writing as making sense of the dark

on writing, thought processes, and narratives

I want to write. I want to write want to write want to write…. ad infinitum. I want things to make sense again. 

I’ve been thinking about the role writing used to play in my life, back when I used to write voraciously, back when it was all I ever did and the only thing I knew how to do. The only thing I had. The role it played was this: the act of writing, of contextualizing my thoughts and feelings and experiences, made things fall into place. Made them neater, delineated them. Without tangible proof of my thoughts, they float and disappear; I cannot name my feelings, cannot form a coherent string of thoughts that is meaningful in any way. I am less me when I don’t write. My inner life a dull gray. 

I’ve heard that for some people, thinking involves saying the words aloud in their heads – they talk to themselves, their thoughts articulated almost like sentences spoken within the brain. Highly verbal and linear. On the other hand, there are people whose thoughts exist as abstract, disjointed pieces in their heads; images, sensations, impressions, ideas. Your thoughts feel less like thoughts and more like emotions or concepts. A tinge, an intuition. I clearly fall into the latter category, and I think most other writers do as well. Just the urge to make sense of it all. To arrange your thoughts, and by extension your life, into something resembling linearity and cohesion. A narrative.

Patti Smith, Devotion

I’ve come to realize that above anything else, writing is a tool for me to create a narrative for myself, for my life. My thoughts exist in fragments and kaleidoscopes, and the act of writing externalizes them out of the amorphous space of my mind, unfurling a story or a theme, something with structure and meaning. Whatever semblance of a narrative unfolds from writing helps me synthesize these abstract impressions, and in turn, allows me to make sense of myself and how I relate to the world. Narrative, structure, meaning, making sense of it all, etc etc, how elusive it all feels to me these days. I float and fumble my way through life and all my thoughts and ideas die within me, without the means to express them. They’re not things I can express to the people in my life, and in fact, they’re not even things I want to express to anyone who knows me. I think it feels too inconsequential and also it just wouldn’t make sense, for whatever reason, to say some of these words out loud. Some things in my life feel like they’re meant to live within pages or words that only strangers on the internet will read. And I prefer it that way.

Another reason words don’t flow and come easily to me anymore – I haven’t been reading. I used to read so much and so voraciously when I was 20, 21, 22, and then for whatever reason (I started working, I fried my brain from being on my phone too much, I moved countries and then came back home, all these changes, who am I anymore? But also, I haven’t changed even the slightest bit, the fundamental aspects of me still burrowed deep in me) I couldn’t anymore. Can’t write when I don’t read; can’t read without feeling the urge to write—the symbiosis of it all. What I’ve noticed is that my need to write peaks when I’m going through something painful, but mostly when I’m pining for something, someone. Something about want and desire and hurt that just screams to be let out, to be seen and expressed (i.e. understood). Without unrequited love, heartbreak, pain, or something corporeal to yearn for, my incessant need to write doesn’t arise as much, which I’m trying to change. Why do I find my most potent inspiration in grief and in the void that comes from what’s missing? 

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, “On Writing On Your Own Terms”

I have love in my life now, in multiple forms. And the love fulfills me, nourishes me, and is the antidote to the yearning and longing I’ve experienced for the entire course of my life, almost. When you finally have the thing that felt impossibly ephemeral and evasive for as long as you’ve wanted it – almost fatalistic in its impossibility – it feels like absolution, a release, an olive branch (or a whole tree) offered to you by the universe. Contentment, the kind that doesn’t ask for much else from life. It cut my yearning for life in half, and subsequently, my need to write petered out.

Perhaps I need to look at writing from a different lens completely, establish a framework for it that doesn’t require me to be actively suffering, rewire my brain. I don’t feel as confident in my writing anymore either, but that’s just something that needs constant practice and reading. It’ll take work and some time, but I trust I’ll find my way there eventually. 

Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook,” trans. Clare Kavanaugh, Poetry

Writing as discovery, writing as making sense of the dark, writing as a means to save your life.