cut ties with me, I had no one but myself and a computer screen.

I wrote a poem about cracking eggs against my frying pan and missing, too drunk to care. My roommate, the only other person I was to have contact with for the next three months, asked: "Do you really only have eggs and champagne in our fridge?"

The answer was yes, and not only was I not ashamed, I wrote about it.

And I started getting published.

This is a flash-forward to 2021. So far this year, I've had three pieces of mine published by various magazines. The are short prose link this. And every time I get published, I think: I've shared too much with the world.

I wrote about my sister, and she didn't even care. I sent her a piece I had published, one where I tore our family to shreds. She didn't blink. Or, at least, through the phone it didn't seem like she did. She said, "You know what? When Kim Kardashian wears a million dollar coat, it catches everyone's attention. She's making a statement."

I'm still thinking that one over.

Why do I write? I write because, as Charlie Sheen says on Two and a Half Men, "There are things inside of me I need to kill."

He actually says that while hugging a toilet on the show, drunk and throwing up, but I digress. Perhaps it's even more relevant to me, then.

I write because the things inside of me I need to kill need names written in ink. I plaster my emotions in print, feeling the weight of it all evaporate.

Even if, only after I write, I stop to consider who my writing could potentially hurt, I feel a freedom in that "publish" button. Who knows who will read my stories, who those people are?

If you've gotten this far, perhaps I've succeeded in at least planting a seed of something in you, and you'll take away from this something that makes you feel okay.