Writing: Why?

It feels like my brain is swelling, I’m overwhelmed, its pushing on the inside of my skull. It might burst. I don’t know how to verbalize sometimes, even though I’m 36 years old, but I can always find the words on paper. My mouth stays silent but those feelings, those words, that overwhelm, I can lance it with my pen so the pressure subsides as writing trickles out.

Maybe it's from my childhood, an oppressive mother who wouldn’t let me speak my own mind. Maybe it comes from my shyness, fear of saying the wrong thing. The page doesn’t talk back and it always has time and space for my thoughts. Maybe it was borne of my obsessive reading. Books are my friends, they’re safe, the place where things stay the same and loose ends are tidied up.

There are periods I have not written, after the exhaustion from a new baby or at the beginning of a new job. Big life changes that require all my attention. But I always come back to it. My notebook comes with me everywhere, it’s the best companion at a solo dinner or those few minutes waiting to pick someone up in the minivan. Never trusting my memory I might just need it to keep a thought for me.

Through life and academia it’s grown from a therapeutic outlet to my craft. There’s joy in it too, the satisfaction of finding just the right word. Pleasure in capturing a moment. Pride in creating emotion on paper: something from nothing. There’s the creativity of building a world that doesn’t exist and having the freedom to invent whatever I can make plausible. Finding a flow state where the rest of the world goes on around me but all I need to focus on right now is the next sentence. I write because I can’t not write.