Why Do We Write?

I won a writing competition on Substack a few months ago; everything was falling into place. I would commit to my craft and finally make it as a writer. My name would be uttered in the same breath as ‘writer of her generation’, and people on the internet would be mad when they read my book and found out how young I was.

I was fizzing with ideas, high from the validation of having an actual writer and people not only reading but praising my work. I walked down the street and thought things like ‘I am a writer’ and ‘Nobody on this estate knows I’m a writer’, and it made me feel good and special. I walked through the park that I always walk through with the graffiti on the climbing frame and the burnt-up bins that usually depressed me, and everything looked new and interesting because I had this secret: I am now a writer. As though I had only earned this title because other people had decided I was good enough. And so the next time I came to sit down to write, I couldn’t. I found other tasks to do to avoid writing: attempting to read The Brothers Karamazov for the third time, tidying my room, flying to Oslo, learning Blue-Ivy’s Renaissance tour dance, and lying on the floor. All of the ideas I’d scribbled down in my notebook whilst thinking, ‘This is the best idea anyone has ever had’, now seemed unoriginal and trivial.

At first, I felt pressure to write something as deep and meaningful as my first story, and then I felt resentment towards myself for sharing so much of myself on the internet, debated deleting the post and all traces of it and myself from the internet, pulling a Lorde, moving to New Zealand and getting really into crystals, yoga and only wearing linen. Once the thing that I had been chasing actually happened, and it was a thing that could be a reality instead of a pipe dream, I froze up and couldn’t do anything to continue the momentum. My brain perceived the writing as a demand, and as a demand-avoidant stubborn person, I could not do it. I was paralysed by the fear that I was letting the opportunity pass me by while doing absolutely nothing about it. The evil worm that lives in my brain re-surfaced and started niggling away with talk like, Why should anyone care what you have to say? Nothing you have to say is novel or worth sharing. Shut up. Did you actually think that you would become a writer? Of course, this is my inner monologue when I was the girl who never raised her arm in school or spoke up in groups and yet would come home and write for hours on the computer. To this day, I start telling stories only to trail off mid-sentence because I don’t want to waste people’s time. I’m not saying this in a woe-is-me way either; just a matter of fact, I have never believed my voice or opinion really mattered. This is probably a normal human thing to feel, especially for those of us who think using the internet as a diary is a sane thing to do.

The idea that a writer is something we become when others read our work rather than something we are by just doing the act itself is a complicated one. A writer is someone who writes a book, sells millions of copies, gets a load of praise, and eventually gets bitchy articles written about them saying they're over-hyped. If I write every day in my notebook but never share it, does that make me a writer? Is it the sharing and the acknowledgement from an external source based on a literary cannon made up centuries ago by a group of elitist writers that makes you a good writer? For me, it has always been the act itself. I remember one of the therapists I had as a teenager while I sat squirming in my seat, silent and awkward, unable to name a single thing I felt telling me to write. If you struggle with saying the words, try writing it down. “But what will I write?” I croaked, my voice always sounding like a scared animal. Everything, they replied.

Writing in a notebook is one thing, but writing those thoughts on the internet comes from a need to be seen and understood, to belong in the only format I can. In social situations, when communicating verbally, I often feel isolated and frustrated that I’m not getting across what I want to say; I stutter, and my lexicon is reduced to like, erm and vibes. People have said they thought I was thick because of how I speak. In my writing, I am confident, articulate - prone-to-tangents-yes, but well-written tangents nonetheless. I know exactly what I want to say. It’s like something goes wrong as the words travel from my brain to my mouth, and they take the wrong exit and get lodged in my throat. Writing down my thoughts allows me adequate processing time to articulate what I’m trying to say. It helps me make sense of the world when it’s all so overwhelming and hard to decipher.

Last week, I sat chatting with friends over mugs of tea and a packet of biscuits, autumn curling in around us. We told each other the stories of our high school days. We took turns to speak, each of us telling our story as though for the first time. It felt healing to go back and give those younger versions of ourselves a voice, naming the wrongs that had been done to us. We don’t often do it; maybe something about the turning leaves, the candles and tea whilst rain rattled outside made us feel sentimental. I’m reminded that everyone, even non-writers, tells themselves stories about their own life, and it’s rare that we get the chance to share them. We’re all just existing with all these hard things inside us. Our little traumas arranged like stops on a tube station map, branching off like forks of lightning, waiting for something to happen, for someone to stop there. But mostly, the train will steam straight on through the central line; maybe we’ll feel a tremor or slight chill as it passes, but mostly, our hardest moments remain like those stops along the way that nobody ever stops at with obscure names, not even a vending machine or toilets on the platform. I want to reach into that map, untangle it and lay it into a straight line that’s easy to understand so that I don’t have to stand in front of it scratching my head while people carry on with their lives, rushing past me. Writing is a way to feel and process my emotions because it doesn’t come naturally to me in the same way it does for neuro-typicals. I can’t just feel a feeling, it usually takes 2 to 3 working days for my body to catch up with my mind.

I remember my creative writing lecturer in our first class telling us we had to call ourselves writers from then on, we laughed nervously, and the wooden benches creaked with our collective discomfort. He said while it might feel cringe and not true, that’s what we were. “Do you write every day?” he asked, and the room filled with that awkward silence that’s present in those first few weeks while we are still learning that this isn’t at all like school or college, and it’s okay to be passionate and interested here. “If you do, then you are a writer,” he continued. And so, as long as I’m writing, then I have to believe that my story matters regardless of whether nobody reads my work or if thousands of people do.