Why I Write

What do you enjoy most about writing?

I love hitting Publish. When I sit down to write, I feel a chaos of ideas floating above my ears and the weight of tangled emotions upon my shoulders. Through the process of allowing the words to flow, then categorizing them under subheadings, I untangle, I stack, I balance the weight. I feel a sense of calmness.

In a moment of recent darkness, a friend shared with me that a mutual cried upon reading one of my posts. I brought a grown man, a me and a half in height, to tears as he sat on his toilet. “See?!” I said, between sobs. “I am a good writer!”

Learning that others are able to feel something through my work is by far the most enjoyable aspect of writing.

But that’s not why I started to write.

I started writing so I could stop being invisible.

I started to write because I was alone. I was an abandoned kid, a neglected kid. My sibling didn’t want me around and I spent much of my time with my television as my babysitter, but there were a lot of reruns back then. My first journal was from the first grade, as I was learning how to write words. I still have that crimson spiral-bound. It reveals little more than my favorite color, entries scrawled with crayon two spaces high. I keep it because it was the beginning.

I started writing because I had so much I wanted to share and no one gave a damn.

My father fled while I was in kindergarten, undergoing chemo. I’ll never know if he did so because he couldn’t bear the thought of me dying or because he didn’t give a damn either way.

My mother was attentive when I was in the hospital. She felt the pressure of caring eyes, played the role she felt she should. But once outside those automatic doors, I was shifted from caregiver to caregiver, any relative that would bear the burden of my frail presence while she went out on dates, while she savored her youth.

When the cancer was gone, so was she. She veiled her absence with excusing it as a necessity of being a single mom, but we didn’t see her any more when school was not in session, though she was unemployed.

I started writing because maybe someone would listen…later.

I was a bright child, gifted. I tested high above my peers and was sent to a school that would better suit a brilliance that I presented. My mother boasted of my intellect, but it wasn’t long before I noticed that high marks or academic effort yielded no praise, no acknowledgment. I couldn’t grasp her attention while she spent hours chatting on the phone in her bedroom, door shut. She’d hand me a notepad and pen to take questions.

I wrote as a cry for help

My first blog coincided with my first year of high school. The anonymity of the internet was beginning to fade, and I remember that deer-in-headlights feeling when a classmate dug deep in my archives to uncover a post I had written about an assault that occurred before freshman year.

The exposure of my vulnerabilities didn’t stop me from my oversharing, often writing about the physical assaults I endured from my high school boyfriend, sharing them friends-only on LiveJournal for a short while before making them private.

I wrote to illuminate the good

Blogging turned into microblogging on social media. I became skilled at sharing a sugar-coated version of my life as a teen bride and mother. Online I could edit out the negative, I could emphasize the positive. I had been using that as a survival mechanism my whole life, yet now I received likes and felt social status as a result. I honed in on my ability to capture a composition, I learned a knack for creating a highlight reel.

I wrote as a salve for the pain

When his drinking, infidelity, and assaults became too much to bear, I left my first husband with my online audience as my witness. I kept his infractions under wraps, embracing an independent woman narrative, a phoenix rising—the ashes from what remained unmentioned.

I wrote as a celebration

When my now-husband wooed me. When I could flaunt the materials and the experiences that consumerist culture values. When I graduated university with my preschooler on my hip. I was the underdog, but I was making it, despite it all. I languished in it, and my online friends celebrated alongside me.

I wrote for income

The years I spent sharpening these skills culminated into the beginnings of a career, yet my lack of maturity and discipline in a work-from-home environment while also tasked to care-for-home as a mom that stayed-at-home left me floundering.

I wrote out of desperation

In my worst times, when faced with another abandonment, bout of deafening depression, or blinding bereavement, the keys remain to console.

I write to console

Belonging has been a fleeting feeling. Yet, I yearn for it. I may always remain that frail girl, alone, writing on a notepad hopeful that someone is willing to take a glance.

My hope is that when they do, they will feel something. And for a moment, their world won’t feel as heavy, knowing that that in those feelings, they aren’t alone.