They say writers write. A writer should barely be able to function without writing a little, each day. At the very least, each week. I stopped writing a long time ago. I can’t really put my finger on why, or even when it happened. It just slowly faded out of my life. Maybe that’s why I so often feel like I can’t function.

The thing about writing is that once you start, even if you had an idea where it was going to go, it runs away from you. Writing curls it’s sweet little fingers around your wrist and whisks you from reality. But gently, subtly, until you end up somewhere entirely different than you had intended but not necessarily bad. You gaze at your surroundings with a hint of confusion, a hint of pride, a hint of “what the hell where is the backspace key this isn’t what I meant to write how did this get out of my brain and to my fingers without me knowing it?”

Obviously, I’m already there. Stuck in that sweet spot between what I had planned and what really wanted to make it’s way out of my head.

Let’s start again. Writers write. Writers have to take all the things their voracious little minds have read and somehow make them new again. They must think of all the times they swooned over the way their favorite authors crafted a line, and do it as well as they can but not the same. They must stare at a white screen and a blinking cursor and decide on the perfect adjective. They will perfect a plot on the drive home, but their fingers will freeze above a keyboard the second they sit down to write. Writers have to find a voice, because often it is the only voice they know how to use.

Writers are never satisfied. They will keep writing because it’s a need, a need so base and visceral that it will physically ache when they aren’t writing, even though they want to tear their hair out when they are writing. Their brains are too full and their hearts are too empathetic. Writers write because they feel too much. When emotion courses through your body to the tips of your toes, rooting you to the ground and paralyzing you, there is no other option than to force it out through your hands and let it bleed onto paper. When you feel like a twisted mess, like your thoughts could never untangle themselves into a tangible thread, you write. It is a lifeline. An anchor. The one solid thing in a world of chaos, the one way to make beauty out of barrenness.

It is a weighty thing, to need something so much and yet hate it so often.

Because if there is one thing that will keep a writer from writing, it will be that they don’t feel good enough. They will let their minds clog with words and ideas until their thinking feels sluggish and their hearts are lethargic. They will stifle themselves out of the notion that there are already enough writers. No one needs the words of one more human trying to make sense of this life. There is nothing new under the sun. We are constantly recycling, repurposing, rehydrating ideas.

The writer that stops writing will never feel quite whole without it. And so one day, they will revisit the dusty part of their brain that holds all the words, the phrases, the metaphors; they will struggle to string together something of worth. They will feel, as I do now, that this should never see the light of day. They will feel it isn’t quite finished but they won’t know what it needs. They will hesitate to press “Publish”.

But they will feel weightless once they do.