I don’t know if I have a “why” for writing what I do.
I’m not a writer and I actively resist being described as such. There are real writers, it is their craft and vocation.
I scribble a few words together in notes and they’re generally complaints. So no, I’m not writer.
What I try to do is channel a feeling, or moment, and usually because it’s intolerable for me to keep it bottled inside. Ideas are like bubbles on the surface of a simmering, particularly viscous soup. Some are small and nag at you, some are a mighty swell.
Everything starts with pain. There’s the pain of shame, of rejection, of loss, of failure, and then they trend more obscure, but nobody wants to read about ennui.
Then there’s usually a connection with someone who’s no longer there: dead or gone. It’s easier to litigate painful feelings if someone’s still involved with your life.
But the nightmares start when it’s something you wish you said to someone that hurt you. And for some reason, it’s never negative.
The even deeper question is: what would you say to someone that hurt you? Would you apologize? Would you ask them why they did it? Would you even want to know the answer, or do you just want their ghost that haunts you to go away?
At my most unhinged and paranoid I felt presence of people who weren’t there, who died. My dad, my grandmother. Within the week each had passed there was a comforting presence and then that too disappeared. It was months of silence later when I’d get flashes of feeling like they were judging every move, that I’d left them unsettled.
Maybe it was my own neuroses, but I have a specific memory one afternoon after many nights of poor sleep screamcrying into the phone at my friend in a parking lot that I felt like they were judging me for fucking up.
That’s what it always comes down to, doesn’t it? Do you sleep well at night? Do the ghosts of Christmas Past/Present/Future pay you a visit?
If I’m tired enough, I’m out, and it’s sweet dreams. But if I reach a certain level of tired, it’s curtains up in the haunted cinema.
In the situation I’m typically powerless, and dealing with someone who’s no longer there. And it’s terrible. It’s worse than a “ooh scary monster” nightmare because it’s real, it’s a real situation, and you’re not in 2018 and cozy and in your bed, you’re a passenger in a conversation from 6 years ago and the car doors are locked.
That’s why I write: because for years being closeted, ashamed, stubborn, and pushing things down and away just didn’t work. There was an entire interior world no one knew anything about or could understood. Realizing that others had similar experiences, and that writing was the most coherent way I could channel them, made the difference.
So I write. Not that well, mind you. And it can be exhausting. But unlike ghosts, it’s real.
