ask yourself in your night's quietest hour: must I write?"
I write in the hope of stumbling upon something true, something universally true that has somehow not already been said. We are surrounded, absolutely bombarded by words all the time. Words have been stripped of their meaning, words are abused and thrown around as though they have no weight. The word is the most downtrodden thing of all. But, ever since I was young I have found companionship in words - in books, in songs, conversations, I have always taken solace in the presence of language. When I had nothing left of myself, I found my greatest comfort in words, in the elusive truth that can be found within them.
Five or so years ago I thought myself to be going completely mad. I was terrified of myself, my own face, my manic eyes; not to mention how terrified I was of everyone else and the world outside of my bedroom. My only comfort was to sit, wilting alone in my dark room and write whatever words came to mind. Sometimes, I constructed whole sentences and full ideas but more often than not they were simply stray words; “window", “pink”, “temper”, “sour”, “homeward”, “light”. Each word was its own world, a place where I could take shelter. They were familiar and comforting and I never seemed to run out of them. I could eliminate the noise and clutter of my mind just long enough to draw upon some elusive fragment of language that was exactly the one I needed. Every word felt true, felt like a balm to my worn out spirit. I wrote without care, simply laying out the words I felt to be necessary and honest, decorating page after page with hastily scribbled letters that meant nothing and everything. Sometimes a word would stick to my pen and I would find myself writing it over and over pinkpinkpinkpinkpink until it had exhausted itself.
The entire world had stopped making sense but this, these words here before me, this was true. No matter how terrifying and bizarre my world had become, I could always rely on words to rescue me. And this truth making is why I write. The only way to make sense of the world is to look at it through another lens, to deconstruct the blindingly familiar into something wholly foreign. When I was lost, I found that the only way to lead myself home was to leave a breadcrumb trail of words. Though they appeared fragmented and erratic, each word was truly an expression of something I felt, or was seeing, or was just what I needed to write. I was breaking the overwhelming noise of the world down into digestible pieces that I could understand and hold on to. This is why writing is essential to me.
Our world is limited by the limits of our language, we can only conceptualise what we have the words to explain. To write is to shape and bend routine words in order to give them new meanings; to deconstruct, to reconstruct, and to create. Writing is alchemy, transforming words to express new ideas. What is a metaphor if not a form of transmutation? So, I write, because I need to understand the world, to swallow it and to regurgitate the essential truth. I want to capture all of the things I love and fear in this world and spill them into the page. I want to live through my words, have them speak for me, speak to me, to shape my reality. I write because I must or I will lose some intangible, abstract part of myself that exists only in my words. I write because I can't help myself. There is nothing I can do but write.