15 Reasons to Write Your Fucking Heart Out.
{Photo via weheartit.com}
“What does writing feel like?” he asked me one day.
I had been going to B&O Espresso in Seattle three times a week for what was now months, sitting at the same table in the upstairs room, and when he asked me what it was I did there, I said I was writing things down.
At that point, I believe I was immersed in a story about a woman who started canning green beans when she quit smoking.
And then, weeks later, he asked me the second question. “What does writing feel like?”
No one had ever asked me that before.
And I think about that question often. Maybe because the answer is always changing.
How there was the year it felt like ice cubes and strep throat, the one where it felt like welding, like the Get Me High Lounge on nights it was abandoned and the blue light bulb kept flickering on and off, like amnesia, like forgiveness. And I needed the writing all these years.
These days, when I sit down and write, or pour my body into the tub and write, it feels like graffiti on smashed gravel. Like re-purposing found objects. Like the colors blue, indigo or cerulean. Like distance and closeness.
It feels like those old carnival and amusement park rides, where you sit in a car that rides a track, and enter into a dark cave and everything smells like wet wood.
In all its changes (and thank god for the changes), I want to be here, writing things down. It feels like a kind of love to me. It feels like belonging, even when we are fighting and don’t know how to talk to one another. This is what I know to do, and even if I try to leave it, I always find my way back.
That I’m here, to write my fucking heart out. Again and again and again.
Reasons to Write:
1. Because even when not writing, placing one word after another, you realize you are still following the trail. You’re in the woods, always, and the breadcrumbs lead you out into things and back home.
Even when not writing, you are still looking up and around, connecting stars and dots and pieces of things, wondering what shapes they might make. When you are writing, you are just doing what you are, in some ways, always doing, and it just happens to involve words.
2. Life doesn’t make sense. Writing helps. Not because it gives explanation, but because making sense no longer matters. And then I wonder why I ever judged the value of a thing based upon its ability to be tied down and constrained.
3. “I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silences will not protect you. What are the words you do not yet have?
What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own need for language.” ~ Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
So yes, then. Write because of our need for language. Because we refuse to stay silent.
4. The stories. How there was this trip, this time, when I was driving. It was in the in-between, not light and not dark. And I may have been behind the wheel, but the truck was driving me, and we were headed west.
The road, it stretched out and on forever, until I couldn’t see anything else except where it met the sky in a line that moved out in both directions. It was warm, almost hot, and the window was open, and when the radio played that one song, there was no turning back.
5. It is where knowing takes root, even as we question everything.
6. Writing gives us metaphor, the great as if. For a long time, things felt so horrible, tremors of trauma that shook out and touched everything, and the only way I knew to give this voice was through the protest of my body and bent mind.
Once I could say, “it is as if…”, then I didn’t have to act it out in real life. This changed everything, and I was no longer crazy.
7. Because it did happen.
8. “If you don’t like my writing, you should stop reading it,” I said.
Instead, he chose to read it and ask these questions, that were really accusations.
Soon after, everything ended.
He called it a misunderstanding, a confusion.
I called it necessary.
Naming is a powerful thing.
9. Because the world is where you live. And sometimes the most horrible things happen. And also, it is beautiful, enough to make you ache, and you love her. So you write to her.
10. Because words, my words, our words, matter, in all their many forms and faces. Writing as art. Writing as protest. Writing as expression and exploration. As anchoring and navigating, mining and deep-sea diving. Writing as listening and as speaking.
As a place and space where the ordinary, the quotidian, can co-exist and even fall in deep love with the sudden heartbreak, the astounding loss, the trauma, the pure rush of luck. All of it whole.
11. It is rather easy to be critical of what someone else did, to pick apart and complain, to insult, to say why something is bad or stupid or a waste. It’s much harder to risk and choose, and make something of your life, your days, your work. To piece together. To create something. To build brick by brick.
Writing makes me stop paying attention to the tearing apart, because I’m too full giving my devotion to making something real.
12. Because you miss her. Because you think of all these things you want to tell her, would tell her if the door was open. But you’re here, on this side of the threshold, and they remain in you. So you sit down and write.
13. Writing as a way of keeping time, knowing where the moon is, or what day it is, or how long it has been since you last kissed while it was raining outside and everything was dark.
14. For the love. For the way ink feels when it spills on skin. The smell of geranium during transition. The night of the luau, when I cracked open all the coconuts with a hammer and machete. The way white pants look, those first minutes of wearing, before anything can touch them. The skull.
The detective novel I stayed up all night to read. The tin metal toy car I had as a child. The haunting of a thing. The cadence. The crying in my apartment, week and after week, until it just stopped one day, and we never heard it again. The way words settle into the body.
The way words mean something, and then can be released and you walk on.
15. Because it feels good, the doing of it, the act of writing itself, the putting one word down and then another, the map that gets made from this to that, the traveling and the return. It just feels so fucking good.
*****
{Write Your Heart Out}
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