On Writing

My relationship with writing has shifted immensely in the past few years. Once a way for me to process my various experiences, I find myself not wanting to reach for my “pen” these days. In the past, when my brain became so overwrought with feelings and emotions that it felt I would burst, the typing on a keyboard would provide relief like a slow-release valve, becoming less pressurized with every word I wrote. Now, there is no pressure within, there is no burning desire to write to exhaustion in a desperate attempt to be understood. 

So why would I write anymore? People don’t want to hear from yet another middle-aged white woman. Are my perspectives worth the energy it takes for a computer to boot up and display my words in black and white? There is a little bit of narcissism required to be a writer, to believe that people actually give a shit about what you think. And after the publishing of my book, with the podcasts and the interviews and the speeches I’ve given, I’ve come to realize that people read my words and still don’t understand me. Perhaps because they project their own experiences into the writing, perhaps because so much time has passed that I am no longer the person who wrote that book/those words, or perhaps because I am such a shit writer that I can’t express myself well enough to be understood. It feels like a mixture of all three of those possibilities. By the time you read these words, I’ll already not be the person who wrote them. I’ll have hopefully grown, and I’ll have moved on. And there is acceptance in knowing that the words I write are ephemeral to me. Too bad the people who read my words are seemingly locked into the space and time in which they are written.

So why write? My life is so calm and wonderful that I can only feel peace. Can I write about peace? Do people want to hear about beauty and calmness? When I used to read about peace I would feel so detached from the writer’s perspective. How could they look at the world and only see beauty? Did they not know what it feels like to be me? How broken and full of pain the world is? And now, all I can see is delight in the world: jasmine’s delicate scents that waft through the air mixed with the warm and encompassing smell of my coffee, the flight of a red shouldered hawk as it soars above me, the new sprouts of hoya leaves that sprang forth once I figured out it needed more sunlight… And don’t get me wrong, only seeing beauty is narrow minded in a world so full of war and pain. But even in the pain I can see the hope that exists throughout. 

Will people read what I write if it speaks of hope? Even I am sometimes a disinterested reader of my own words. Fortunately writing doesn’t require an audience.