Why I Write
In Belize, I was asked to explain to a ten-year-old why I write. And why he should, too. As the question emerged from his bright-eyed mother, I was a little unsure how to respond. But I didn’t have the heart to disappoint. After sitting with the question for a few seconds, though, I began to realize that in my time writing, I’d gradually built some pretty persuasive arguments for the value of putting our lives onto paper.
In short, I write because I love it. I love the idea of immortalizing thoughts and events and making permanent out of the fleeting. I love the power of examining experiences and I love the catharsis of reflecting on old memories. And I love the ability to revisit them later.
The more time I’ve spent writing, the more I’ve wondered how I could have stayed afloat in a world without it. When the very ideas in our heads are trafficked almost exclusively in words — writing, at its very core, is an outgrowth of thinking. And putting thoughts into words is as therapeutic as it is essential.
On so many occasions, I haven’t even understood how I felt on a subject before writing about it. Stances that felt fully formed crumbled upon further examination. And opinions that I thought stood on shaky grounds evolved into pieces worth reading when wined and dined. Sitting with and parsing between the million billion trillion ways each individual sentence can be expressed — and arriving at that one — it helps us to understand ourselves better. It helps us to understand on which sides of issues we stand. It allows us to pry open the terrain between the opposing camps of each and every issue in our intricate and complicated world.
Writing is also a means of memory consolidation. Those words that make their way to paper have a powerful tendency to linger. There’s a growing list of memories I’m certain would have faded by now if they’d never been recorded. I can be certain of it because there are entire decades worth of days like any other that have already drifted obliquely into obscurity. Even a boundless childhood whirls into a dizzying reel of fast-fading still frames.
As a child, I went to Mexico and Jamaica with my family. And from our weeks spent there, I’ve brought back only spurious images floating free from their true contexts. The streets, rivers, restaurants, and intimate conversations checkered between are no longer memories I can draw from. The stills that remain are middles without beginnings or ends, uncharted islands whose gaps I cannot bridge.
But through writing, we can repair the chasms between the disparate parts of ourselves. We can build roads and freeways between islands and the murky marshlands of our minds. With enough reinforcements, they’ll be places we can return to. Our experiences will remain whole. Their contexts won’t need to part ways.
We have a means to archive the experiences that would otherwise evaporate. We can build connections between the memories we have today and the ones we’d lose tomorrow. And if we record them well enough, future generations might walk these same bridges.
Our entire lives are stories that we tell ourselves. And when the mind falters and distorts our experiences, the written word is perhaps the best opportunity we have to claim a sort of infinity for ourselves.
It’s a well-recorded phenomenon that we remember information better by writing it down. But when this information extends beyond the facts we’re taught in school and translates to the memories we retain in moving from day to day, writing begins to feel more akin to a superpower than it does a mere mnemonic. It’s a way to recall what would otherwise be forgotten. And it’s a way to revisit those little threads of life that still slip through the cracks.
When I look back at my time in Israel in 2022, the experiences feel more alive than my unrecorded days from only last month. Reviewing all that I’ve written about that trip, it’s no wonder why. And still, rereading the pieces I’m reminded of a flurry of tiny details I’d since forgotten. We imbue our words with colossal parts of ourselves. It’s thoughts, memories, and experiences that color each sentence we write. Pulling pages from the right chapters reveals bygone channels, streets, avenues, and viaducts.
As I look that ten-year-old in the eyes, a vicarious envy overtakes me. A yearning to reclaim the forgotten impassions my words. His parents have already done him the kindness and liberty of beginning to show him the world.
In his eyes, I see the reflections of a strange, foreign place that few ten-year-olds would ever be lucky enough to see. I see a lively, frenetic world dancing across the glossy whites beside his pupils. I see golf carts traversing the streets of this tiny, car-less town and I smell a delightful din of aromas from street vendors, restaurants, and mom-and-pop shops. I hear chatter and bustle and the inner workings of a place I never knew existed a few weeks prior.
Broadly, I see the finer details of cultures that comprise each new locale. And I see the ten-year-old me who unwittingly allowed each family vacation to fade into little more than flipbooks. I see lone sentences in what could have been whole novels.
And I see a profound generosity in the parents who encourage this ten-year-old child each night to journal, even — and especially — during a vacation.
If I’d had even sentences from my time in Mexico logged into a notebook, I could review them today. I could breathe life into words I hadn’t yet found the means to articulate when I was his age.
But for him, Belize is a fresh memory. The details of his time snorkeling, caving, fishing, hiking, basking, and exploring are as fresh to him as they’ll ever be. And in those notebooks, a future him — or some distant someone — might find a portal to another place.
Inspirational - experiencing life and journaling both help develop an awareness of the world and oneself. But the journal is not needed for memory as much as for allocating moments of gaining insights.
The boy may never read the journal and still, he will remember differently - remember what he was thinking and perhaps feeling, and the connections to other thought and feelings he had.
Memories elude for a reason: we need them in summary, to build our conscience, but we don’t need the details.
Trying to recap years later, to connect the dots, is a creative act. Whatever comes out of it is what we need now, built from fragments of experiences from all the years lived. Memories are now. Past is past. We have been there but we are here now.