Why I Write

Back From The Writer's Block: Life Sucked Deep and Swallowed Whole

Captured in my office, where a lot of my writing happens. By my muse India Earl

I wanted to write about why I write, as study field and conversational contemplation, because it’s the origin of why I love to write. I like to take something seemingly insignificant (not that writing is anything insignificant but rather essential both for writer and reader, but perhaps a smaller scale and specific subject to ponder as compared to all the many other things one could ponder) and ingest it so intensely that the one tiny molecule that is the thought “Why do I write?” becomes so magnified that it not only takes up more space, but becomes the entire world. This is in no way to lose nuance, because what we see in such molecule, at first same-like, once magnified it reveals patterns, colors, stories and mysteries that in fact are endless. Every time another magnification happens, another universe reveals itself in the other. And therefore I am called to a mythic quest, I call writing.

One of the main reasons I write is that, whether I write it or not, I have a tendency to experience life in such a magnified way, which sounds extremely poetic but when you’re a daughter of a bipolar father, there is a borderline (pun intended) to something slightly insane, which one, one being me, would like to avoid. Only if you run from fear it has a habit of running after you. Instead you have to turn around and befriend it. Dedicated and stubborn as I am, I refuse to let any parental fate become my destiny, and so I have studied the application and practice of our psyche and spirit in directions that are creative rather than destructive, and writing has always been a channel for my research and findings to land, to take root and make a life of their own. Through writing I have torn down the scaffolding that covered my original makeup and instead I have built something sacred for myself. The blank page is my temple, and my words, the invocations. The invocations are about basically anything I find myself entirely devoted to in the given moment, be it earth-shattering grief or how to roast a chicken.

As I was; I begin this essay with the very same mythic quest energy as I just told you about. An energy I do most things in life by. One could argue that it is not (a mythic quest) it is an essay, with which I can wholeheartedly agree. (I do not mean it in a diminishing tone, I just mean, it is crucial to possess a solid amount of self-irony when you run as intensely as I do. My youngest brother saying: “I really have never met someone like you, Amanda” not knowing if he meant in an endearing or frightened way). But what is life if anything but an art form, in which we have the honor and opportunity to breathe meaning into seemingly meaningless, random acts of what appears to be divine orchestration that not always favors the humans, but humors The Gods? Sometimes I feel this magnification overwhelming me slightly, because as it is with the holographic nature of things; it is never-ending and there are, it turns out, a thousand reasons why I write and the more I contemplate the more I realize. I enjoy my own tendency to make a devotional effort of just about anything, which in turn can make most things holy. But sometimes I am so dumbfounded by divinity that all I can do is to collapse and catch my breath. Writing often seems to be my lungs, that allow me to breathe with newfound strength.

When people ask me what I write about, I say: “My life.” Which always reminds me of the first episode of Girls, season one, where Hannah, high on opium, is trying to convince her parents to not cut her off, because she could be: “A voice of a generation.” Slightly self-obsessed. But did I mention what (my) life entails? “My Life”: How else can I say I write about my lifelong fascination with whatever is beyond the bones, the vow I seem to have taken as a teenager to the eternal exploration of the phenomenon Triboluminescence, the light that is generated by rupture or more or less random points of meditations, such as just how much pleasure I can derive from sucking on a frozen grape. Whether it is a feast or fear, I write that which I cannot speak, because the very birth of everything that came to be me; body, mind and words, was shot into this world with such force, it has often been hard to move forward; either I would stumble over my own two feet (or words), surprised by the velocity every thought into word I made seemed to possess or stay entirely stagnant, like an old running car, stuck in a ditch.

What I know about the formation of my language, is that my father never spoke to me like I was what I was — a child. From the moment I was born I was expected to have a voice, have an opinion, take a stand (and change it again) and take into consideration that I existed within some great interconnected web of art in which I could, should, had to contribute my verse in intelligent, meaningful and well-spoken ways. Effort should be repaid with effort. With great effort I was born, the product of survival of the fastest, fittest biological makeup, conceived on a blue couch during a Full Moon in May, a product of shooting stars over Øresund and white wine on a beach, here I come on the Full Moon February 18th, with the light, he, my father, said. My mom birthing me like a lioness; I better pay my respect with the same kind of effort that this very life was given to me.

