Why DO I Write? (an essay)

I write, because I do not know how not to. I cannot have experiences in my life, compelling to the emotional and auditory- and NOT record them. I see a perfectly adorable pair of chipmunks, running about a baseball diamond- sharing an acorn and basking in their untouchable, bushy tailed, blissful, scampering, worry-free chipmunk love. I want to write a children’s story(Munky Business). I share a passionate night with a beautiful woman- whether she is the love of my life, or some chance encounter which I’ll only touch once…I want to write a sonnet- perhaps a love poem or an ode. Something in the news catches my attention- as utterly irresponsible and politically profane…I have to write an Op-Ed piece, an essay, or a long-winded pissed off rant on a web forum. It has always just been in my nature to express my thoughts through writing; I love the sound of words- and can almost stitch together musical hymns, in the rhythm of a well-written work.

“How am I suppose’to pretend…I never want to see you again…”

Such little clever lines in pop songs, flip a switch in my brain that automatically triggers this long chain reaction, and causes me to go off and write a short story about a lost love-- where the 19-year old casanova must rescue his 24-year old damsel in distress from the evils of her parents wanting her to marry some loathsome future lawyer. Where I see myself constantly as the superheroes I read about in comic books- therefore I must concoct my own grand-scale tales of heroism- of good triumphing over evil, and where bad science experiments somehow always result in funky Superpowers- rather than mangled body parts and horror stories of limbs blown apart. I see beauty in the world. I have to catalogue it.
Since the age of ten, maybe eleven- I’ve written poetry. It all started off in a ‘Young Author’s competition’, where everyone in my fifth grade class was given the same writing assignment for our English class. The prompt went something like- ‘Line 1- Name…Line 2- 3 descriptive characteristics…Line 3- What do you wish for?..Line 4- What are your fears? Line 5- Three more defining characteristics’. This seems far too constricting to my poetic algorithms nowadays- but in that age, you’re really more interested in watching cartoons, eating cereal and playing with action figures than you are being a young thespian. Winning the top prize for ‘best poem’, getting it published in a ‘Young Poets of NJ’ composition, and being told I have ‘a way with words’ by just about everyone I’ve known since Kindergarten- always gave me that drive to continue dabbling in the scribe’s world. Some of it fueled purely by my own ego- no doubt, I have always enjoyed the feeling of people telling me ‘you write wonderfully’ or that something I created could touch them enough to make them laugh, impact them enough to memorize it in full, or would be powerful enough to bring them to tears. The power of words, to me, has always been an awe-inspiring thing. I’ve read Mark Twain novels all throughout my adolescence, been moved by the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman. In my more recent years, the philosophy of Descarte, the modern writers- Junot Diaz and Saul Williams...yet I've always felt that if somehow I could leave my own personal legacy on this Earth- to put out works important enough to be published, bought, stored and cherished for all of time, then I myself could never really die.

To me, to write is to forever document your voice. To feel that deep within you, some fucked-up falcon, or Jaguar; both high off lyric-laced catnip, with hunters feverishly trying to maim their young, lay lurking- waiting to lunge upward from the cage you keep deep inside your cerebral cortex. I write because it soothes whatever beast that is…because to not keep in touch with that activity which satisfies me like the perfect meal, which stimulates me like the brush of warm flesh, and connects me to others without ever having met. When writing, that is the only time I am allowed to be someone else, yet retain pieces of myself. To be God; to be demonic; to be artist, musician, female; Greek philosopher, wind, machine, and ocean’s tide all in one. I write because I can’t NOT.