Why I (Wish To) Write

This is a post that I got published on a website called Lionhart. Lionhart is a community of women who is committed to empowering and encouraging young women to recognize their worth and spread that courage into their communities. I had the honor of having a little writing of mine featured on their website. You can check it out here!

There are a lot of nights that I ask myself, why do I write? And why do I have a desire to write? Can I write?

And there is a quote I found that stuck out to me that I want to share. And, I think DeSalvo nails to the wall exactly why it is that I want to write.

"Why, then, should we write? Because writing permits the construction of a cohesive, elaborate, thoughtful personal narrative in the way that simply speaking about our experiences doesn’t. Through writing, suffering can be transmuted into art. And writing permits us to use our writing as a form of public testimony in a way that the private act of therapy doesn’t." — Louise DeSalvo

To turn our suffering into an art. Something meaningful, beautiful.

To create some sort of public testimony. A story.

 I love stories. I love hearing them --in books, in music, film -- and I love sharing the ones I've collected from the lives of others. I want to share my own story, too, but, I find my story to be the most difficult to want to tell. I have struggled with this for many years, an instance in the past most note-ably being my year in spoken word club, penning the words, yet struggling to let them leave the pages held to my chest.

And, so it's been for most of my life sense then.

With the desire to tell my story, I find that most often, I am consumed by fear.

Fear of what?

Fear of being ridiculed, alone, rejected, not enough. Or maybe even the fear of being seen as "too much", the one that I, with my heart on my sleeve, personally struggle with.

Sometimes, I sit before the screen, maybe before my notebook, and I try to convince myself that if I can just write a little fancier, if I could just chop out all the vulnerable details or wrap whatever it is I want to share with some guaranteed-to-feel-good conclusion ... that I've done what I wanted. That I've done the work of writing for me.

But I don't want to speak the common voice, or the voice that everyone may want to hear. Truly, despite how I may attempt to convince myself, I don't want to speak in the voice that is deemed only "acceptable" by the masses. But, I want to share my dreams, my fears, my sorrow, my hopes... shamelessly. I don't want to hide anymore. That is why I want to write. I don't want to hide in my fear or my shame. I no longer want to beleive that all of that which I am ashamed of defines the worth of my stories, or the stories of others that I wish to share that may parallel my own heart.

 I want to write with the knowledge that my voice and my life is valuable, that it is connected to yours in a significant way. I want to know that value in the same way as I see it for those that I encounter, those who bless me with their honest lives, although they may appear as an unlikely hero to the themselves and to the world.

I want to write about the poor in spirit and share the stories of those who think, too, that their story is not worth telling, because it is in those that I see a glimpse of me. I find their stories significant. I hope to share mine within the humble realization of my own weakness, my own desire to be part of something greater, to belong, to have worth.

I want my writing to be a place where folks can come as they are, just as I wish to come as I am. I know that for me, sharing what I write, will be a journey, one that has been long meaning to happen. I will experience fear, but now, I want to choose the courage to leap above that fear. And I will have courage, because I want to believe that fearless honesty is all it takes for writing to be good and true.

“Good writ­ing is hon­est, alive. The more hon­est and alive our writ­ing, the more we show our­selves. The more we show our­selves, the greater dan­ger we’re in. The greater dan­ger we’re in, the more scared we are. Hence fear is a marker on the path toward good writ­ing.” -- Ralph Keyes // The Courage to Write