This peculiar way of raising a child, is partially the foundation of who I am. It is also the reason why I started to write because I found it hard to speak, or rather I found it hard to meet the standards of speaking which were required of me. The expectations of my language were not only that I had to possess a sophisticated and diverse vocabulary as a 4 year old, but that I was able to choose words from that very vocabulary, correctly informed by feeling and meaning. Not only must you contribute with effort, but with honesty and intelligence too. So to be able to transmit the way I took in the world, or rather how the world seems to come at me and from me, in ways so intense couldn’t always quite compute with my still developing ability to put sound behind observations and practice to my vocabulary, which makes the sum of speaking. Because I quickly found myself to be an intense and dedicated observer of life, from the details to the broader reality, and therefore had many guts to spill, it required a certain level and skill of communication which was not always easy for a child. Instead it left me startled and speechless and this is why I started writing.

Writing became my patient friend, and a place to undo myself, not under anyone’s eye. To say, that which I never felt I could speak due to the well-intended, but twisted, sword of accuracy and expectations hanging over me like a warning, ready to cut my tongue. Freely spoken, I was not, because before I could say what I wanted to say, and here I mean not just words, but the very life of me; feelings, thoughts, questions, I had to undergo a thorough analysis that resembled being lectured by an encyclopedia. Writing, therefore has been my most essential rite of passage in my own becoming. As sort of reimagined womb space, where I could outgrow the shapes I was originally given. The shape of a woman, carved by a man.

I cannot say that I am not grateful for this particular carpenter that was my father. I cannot say that I am not grateful for certain shapes that have been carved into me so deeply that they became me. I am. Carving never comes without pain, neither does life, and writing has been a way for me to understand this pain in the flesh, to bleed onto the pages, to spill over, not hinged by external examination, but to become entirely free, messy and incohesive as I invoke what is dormant within me, reinsert my tongue and take in air, so I can start speaking. It is here I come to find solace and surrender to what is and what has been — and furthermore, what will be.

I write also to let go of my own vanity. First and foremost, to be honest, to be true, to cut down to the bones I love so very much. It requires, effort yes, courage also, but more so the willingness to be exposed from unflattering angles. Writing requires of me to turn feral and writing itself, is quite the feral act for me. I do not shower, I sit there covered in odor from the night, drinking more coffee than I’m eating food, turning myself inside out, in ways that are pleasurable but closely intersected to pain. Maybe I’m romanticizing and maybe there is a way to deliver that which I cannot speak in a more hormonal-friendly way, but I like it like this. I like refinement, but not sanitation of art and form nor in the ways these are born. And it is my own sort of liberation to let the part of me which could never speak, speak and therefore breathe. Not pretty, not desirable, not perfect. Not even sophisticated at all times. But true. To become more true — to become more alive, is to step out of the confined shell of fantasy and illusion, and to shatter the very shell that keeps one from this greater sort of intimacy with self and life. And this is why I write.

Writing became a medium to a creature that lived inside of me. A creature that seemed to be made entirely out of darkness and this creature had no language so I had to give it voice and I called it writing.

I have breathed her, I have bathed her, I have held her — this creature, with every word she asked me to write. The unthinkable, the unspeakable, but nonetheless, the ones she felt. With every word, she became more courageous to reveal her true nature which turned out to be holy.

I have only recently discovered or perhaps remembered that long before said creature took a home in me, I wrote stories about a lioness and heroines and mystical queens, who set out sails for life so passionately, the same way I do in life. And so perhaps, writing, first and foremost, became a way to call myself home. I wrote about abstract form and lips colored green and things breaking but mending by the power of love. I write because I believe writing is the wisest part of me. I write, now I understand, because I love life with such ferocious intensity and totality — I love that which is close to me, seemingly mundane, as much as I love the broader reality, seemingly mystical. Writing are my reaching hands towards the life, not just the one inside of me but the one inside of you too, this molten core that seems to bind us together. I can also call it love. Writing is my invocation, my chant to animate life with spirit and gusto. When I write my heart beats faster, because it is as if my whole, entire body rejoices that we have made our way back to our original place of origin. That we, as in I too, are once again rooted in reality but also expanding and magnifying the sense of that reality. To dissect a flower, not to tear it apart for the sake of it, but to see just how much beauty reveals itself when we look beyond the immediate surface. What fragrance is released by the ripping of the petals. What magnificence is experienced when we pay close enough attention to the subtleties of sacredness.

Anaïs Nin says: “We write, to taste life twice.”

But I don’t write to taste life twice, I write to taste it thrice, pulled apart, redefined, reimagined and then put back together, sucked deep and swallowed whole.

This is why I write.