Why Do I Write?

October 28, 2013- Happy 27th Birthday to me!

Twenty-seven. I’ve spent the past week reflecting on my twenty-sixth year. For most of the year, I was really focused on my career, trying to find my place and my role in an ever-changing environment. After four positions with the same company, I think I’m finally doing something that makes me really happy. With that being said, and with the time I have spent trying to get myself in a really good place in life, it is finally time to turn my attention back to the one thing I might love a little bit more than life itself. Writing.

So this year, I’ve decided to make twenty-seven the year of the written word.

Why do I write?

I write because I feel a hundred emotions passing through my body at every given moment.

I write because I experience a thousand places I want to go, a thousand foods I want to try, a thousand people I want to meet.

I write because I can’t go to a thousand places or try a thousand foods or meet a thousand people. There isn’t enough time to be the doctor, the lawyer, the dancer, the musician. Not in one lifetime. A piece of me burns with intense passion to be great at all of those things.

I write because words take me everywhere I want to be. They transform my simple and ordinary life into one that breathes life into people, it moves and inspires them.

I write because sometimes what I want to say and what I actually say are two completely different things. The words that come out of my mouth just don’t make sense. But when I write it, the words dance off the page with a certain beauty, eloquence and grace.

I write because I need all the wildly running colors of my imagination to bleed from my mind onto the paper.

I write because a part of me knows I’ll never be that great at guitar and I’ll never find the cure for cancer. But I still want to be, I still pretend that I can.

I write because “me” isn’t “me” without a laundry list of hobbies that I pretend to know something about.

I write because I am crazy to think that I can be good at everything I try. Somehow though, because I write, I get to be the expert.

I write because I live inside my own crazy, fucked up world half the time imagining all kinds of insane scenarios, and spend the other half of the time talking to myself out loud pretending I’m living in another time as another person, which only validates my insanity.

I write so I can release my tears. Not sad tears. Tears are just how I show my emotion.

I write so I can share.

I write because I care. I care to know about other people and where they’ve been and where they’re going and how they’re going to get there.

I write because it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

I write because in all my insanity, it’s the one sane thing I’ve got to hold on to.

I write because if I don’t, the fire inside of me won’t die down, blow out, or stop burning. It burns and it rages like a wild animal trapped inside a cage that doesn’t feel calm until it has been released.

I write, quite simply, because I love to write.