Why I Write
Last night, I promised myself I would prioritize writing in my blog in the morning today. I’m a morning person, and I do my best work and am most clear sighted in the AM. I get sluggish at least by late afternoon, often as early as after lunch, and struggle to focus on anything at all once the sun sets.
But the kid I nanny’s school is closed (for the third time) due to COVID-19 infections, so I’ve been spending a lot of time with him, and in addition to spending more hours of the day at work it also makes me more tired for the hours I do have off. Because of this, I haven’t finished any books or TV seasons or watched any theatre that I haven’t already told you all about.
I plan on continuing to write for ninety days, and for February I plan to create a schedule to manage my writing better. For today, since I don’t have a specific topic in mind, I’m going to write about why I write instead, mostly to remind myself.
The earliest I remember enjoying writing is in second grade, when I won an elementary school “author of the month” competition for writing about what I would do if I found myself on a deserted island. I’m pretty sure my story involved befriending the natives, which would make the island not deserted, but I still won, and I thrive on affirmation from authority figures.
Through out my academic life I continued to enjoy writing, especially analytic and persuasive essays. In middle school, my dad suggested I start a blog, mostly because I was annoying him by vocalizing all of my thoughts. I took his advice, and I blogged consistently for six years. It was my first of many blogs (this one is my fourth), but by far the most prolific.
Between blogging and my high school and college English classes, I honed my voice as a writer, and my identity as a word person solidified. But after college, I struggled. I rarely posted on my newest blog that I was initially so excited about. Without outside pressures to push me towards deadlines and affirmation from professors and peers, I lost motivation and confidence. I basically stopped writing anything that wasn’t a cover letter.
Starting this blog again has reminded me that writing is a skill and a practice that has inherent value, whether or not anyone is reading it or providing feedback. I love taking my thoughts and configuring them into sentences, using vocabulary, grammar, and style that I’ve accumulated over a lifetime of reading and writing. The more I write and especially the more I read, the more I learn how powerful words are and all the different ways I can use them to communicate ideas, whether they be about systemic injustices or the worst movies I’ve ever seen.
The more I think about, the more I believe that writing and language is the most important tool I have, arguably the most important tool any of us have. This could be a topic of a whole other blog post, but I once heard that around 75% of adults do not use any math above fourth grade level fractions and percentages. But almost every single adult communicates, and I would venture to guess almost all adults participate in and consume written communication. So why did I have to take pre-calc?
The through line of this blog post is growing more tangled by the paragraph. I love writing because words are powerful and magical. It’s become an over-used cliche to invoke the fact that “abra cadabra” comes from Hebrew words that translate to “I create as I speak,” but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most famous magic words of all magic words invoke the inherent power of language. I joke often that our myriad of genius uses of the humble potato is what separates humans from animals, but I’d be willing to consider spoken and written language as well. Did you know that the human brain is literally rewired when it learns how to read? We’re the only species that does something like that.
There isn’t really much of a point to this post except to remind myself why I embarked on this project, beyond the practical reasons I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Hopefully when things calm down a bit in my life I’ll be able to create a schedule that’s more manageable so I’ll have more time to write and more things to write about it. For now, I’m currently bribing myself with some chocolate that I’m not letting myself eat until I post this. And sometimes the promise of chocolate is reason enough.