So I can’t help– being here– thinking about writing all the time. Which is a nice change for me since, as I think I’ve said before, my mind is generally occupied with something Other.
Just now I attended a seminar called “Fooling the Watcher: How to Write when You’re Scared to Write.” And I know that, going in, I once again had “Writer Wannabe” branded on my forehead, but I tried to hold my head high, and remade the sign so that now it read “Writer.” And in I went.
We had a few moments’ lull between arriving and the seminar’s commencement, and I was sitting in solitude and anonymity, an infrequent but enjoyable state in my experience. Not everyone was in solitude, and I suppose that the real definition of that solitude might be called into question, as people abounded in that room. But I was not with friends; I was sitting alone.
This was not the case for the three women in front of me. They had come together, they were chatting, and their voices were not lowered in any tone requesting privacy. As such, I found it hard not to be aware of their conversation, especially when I overheard the following:
“She is absolutely compelled to write.”
“Is she.”
“I mean, she started a blog. You know, an on-line thing. And she just can’t stop writing. Pages and pages. She is absolutely compelled.”
“Yes, but isn’t it a physical thing? I mean, like a mental thing? Like she can’t help it.
(Indistinct response from the first woman)
“I mean, there’s something wrong, isn’t there?”
“I don’t need to write. I really don’t. I don’t feel that way. I could go the rest of my life and not write another thing.” (Murmur of assent? Of dissent? I can’t discern the meaning.) “I physically need to read. I physically feel a lack if I can’t read.”
It’s not that I need to write. No. It’s not that. I’m sure that if you kept me from writing, I could go on. I would learn to get past the void in my hand where my pen used to sit, or the keys beneath the pads of my fingertips, or the consoling click when I pressed them. I could keep it all in my head, the way I do now when I can get to neither pen nor laptop. I could continue to compose sentences that help me retain after their passing the amber light glossing the black piano, the whorl of golden hair near the top of my baby girl’s head, the musky scent of my husband’s skin when he’s been working in the sun.
I don’t need to write anything, really. But I want to. Writing for me is more than scratching an itch; it is rubbing a muscle pain so deep that, if unattended to, would expand deeper and deeper toward the bone. And the ache, while never relieved absolutely, retreats with the emergence of the words and the cadence of the syntax. Writing is momentary resolution, an equation solved, but not the last equation on the page.
That’s why I write. That’s why.
