Why You Write

You carry a notebook full of unstructured scribbles, safety-pinned to your heart. You daydream of moments alone with your thoughts, putting bloody words to black and white.

You can’t outrun your reflections, your Erinyes.

Random, disjointed sentences and disquieting propositions emerge from the horizon of your subconscious… out of nothing, invading your stillness.

You zone out and dissociate, surrounded by people babbling.

Whatever you do to distract you from reality, words swirl in your mind as mismatched puzzle pieces.

You are never at ease; tormented until you write down your thoughts, until you click that ‘publish’ button… and with that, a sigh of deafening relief… only for a split second.

You feel compelled to write, as if some Muse watches over you, aggressively violating the sanctity of your soul with sadistic inspiration that isn’t even yours.

With every one of life’s little misadventures, you can’t help but overanalyse, philosophise, mythologise. You desperately seek meaning where there is none. And then you seek meaning in meaninglessness itself, envisioning alternative realities superpositioned inside and outside of one another, existing and not existing at the same time, beyond time, of shattered temporality.

You are being tortured by thoughts, ideas, things about which to write, as if they don’t come from you, but rather, are instilled in you by external sources, the Muses: your protectors, your tormentors.

What you write is the consequence of your immense suffering — the result of your accumulated trauma, the struggles, the valiant defeats, the Pyrrhic victories.

Your inspiration is your pain. Your creativity flows through blood and tears — your work, a testament to your tragicomical existence.

Writers need pain, their ink an infernal mixture of sweat, blood, and tears.

Why you write:

1. You write for catharsis. Simply putting your emotions down on physical or digital paper helps you understand them better as you reflect and attempt to resolve your trauma as much as is possible to resolve. Therapists insist that you write down your thoughts and even compile letters to those deaf and blind, never to be sent, never to be read. It addresses, it soothes, it somewhat resolves.

2. You write to forget. While Nietzsche’s obsession with forgetting dishonours certain experiences, people, and their virtues, your noble pain sometimes becomes unbearable. A way to “archive” a traumatic memory and make it less immediately accessible by your consciousness is to write it down. This gives you a sense of “documenting”, so that you can rest knowing the toxic memory is safely stored somewhere other than your brain, on paper and in digital worlds that don’t share your pain receptors. You store burning ideas on external memory drives.

3. You write to assign meaning to your suffering. Pain is education, and most of the time, you don’t get a second chance to use what you’ve learned from such costly learning. This makes suffering meaningless, and thus, unbearable… unless you use your insight to help others learn from your pain, without having to go through the same trials and errors you went through. If your suffering can offer helpful, useful insight to at least one person, and perhaps improve their life even slightly, then your suffering gains meaning, and it therefore becomes more bearable.

   You can bear any pain as long as there’s a good-enough purpose behind it.

   So, you write with selfish altruism — you care about helping people because you serve yourself in doing so. Is there any nobility in that? Who knows… Yet another unanswerable question for philosophy to never answer.

The Muses torment me, Melpomene (tragedy) and Thaleia (comedy).

Why I write?

I’ve been flirting with suicide since age eleven, when my mother began confiding in me her own suicidal tendencies. Looking back, I had a hellish life of meaningless mental and physical sickness that I only began to recognise and address in my early thirties, having wasted once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, and still wasting. Did many things I’m ashamed and guilty about. I’ve been abusive, petty, stupid, vindictive, insecure, undignified — just like those who scarred me from an early age. I’ve betrayed who I truly was, but my worst sin of all is betraying the good people who were willing to stand next to me — the true me — when I rejected myself.

I write to provide insight from regret and from experience, to help people, which makes my mourning of an unlived life somewhat meaningful, and therefore, more bearable. But I also write for penance to mitigate my guilt; overdue apologies and wisdom come too late, when they don’t matter anymore.

“Futile and vain,” Sisyphus whispered.

Why do you write? Why do you read?