Why am I Writing?

Continuing to justify my habits, publicly

Voice over above.

Why am I writing?

That feels like the wrong question. Like asking why I’m talking while already mid-sentence. The better question is probably why any of us do this at all. Why we insist on narrating ourselves, even after realizing we aren’t really saying anything new.

In an ideal world I’d be a creative writer. I wouldn’t rely on myself as the anchor.

Still. Why is this? Why now?

I’m sitting on my front porch with a shamefully large glass of wine. I should be reading my book club book, but this feels like a more productive form of avoidance. Writing for the sake of writing. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. This is important, I tell myself.

I could leave these thoughts where they usually live. Fermenting in my notes app, or buried in the sacred (and humiliating) stack of journals no one will ever read except me and, eventually, a thrift store employee with questions. And tearful laughs. Instead, I now upload my wandering psyche publicly. Dressed in a little cocktail dress and demanding to be ogled.

As a thought becomes 0s and 1s, it stops being purely personal. Even if honesty and candor are the intent, it starts canoodling with performance. Shifting. Am I writing with the hope of being perceived? Yes. Obviously. A mortifying admission. An audience implies perception. Perception implies judgment. Judgment implies misunderstanding. Which is obviously unacceptable.

But still, I invite you.

I’m writing because I feel like I have something to say. Which immediately raises concerns. Who gave me the confidence? Why do I trust my own thoughts so emphatically? What even are my thoughts?

I don’t actually know what I’m saying yet. But we’ll get there together. Generally, I’m hoping something leaps from my brain to yours and lands as an oh, or a laugh, or, at minimum, a mild annoyance. Maybe I want to spark something. Maybe I want to be seen the way I enjoy seeing others: mid-thought, a little exposed, vulnerable. Yes. That does feel vaguely sadistic.

Writing feels narcissistic. Not in the way your millennial bestie Jessica calls her Tinder date a narcissist after being ghosted for a day. I mean in the way that I’m announcing, with alarming assuredness: I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY. Like that alone makes it worth hearing. Like my particular arrangement of curiosities and late-night spirals isn’t just me DJ-ing with the same tracks we’re all playing.

Let me stop pretending otherwise. No more beating around the bush. I do think I’m unique. I assume you do too. We all do. We curate our niche little joys. Knitting, bugs, obscure history, refinishing dressers from Facebook marketplace, learning for the sake of learning. The precious building blocks of our personalities. Don’t tell me it isn’t sweet how we nurture our personal ecosystem of interests.

Annnd then we open the internet and discover how horrifyingly predictable we are.

We cringe at the same things. Laugh at the same inappropriate jokes (behind closed doors, of course). Reach for our phones at 2am with a sudden, dire need to know the capital of Colombia. We hyper fixate. We spiral. We self-diagnose. We collect knowledge like it might ground us.

But that sameness is why it’s possible to align with thoughts from Marcus Aurelius in the year 160 CE and feel personally addressed. Why Joan Didion makes loneliness feel like a newly articulated quirk. Why James Baldwin is still devastatingly current.

Nothing is new, and it still matters. I respect the gall it takes to keep saying things again, to trade the fear of has this been said before for the risk of maybe this will resonate with someone now. Speaking with a backbone, even if the thought has already existed in a different syntax.

We are the same, you and me.

Still talking. Writing. Annotating our lives in the margins of time like that might possibly count for something.

I am special.

So are you.

Fine. I’ll keep writing.