Why do I write?
I write because I dream in vivid colors, swimming in the new, the odd, and the real. I write because I can feel and see things through my artist eyes that cannot be expressed in any other way than the power of feelings conveyed by words.
There is an essential part of me that longs for communication and understanding on a deep level. I want to be understood. I want to share my hopes, my visions of the beauty, the strange, and the twistedly weird.
Before my mental illness, I wrote for entertainment and for the experience of living in another world, time, and space for a few hours at a time. I wrote because I loved reading it over and over, caught up in stories and ideas that compelled and pulled at me, begging to be set down.
Now I write to purge the thoughts that plague me. The thoughts come in endless streams, disjointed yet related. I write in long run-on sentences, using too many commas because it's where I stop to breathe, but not where the thought ends. I write in incomplete sentences. Because impact.
I write because I enjoy finding connections and seeing where they lead, so the words 'and', 'but' and 'therefore' find their way into my typing more often than they should.
As I type there is a freedom, an escape from the cage that is now my head. Feelings escape and there is a lightness, a movement that I cannot find in the daily activities that I now have to force myself to do.
There is much lost in the translation from mind to fingers. My pinky is in love with that apostraphe and will possessify or contract anything that ends in S unless I enforce extreme discipline or go back and proof read. Not once, not twice, but sometimes ten times over. Its turns to it's whether I want it to or not. That finger demands to be used. That finger has a mind of it's own and I lack in catching all the errors.
But it is sometimes the errors that make writing what it is. Error is as much a part of me as is the blood flowing through my veins. It may not stain the page rust colored when 'there' comes out instead of 'their' or 'they're' - even though I *do* know the difference. But the flaw is stil there, innate, beautiful in its own way. Annoying in its constancy.
Unfinished thoughts and words leak in as well. Words that have no meaning. The word Bear appears on the screen when I meant Table because the logic and intellect that once managed such things is damaged.
I write because imperfections must come out, whether in poetry or discourse. Thoughts rot and canker, spoiling everything around them when left to simmer in a rage unexpressed.
Words are cathartic, powerful emotions that I cannot deal with when bouncing inside my head from ear to ear, thought to thought, playing on the tides of my chemical imbalances like dolphins on the wake of a speedboat. Words keep me awake at night until I let them out.
I write because I want to be heard.
Thank you, Chuck Wendig, for this week's writing prompt. :)
Awesome!
ReplyDelete