A Complicated Writing Story

I had to think long and hard about this before I could come to a definitive answer. That is to say, I know why I write, but I had to come to an understanding of my complex relationship with writing before I could find the right words to express it.

My drive to write has changed over the years. It started out as a way to garner praise, attention, and guidance from the people who believed in me when I didn't believe in myself. They saw my writing ability as a natural talent to be cultivated and I took it as an opportunity to develop a skill when I thought I didn't have any to speak of. There wasn't any rhyme or reason for me to write other than the sense of acceptance it provided me from others. But that was over ten years ago and life and experience have a way of changing your perspective.

With time, writing became a way for me to express the things I couldn't say aloud. It became my only companion when I didn't have any friends and no one else to talk to except the pages of my notebooks. For a while, that was why I wrote. I wanted to free the emotions trapped inside me that had nowhere else to go. It got me through hard times and helped me to overcome many of the things I had repressed throughout my life, but I found that it stifled my writing as a whole. In retrospect, many of the things I wrote back in the day were fairly terrible and, quite honestly, cringe-worthy, but at the time, it was damaging to my ego. I am a perfectionist writer- always have been, always will be. So, seeing that my writing lacked originality, the word choice was subpar, and that I had lost my voice in, what I call, a deafening strain of mediocrity, I felt that I didn't have as much talent as I had believed. I didn't have any direction. I didn't know what I was going to do with what I had written and I couldn't see why I should write. Top that off with being told that I couldn't make a career out of being a writer anyway, and my confidence was shot. As a result, I stopped writing for a number of years. Until about a year ago when I hit rock bottom. Debts were piling up, I had been swindled out of hundreds of dollars by someone I considered to be a good friend, my home life wasn't going so well, I was working multiple months in succession with only one day off each month, I was seriously ill, I lost all my friends, I had a very traumatic death in my family, and I didn't have any clue what I was doing with my life. I didn't have any joy. I didn't have any expectations for myself and I didn't have a reasonable way out of the hole I had dug for myself either. I spent so much time and effort- literal blood, sweat, and tears- in a career that had no intention of supporting my interests in climbing the bureaucratic ladder and building a career out of what I had come to love doing that I lost sight of myself. I stopped seeing the good in what I was doing- for reference, I am a therapist for children with Autism- and I lost my purpose. With the exception of the kids I have worked with, I spent so much time running myself ragged for other people that I didn't have anything left for myself when everything was said and done. I left my job, cut ties with so many people, and just generally tried to pick up the pieces and figure out what I was going to do with my life. I needed to find meaning in my life when I believed there was none. So, after a few months of consideration, healing, and wrestling with opposing interests, I decided that I would pick up writing again. Slowly, at first, to get into the habit of doing it and rebuilding skills that I had lost over time until I could feel confident that what I was writing was good. I also made sure that, this time, I knew what I was going to do with my writing. It may not have been easy, as I dealt with a severe mental block for the first few months of trying to get back into writing, but it's instilled in me a renewed purpose that I didn't expect.

Looking back, the reasons why I had written in the past were purely for my own self-satisfaction and I lacked the scope of experience to understand what it actually means to be a writer. The greatest stories ever told, the ones we remember, the ones we read over and over again, are great because they provide us with something we are missing from our lives. Whether that be insight, experience itself, words that express something we are feeling and can't express ourselves, entertainment, knowledge, or something to relate to. We identify those things for ourselves when we are reading that have the most impact on our lives and that's why we read, but as writers, those are the things that inspire our writing. At least, they are for me. That's why I write. I write to share the lessons I have learned from life, good or bad, in the hopes that I can make someone else's life better. I write to inspire others, to show the good and the bad of life so that others understand, to share my experiences that someone, somewhere can relate to, to provide some insight into things that aren't talked about enough but should be addressed, and to maybe even make someone else not feel like I have in life: alone. I write because I want to add something good to a world that seems to have so much wrong with it. It's enough for me to write because it could change someone's life. Even if the only thing a reader takes away from my writing is a general sense of entertainment, then that is enough for me, too. Life isn't easy or fair, and it certainly hasn't done me any favors, but at the very least, I can become the person that I want to be by writing. If done right, I can have the success I crave while also helping someone else, even if it's at a respectable distance and at my own pace and leisure, rather than trying to do too much and running myself ragged again.

In all honesty, it kind of sounds like I have a big head about my writing and that I think I'm a great writer, but I'm not and I still have a long way to go in accomplishing even a fraction of the reasons why I drive myself to write. I want to be a writer who does all of those things while still remembering where I came from and understanding that as much as I may want it to be, my writing will never be perfect. But that's also why I write. Because I can continue to learn and grow while striving to do good for others. Those are the things that have come to bring joy to my life after being unhappy for so long and by being a writer I can find my happiness in that and the stories I tell while providing the same to others.