On Writing.
My mind is like a butterfly house with an open window. Thoughts, emotions, and ideas are fluttering about, and if I’m not careful they escape before I can even see what they are.
How does one receive the title of “writer”? From the very first chicken scrawled backwards and barely legible words we put to paper as children, are we forever writers from that point on? I remember falling in love with words as a kid. Sitting in the corner of my kindergarten classroom with beanbags and bookshelves, sounding out syllables with the help of my teacher. Creating skits with my sister to Shel Silverstein poems. Sitting on my mother’s lap as she read stack after stack of library books. Writing little poems and stories to describe the worlds in my head. Does your love for words make you a writer?
Even if that were the case, somewhere along the way I lost touch with the magic of words. Adjectives and verbs became dried out grammar test questions instead of captivating expressions. Hours I had spent scribbling away were replaced with school and friends and the monotony of life; writing became more about a letter grade than a creative expression of self.
At times, the touch would return to me and I would write again, like getting lunch with an old friend stopping through town. These times were usually when my thoughts were overflowing to the point that I had to let them out. A school poetry competition where I poured out my insecurities and pain over my parents’ separation on stage. A fictional essay assignment, where I wrote about two boys falling in love before I even came to terms with my own sexuality. Late night letters to tell the people in my life things I knew I never could share in person.
Throughout all my school years my answer to the classic “favorite subject” question was always English or some other class that involved writing. However, even though my skill for writing had improved, was I any more of a writer than I was as a kid? Did saying I liked English make me more of a writer than my friend who preferred science?
I have a blue suede journal. It has two satiny long bookmarks attached: one orange and one black. On the cover the words -my notebook- are shallowly engraved in small uppercase block letters. It says in very small print “100% made in Italy” along the edge of the binding, but I received it as a Christmas gift when I was in South Africa last year. The first sixteen pages include tables to fill in: contents, a key, yearly goals, a monthly planner, and even a world map in which to mark dream destinations. They are all blank. Further inside are dotted grid pages with little weather icons in the top margins: sunny, sunny and cloudy, cloudy, rainy, stormy, and snow.
I have tried journaling before, and it has not worked out. I think there is something of a shroud of shame around the practice for me. Probably because it represents a failure to consistently do what I love: write. Maybe the reason I couldn’t keep a journal is the same reason for why I stopped writing as much as I did as a kid — losing touch with words. But I think there was also an undue pressure I was placing on myself in this instance. Journals and diaries have this unspoken promise about them that they will be read in the future. The “dear diary” trope where the teenager pours out their heart and somehow the whole world ends up reading it.
So that is why, on a day in late July when I happened to notice my blue suede journal sandwiched tightly onto my bookshelf, I was apprehensive. But I was also bored and in need of something to do. With low expectations, I decided to simply write down what was in my brain. A list of things I needed to do and had completed, a description of a sailing trip I had taken the previous day, a note that I had managed to drive my manual car by myself for the first time, and a list of friends I wanted to talk to. Not even a full-page worth of writing. And not with the purpose of sounding good enough for someone else to read it.
Something in me clicked.
Since then I have journaled every single day, progressively writing more and more about experiences, random ideas, lists of things I need to get done, and all of the thoughts that are always fluttering around my head. Instead of letting the events of each day pass by, I go over them in my head every evening and transcribe them.
You may be thinking, keeping a daily journal is entirely unexceptional. However, the results I have seen in my life from keeping this one simple promise to myself have been astounding. This daily practice of writing shut the open window of my butterfly house brain. It caught each butterfly one by one to look at, name and preserve. It has brought me peace. Writing has come back to me because I am writing for myself, and not for others.
Writing is a process in which I can enjoy my passion for words and express myself on paper. It is a way to hold on to memories, create worlds and stories, and transcribe what I think and feel. I consider myself to be a writer, not because of how frequently I write, the content of what I write, or even because I want to make a livelihood from it. Those qualities are attributes of a writer in the external sense, but one can still be a writer without any of those things.
I am a writer because the words I write are a part of me. No matter how long I go without putting pen to paper I will always come back to it eventually. A writer will never run out of thoughts; of butterflies, waiting to be caught.
