When we write stories we are hoping that somebody reads them, that they strike a chord, that they resonate and perhaps change a life, and encourage a spirit that has been wounded.
But it isn’t always the only thing we are hoping and neither is it always our greatest hope.
Sometime we write for ourselves, sometimes our greatest hope is to change us, we write to become brave, brave enough to give voice to our pains and joys and our fears; to give voice to our triumphs and our failures; to give a voice to our experiences. It is the things that we give a voice to, which we then become able to deal with, which we can then learn from, which we can then celebrate and embrace.
When we write we heal, when we write we become better observers of the world and we are awed by the gorgeousness of the world. When we write it is like standing at a distance and then observing ourselves, observing how we respond to life.
When we write it is not a declaration that we know more because sometimes we start writing from a place of ignorance. When we write we are not saying that our experiences stand out more than others, no, they don’t. We are regular people agreeing to breath life into our regular experiences and to make sense out of them.
Writing is our souls agreeing to be courageous, agreeing to shine, and agreeing to be vulnerable and to be found out. Writing is us making spaces for ourselves at a table of people who have chosen to make their lives count, who refuse to let pieces of their lives collect dust and pass by unrecognized.
We write because it is a pleasurable thing to do, it is fulfilling. We write as an act of humility and as admission that we are not there yet, that we are still becoming and we will get better at this.
We write because we embrace the hard part about writing, the ones better described by Ernest Hemingway that “All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed”. In other seasons when we sit to write it feels like bleeding, we break our backs, there is an ache of sorts, some days it is terrifying but in spite of that we refuse to stop.
For all these reasons, even for the reasons that are hard to articulate we keep writing.
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