Ruminations on Writing

or how i learned to stop worrying and love my vocation of choice

Despite what you might think about me once you hear my life-long ambition to write for a living, I’ve never liked writing. In fact I hated it. I remember having to write these convoluted essays about whether school uniforms should be banned for high school English and thinking I’d rather chop my hand off than make a pro/con list for such a tedious argument. Who cares I thought to myself: At my school we didn’t have uniforms and my essay wouldn’t change that fundamental fact. I’d still get detention for wearing my skirt above my knees even if I did get an A for what I wrote in favor of it. We had to make do with what we had, so what was the point of considering a hypothetical alternative. I’d much rather write about why we shouldn’t be compelled to write about such pointless arguments no one actually has. 

I think I hate what I end up writing more than I hate the act of it. I rarely re-read anything I’ve written, for fear that I’ll end up scrapping the whole thing. I used to think only people who genuinely liked putting words to paper - or in this day and age characters to Word doc - could be writers. That is until I heard Fran Lebovitz declare that she’d only met one good writer in her lifetime who didn’t hate writing (for those of you wondering if the results of my very limited google search are to be believed the writer in question is most probably Toni Morrison). To this day - which is to say a few months after I first watched Pretend It’s a City on Netflix - the thought of someone else who could hate writing as much as I do but also be dependent on it as an artistic endeavour/ emotional crutch is comforting to me. Because in a way I don’t know what else I could have to offer to the world besides my words. Which sounds conceited: to assume my sentences deserve more eyeball-attention than those of other people. And yet I don’t think I’m a particularly interesting or valuable person. There are instances when I think I’ve finally managed to get it into my head that I’m just like everybody else in terms of thoughts, feelings and lived experiences. But then something happens: someone compliments the calculated intricacies of my thoughts or my wry sense of humor in the middle of conversation and suddenly I think to myself: all those teachers who told my mom I was special at after school parent-teacher-conferences had it right: I am special.

As a sociology major, I know there are countless sociocultural diagnoses of our obsession with being special. Most have to do with laissez-faire capitalist individualism and how it has practically infiltrated every facet of our lives. From the moment we’re born we’re told how unique, one of a kind and undeniably special we are. To exist is enough to be considered remarkable. There is some truth to that, in the sense that everyone who was ever born was “chosen” over others for life by chance. The arbitrariness of that very fact is remarkable. But hammering into children’s heads that no one else was and ever will be like them is trite if not dishonest. It makes sense in terms of economic incentive since individuality is nothing if not marketable: whole generations were raised on the palatable idea that one ought to set oneself apart from others by way of seemingly-unique consumer choices. But upon closer inspection this “special” line of thinking is lacking in perspective, however well intentioned it might be. Because what does being “special” really mean? Isn’t it just another ploy of the capitalist powers that be to ailienate you, the only cog in the machine that matters, further from your fellow men (your comrades if you will)? Isn’t it inherently a political conspiracy to get you to lobby against labour solidarity? Isn’t it ultimately an oxymoron in of itself because how can you be “special” if everyone else is “special” as well?

We are more alike than we are unlike and that’s a hard fact to swallow when you’ve been brought up to see value in yourself only to the extent to which you are “better” from those around you. The illusion of a world built by the more capable, the more knowledgeable justifies the existence of a meritocracy; where those who have proved themselves to be special by way of sheer hard work and talent are framed as the most deserving of their success. And for the longest time I fully bought into that idea of a merit-governed society: I figured that if I had been a good writer I would’ve been a prodigy by now and since nobody was willing to commission me for my writing - financial compensation being the main benchmark for deserved recognition in our current hellscape of a gig economy - I gave up on writing.

That is to say I gave up on the idea of writing because, as my 5+ years of being prescribed antidepressants will indicate, I can’t bear to live without at least trying to document what I’m feeling.And since I’m usually not very fond of articulating myself in conversation, I’ve kept a diary since the age of 7. Initially, I used old notebooks lying around the house to scribble unintelligible lyrics about crushes I had or jot down awful stream of conscioussness “poetry” whenever I wanted to feel like the main character of my own TV show: a Turkish Slyvia Plath in the making (or so I believed). I started writing regularly in my diary sometime around my 11th birthday and have retreated to the notebook and pen I keep on my bedside table to find my peace of mind ever since. Recently I came across this quote while reading Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs, which summarizes my feelings on writing perfectly:

“Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away.”

So that’s where I’m at right now. I still have to coerce myself into opening Word documents with a curated playlist - aptly named songs to listen to on loop when im trying to write - comprised of random songs that have proved to motivate me to keep on writing. I still have to try and not give up in the middle of a sentence for fear of not finding the right words. I still question whether what I have to say is really worth saying or why that question of inherent value should withold me from saying it at all. But despite all my trivial anxieties around finding the right words or forming coherent sentences, my primary need to write has not and will not go away. I feel alive when I write. I feel like I have purpose. Even if it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Even if I can’t say all that I would like to say or as beautifully as I would like to say it, whether I’m whining about petty friendship drama in the coffee stained pages of a battered journal or arguing against the systematic exploitation of emotional labour in an academic essay writing is a prerequisite for my way of being. So the least I can do is give into to the urge to indulge in the art of the written word for the short period of time I am here.