why you can (and should) write

 a/n: is that how you format author's notes? it is now! whew what a mess, i hope this is at least coherent. i tried to avoid sounding preach-ey or like some sorta inspirational speaker cause that feels annoying and condescending, hopefully that worked.

writing isn't sacred.

which sounds obvious—the act of putting words next to each other is second nature to us. we write when we text a friend. we write when we name files on our computer. when we make shopping lists and other reminders to ourselves. 

"oh, but that isn't REAL writing", you might be thinking. 

for a long time, i would've agreed. there's real writing. and then there's the silly unserious unimportant writing that most people (and i) do. 

but hold it a second. "real" and "fake" are bold distinctions to make. to quote the professor responding to my half-assed answer in an 8am discussion section i skipped the reading for, "please elaborate on that."

to be a bit dramatic, "the war on writing"

our system kills writing. from the moment we learn to put words on a page, writing is graded—assigned value—based on arbitrary and often stupid qualities. forgot a period? die. misspelt a word? die. 

never mind that these have little to no bearing on the ideas you're trying to communicate; follow our rules or suffer the consequences. 

teachers do their best (english teachers and professors are consistently some of the kindest, most approachable people i meet), but the need to slap a grade on things—reducing tens of thousands of characters to just one—is incredibly damaging. and that's to say nothing about how much these rules impact those learning english as a second language—having their efforts to communicate constantly rejected through labels of mediocrity. 

if our memories are filled with countless hours spent rewriting papers for points, seeing teachers after class, and having our work scrawled over in angry red pen, it's no surprise so many people end up with a particular belief drilled into their minds:

i'm not a writer

is something i hear a lot. for me, and many friends i've talked to, it feels like there's this divide—a rigid barrier that separates real creators from non-creators—whether writers, artists, or musicians.

i draw things sometimes. but i'm not comfortable calling myself an "artist". i feel like it comes with so many expectations that i don't live up to; a certain level of skill, a certain degree of consistency, and so on. even "writer" feels intimidating, and i MAJORED in that shit.

these barriers gatekeep our very basic human tendencies to make things and express ourselves. they tell us that we need to be "good enough" to be valid in the things we do. they mythologize "real" writers, "real" artists—setting them up as these idealized, unreachable things.

i don't even know much about pablo picasso, but i keep thinking back to a quote of his: 

    "every child is an artist. the problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

i was a pretty shitty student in grade school. i dedicated my class periods to filling every blank space on every worksheet with doodles of pokemon and protoss starships. was it a waste of time? maybe. were they good drawings? no. but those concepts didn't matter in my mind back then. i doodled cause i wanted to. same goes for singing, and some silly short stories i wrote. 

we are artists, we are writers, we are creators; we've always been. the process of growing up suffocates these ambitions beneath labels of good and bad, internal judgements of "wasted time", and the divide of "real and fake" creatives. but it's still there. to dig the artist back up—to overcome all of this bullshit—is a long and difficult process. but it might be worth the while. 

cause writing isn't a title you need to earn. it isn't an external permission bestowed upon you by a teacher, a college degree, or some sort of online audience. it exists between you, your ideas, and whoever you choose to share it with (or not). 

i have nothing interesting to say

is another judgement that i'm still trying to overcome in sharing my writing. and it's pretty daunting: people are interesting. they live through some interesting shit. and learn some really interesting things. but here's the thing. 

you are people. 

from the perspective of someone living our lives for as long as we have, things may seem flat or mundane. but none of us walk the same path through the world. by virtue of charting that path, we by definition have a story to tell. and the places where those paths intersect or run parallel only make that story more valuable. 

so why do i write?

as i offhandedly mentioned, i am an english major. but i spent much of high school and college scrapping together mediocre essays, submitting them minutes before they were due, and never looking at them again. many were unfinished, and remain that way—only getting credit through the extraordinary generosity of my professors. i felt some pride at somehow surviving and graduating, but rarely at the writing itself. 

the exception was junior year, where one of my professors gave my class the assignment of writing her an email every day. whatever length we wanted, about anything we wanted. it could be a single word, even a single letter if we really weren't feeling up to it. 

so i just put down random thoughts—stories and reflections from whatever was going on in my life. and reading through them recently, some of them were kind of bangers? like:

"i wonder if other people wonder about other people this much."

i dunno. the simple act of writing out weird and complicated ideas in a simple, clear way just feels really cool to me. only recently, reading through some of the emails, did i rediscover that—a reason to write other than "i have to or grades go boom". 

it lets me put words to messy ideas. or share my feelings in hopes of finding others who might feel the same way. or organize the output from the weird-idea generator in my head before it buries me alive. or in the case of this mess of an article, all of the above. gradually removing the standards of "good writing" or "interesting writing" or "intellectually-and-academically-meaningful writing" (hate that one) leaves a lot of things that i actually want to write about. so yeah that's what i'll be doing here at uhh placeholdertitle01. 

i guess a conclusion of sorts: you don't need to become a writer because you are, by virtue of being human. you don't need to become unique or interesting to write because you are, by virtue of surviving and navigating this very weird world. to write—or to create—is inherent to us as humans, and only you decide what to do with that. 

oh. here's an image so the preview isn't just the default icon.