Why I Write

          I understood words young. By eighteen months, I was speaking with adults in full sentences, paragraphs, pages. Both my own personal blessing and curse, language and syllables, thoughts, ideas, wisps, clouds, and dreams have buzzed around the inside of my head for as long as I can remember. As a child, I found myself mesmerized by notebooks, journals, and stationary—enamored with breathtaking beauty in the openness, the endless possibilities. I’d tote around this paper, never actually filling the books for fear of staining their sacred pages with anything other than that one “right” thing. But I’d collect them anyway, revel in their beauty, their overwhelming blankness. Usually, I’d silently promise to write every day, hoping to entice myself into perusing my mind if I found the right journal, the right pen, the right time. Usually, I’d succumb to the overwhelm and my too high expectations and tuck those precious pages away in a drawer to retrieve when I knew more, when my questions were answers; my thoughts wise and illustrative. 

          I was older when I understood that my mind wove tapestries of life through words—that it was only after mulling and investigating and writing, would I truly know. Ever since I was little, I’ve lived my life by and through and within questions. What does this mean? Who is that? How old were you? When did that happen? Why? I saw the world in blacks and whites; a formula to plug the correct variables into if I could just grasp my fingers around those answers I so desired. To me, questions unlocked the ornately decorated box labeled “Life:” the ins and outs of the human experience, the point, the purpose of actively living and breathing and being every single day. Writing became the keyhole to clarity, the way to make sense of all my wondering.

          I write because I crave sense. I want to understand how and why we are held—by a silent force unseen—to an unthinkably large, spinning rock, slowing rotating around a flaming ball of hot gas. I write because it is the one thing in my repertoire of random knowledge and abilities that comes to me with marginal effort. Often, my mind fractions and the part connected to my fingers drones and weaves and flits about, dictating the thoughts as my hands dance over the keys while the other half worries about my future and my past and all that I cannot control. I write because it releases some of the pressure behind my eyes and provides more space for fresh air.

          I write to discover, learn, and process what and how and why I’m thinking and what it all means: to me, to those that I love, to humankind. I write because I can’t come up with the right and accurate words and because I have an overflowing excess of them. I write my own painful, beautiful, horrific, lesson-learning stories and thoughts and experiences in the hope that someone, somewhere finds their own reflection. I write because even when it is excruciatingly hard and the sentences are jumbled in a net in the back of my head and the thoughts are so high and far away that I can barely make sense of them and I pick and peel and bite my fingers till they bleed as I panic about the world and the way my voice reads and my heart pummels my sternum with the echoes of doubt and fear and anxiety, it’s worth it. When my body goes on autopilot and sentences pour from me like honey—viscous, sweet, and warm in tone and taste and everything falls together, for a moment—it’s worth it. When I write, things make sense, the buzzing gets quieter, and the world gets brighter and that is what I’m constantly, exhaustingly chasing, forever. 

Written for Master of Arts in Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing at the University of Denver; June ’21