For so much of my life, writing has been a constant companion, a friend and listening ear I could turn to before and beyond all others. My writing let me say everything I needed to say. It seldom interrupted or judged me, and it listened patiently, even when I got off topic. My writing was the best sort of slumber party soulmate, letting me rant and dream and grieve no matter the hour, sometimes all in one sitting. It let me capture nonsense – my purple spiral notebook filling with everything from made-up stories, to lists of synonyms for the word “said,” to confessions of elementary school crushes – and it didn’t call itself nonsense. In its own sort of way, it was a brilliance, and I would spend the next chapters of my life chasing that light.

 

As I grew, my writing grew with me, becoming an extension of myself. It became my living, breathing words on the page; my thoughts, my fears, my hopes – all suddenly squirming and blinking up at me with large, curious eyes. In those days, I wrote because I wanted to. Later, because I needed to. My writing became a drug, addictive and insistent and taking me to places I never thought I’d go. It pulled me down dark tunnels of my psyche, dragging me into crawl spaces where I’d wrestle with fraying loves and dead grandmothers, constantly looking for lost somethingsin the shadows. It was the reason for my madness, yet it was the reason for my sanity, too. On the page, I could finally understand the issues I was dealing with – the thoughts that couldn’t quite coalesce until the picture was taken and the ghost emerged, wraith-like, in back-corner shadows. In those days, I wrote like Joan Didion: “entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear” (Didion, “Why I Write”). Sometimes, what I found scared me, but in a lot of ways, what I found saved me – from myself, from the world, and from becoming someone else.

 

Back then, I don’t think I could have told you whyI wrote; I struggle even now. But getting these words out on a page, out where I can see them – hundreds of black marks in a bright, helicopter spotlight, with nowhere left to run – I think I’m beginning to understand.

 

I write because I want to. Because I like the puzzle and the game of it. Because I like the music.

 

I write because my mind scares me, and my heart hurts me. I write because the world is a place too big to fit on a sheet of paper, but I’m too desperate and eager not to try.

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I write because I have an overactive imagination, and I’m bursting with a whole host of stories, begging to be told. I write because my mind swims with faces and places that I’m longing to share, and this is the only way I know how.

 

I write because I am a captive (a happy, willing captive) of the written word, and I’ve made my prison my home. (I share it with my love, and we make art on all the walls.)

 

I write because I have an imperfect memory, and some things are worth remembering, no matter how trivial they may seem at the time. As Didion points out, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget loves and betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were” (Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem). And I don’t want to forget who I was, or how it went, or what I thought about all of it. I write because I need to capture this moment, so I can keep it and look at it when I need to. I write because I need to save this string of words – this thought, or image, or person, or place, or time, or feeling, or uncatchable thingthat I’m determined to hold on to. I need to hold it in my hands – if only briefly. I need to see it, staring back at me, from wherever it was I set it down.

 

I write because I need to know that I left my mark, and said my piece, and took one step closer to catching that brilliance I’ve been chasing after since childhood – whether on a screen, a sticky note, a napkin, a hand, or in some obscure purple notebook I may never find again.

 

In short: I write, quite simply, because I am a writer.

 

Because I’ve always been a writer.

 

Because the world would become so much paler “without the dark stain of alphabets,” now that I’ve glimpsed the written word’s rich hues, and I crave color (Pastan). I crave the clarity of a well-articulated thought, lying naked on the page, so my muddled mind can begin to understand the mess it holds. I crave the euphoria of imagination. I crave metaphors that need unpacking, and tangents that lead me back to myself. I need to keep doing what I’ve always loved to do – no matter how hard or frustrating – because I love to do it.

 

I write to be the writer I am, and have been, and hope to be. I write to stay true to the self I have become, not giving up on the outlet that is now central to my identity. I write because I ama writer, and writers need to write – if only because we can’t imagine the alternative, if only because we wouldn’t be ourselves if we stopped – and that seems reason enough to me.