measi's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why I write (a journal prompt) (Thanks to A year's journal prompts for the topic...) Why do I write? What makes it so important for me to plunk down with either a pen and paper or with a keyboard and monitor, and start scribbling words that hopefully make some semblance of sense once I'm through. Honestly, I'm not quite sure. I fall into that category of people who **need** to write. Writing to me is a necessity of life. It's obsessive-compulsive. I need to scribble. I need to record. I need to create. I have been writing since I first learned how to make letters on a page. The first recorded copy of my writing was inside one of those Betty Crocker Junior Cookbooks from the late 70's/early 80's. One of the few other kids in the neighborhood was three years older than me and was learing cursive handwriting in her 2nd grade class. I was four. Maybe five. She taught me to make the letters of my name. So I signed MY copy of the cookbook, since my brother had his own copy (even though he was only two at the time... not sure why my mom thought he'd be cooking!). Heaven forbid that anyone used MY copy of the cookbook. So I signed it. I spelled my name correctly. Even if my S's were backwards. The next evidence of my need to write came three or four years later, when I was nine. We lost our family dog to a severe stroke that year. Katie was a gorgeous Collie. She really was the first child of the family. And she was a 13 year old dog who had a severe stroke, paralyzing her. We had to put her to sleep out of kindness to her. It was my first taste of what death was. Sometime that week after Katie died, I woke up screaming and crying in the middle of the night. I'd probably had a dream about her and woke up from it with the reality check. At some point after someone had come to comfort me that night, I scooted out of bed, pulled out a sheet of notebook paper, and wrote a poem to Katie. My mom still has it. According to her, it still brings her to tears. Mind you, I honestly don't remember what it says, but I'm fairly sure it's more of an attempt to just put my feelings down into words. It was probably brutally honest, clumsy, and well, since Mom has it... she'll be even more sentimental about it since I was so young when I wrote it. But I do remember writing it. I remember putting a lot of thought into what I was going to say, because I wanted it to be right. I kept writing. I discovered penpalling as a hobby, soaking up letters from my two penpals in India when I was 12, relishing the strange English dialect they both wrote in from halfway across the world. I wrote stupid little pre-teen romance fantasies with Andi that were god-awful attempts at fanfiction before we were aware there actually were mailzine clubs for this sort of stuff (this was, of course, several years before Usenet really took off with alt.tv.insertshowhere groups). I wrote an escapist fantasy diary to get me away from my parents' divorce for four years, filling a 200 page journal with daydreams. I wrote in a normal journal when I actually needed to deal with what was going on. I went into journalism for my college degree. I wrote everyday. Sometimes three or four papers in a day, depending on the semester load. I collected my thoughts in college in cheap cloth-bound journals all four years of school, and continued past college, stopping only when reality was so painful that I couldn't write about it anymore without feeling sick. Suddenly, I hated writing. I was burnt out from school. I was burnt out from life. And my burnt-out'edness reflected how my life was going at the time. And then in 2001, I started writing here, letting the words start flowing again. At first they were very hesitant. Stupid little entries. Whiny little entries. And little by little, I started to dip more than my big toe back into the world of writing again. I jumped into the pool... writing in my journal, attempting some fanfiction again (that I've never uploaded anywhere!), writing again to penpals, and then attempting NaNoWriMo last autumn. I've found my love of writing again. And oddly enough, I've found that discovering that love of writing gave me a sense of self again. Writing is part of my blood. It sustains me when my thoughts are swirling too hard to do anything else. I can pull the keyboard closer and just let my fingers fly. It helps me to remember things that I enjoy, things I hate, and things later on that I have no clue why I'd really care to remember. I write because I live. I write because I'm here. I write because I am. 2:21 p.m. - 24 June 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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