"Why I Write"

I am in the middle of an online course called The Writer's Rebellion, created by Andrea Balt, founder of the Rebelle Society. It is very nonacademic and from a lot of standpoints pretty woo, but I can tell I am getting a lot out of it -- certainly at the level of getting in touch with myself and confronting my relationship with writing (a source of deep shame and pain in recent decades) and who I am and what I want out of life. (Less sure how much of a difference it's going to make to how I actually write -- too soon to tell, although I've definitely gained by some of the practice prompts I've done, if only in terms of memories I've now put down in as vivid writing as I can muster.)

Anyway, one of the early exercises was to create a five-point manifesto on "Why I Write."  The basic instructions: “Reflect on your hidden motivations as well as your most obvious ones. Write the truth about why you write, even if messy.”

I've come back to this over a couple of weeks, and what I put down here still feels completely true to me. Of course I feel so little qualified to define myself in public as a writer, when I haven't written anything except academic stuff for so long, and far less than other people of that. But whatever else, this course is helping me reclaim some deep things I know about myself and my core identity which I have silenced for so many decades, and I am working to overcome that blockage and fear. So yes, I understand how inflated this will sound to anyone who knows me (knows the me I have allowed to be revealed).

Why I Write:

1. I write because I hear the rhythm in language, it feels so right when it flows through me. Powerful, erotic. When I am crafting sentences through my mind and ear I know it is what I was born to do.
2. I write because the things that drive me are truth and beauty. Even my parents knew that about me, sometimes calling me jokingly “Miss Truth and Beauty” because I was so uncompromising. I seek and strive for beauty in various forms, but writing is the activity in which I have the greatest gift to create and shape, and in which “truth is beauty, beauty truth” most clearly. The beauty of thoughts and ideas is a big part of what excites me, and you need language to explore that. So while I am also very visual and always loved art and (now, with my phone) making photographs, visual art alone could never fulfill my deepest needs.
3. I write because I have always felt different, because I need(ed) to try to understand myself, my feelings, my perceptions, my odd loves. And I had no one to talk to, nowhere to turn to (outside books) -- what life was like growing up before the internet -- so I needed to talk to myself. And even when there have been people to talk to deeply in my adult life, like therapists and occasional close friends or lovers, l still need that.
4. I write because in the world at large I am so silenced. Not oppressed in any identity category (except in the ways women get inevitably silenced by men at times), but through my personality structure, my INFJ-ness, my aversion to pushing in. I keep myself back. People never shut up, I could rarely get a word in edgewise with my larger family, my friends are often yammering away focused on themselves. And even when the conversation is one I can get involved in, it almost never goes to the level at which I want to communicate. Or I say things and they just drop like rocks, no one gets them. The best way to convey my true and deep thoughts is to write them carefully and beautifully, and then people can choose to read them if they want, if it feels safe enough for me to share.
5. I feel like if I could write the way I wanted and get it out in the world, I could be loved the way I desire. And admired, praised, which I will take if I can’t get love. In my heart of hearts I have always felt I would never truly deserve and hence never find love until I write a book. Maybe on one true side that means, I intuit that I will never find the love I want until I convey and open up my full self to the world, so that I can be seen and loved for all of who I am. (From another side it means I have to achieve something to earn love.) But at this point I have trouble imagining that happening, no longer expect or even really long for realized human love in my life, so it feels like I would accept being praised and esteemed and validated as a writer, and in the life experiences that prompt the writing. Loved in some way, if not soulmate love.