Part 7

So, we are finally here; the first blog post where I’m not really sure what to write about. Until now it’s been rather simple because I feel like I had a fair bit to say about what it took to write the first book, but now that I’ve said all that I am willing to say at this time, it kind of feels like that story is complete. However, I owe you a weekly blog post, so I guess I have to figure out something.

I guess I’ll write about something simple, like why I like writing to begin with. To me, writing is in a word: therapeutic. I wrote a bit about my mental state growing up in some earlier posts, and when I think back on it, there were really three things that allowed me to process all of that and move past it. The first was isolation. The second was an obsessive need for introspection I developed back when I was nineteen. The third was writing.

I’ve always been more of an introverted loner than an extroverted socialite, but that hasn’t ever really impeded me when it comes to meeting new people. For a long time it was mainly people I went to school with, but that’s shifted quite a bit in the years since graduation. However, like I said, I’ve always preferred being alone over being around others. As far as it relates to how that helped me work through my mountains of mental baggage, there was a long period of time where I did not understand the source of my negative feelings, and unfortunately, being around the people who wanted to spend time with me did more harm than good.

When things inevitably came to a head, my true isolation began. For the first, six to eight months or so, each day brought with it even more negativity. But, slowly, over time and without my notice, things started to change. I started to change. The boundless anger, pain and sadness that consumed every waking second of my life shifted. I still remember the exact day where I felt its impact for the first time.

It was November of that year, and during that time my sister’s dog was living at my mom’s apartment on a full-time basis. Something happened somewhere along the way and my mom was going to be out of town or something for some measure of time. I don’t really remember the specifics of why she asked me to walk my sister’s dog twice a day, but she did and I agreed. What I do remember is during one of those early afternoon walks, I was struck with a bout of pure, genuine happiness. I remember stopping in dead in my tracks, almost like I was frozen in place. I looked around as if I were expecting someone else to be around me for some reason. But no, I was alone. Just me, my sister’s dog and the dirt path we were walking on.

By that point in my life I had learned how to both what I was feeling and why. Now while that my sound a bit odd to most people, like “how is knowing how you feel impressive?”, I would say that in my opinion the overwhelming majority of people cannot articulate their emotions beyond a surface level explanation. That trait in people annoys me, mainly because of how much dissonance my own inability to do more caused me, so I changed it. But, before I get completely sidetracked, let’s get back on track. That little bout of random happiness lasted less than a minute, but it perplexed me for days.

Why did I feel it? There was no external factors that contributed to it. It was the same dog being walked at the same time at the same place, yet there was something different, somehow. Looking back on it, I think that it was a signal that I was healing. I hadn’t thought about the things that kept me up at night for months, if not years, on end. I wasn’t actively stressed about anything at the time, so that feeling was probably just me unwinding.

But, what does any of this have to do with why I like writing? Well, from that moment onward I have never felt lonely. Sure I can interact with the people I work with, and I spend time with my family during important moments, but outside of that I no longer have a desire to make new friends of anything. To be perfectly honest, part of what has taken me so long to get this site and blog up and running is the fact that on a personal level I don’t want or need attention, but I also want to share my novels with people, and making peace with those contradictory feelings took some doing. But, I’m here writing this now, and book one is getting closer to being released so it is what it is. Isolation gave me the time and space I needed to start healing, and subsequently, to start writing.

So, while I spent a bit writing about isolation, I’m not going to spend much time at all talking about my introspective nature, because while I am sharing things about my life on this platform, my decision to keep things private is still paramount. What I will share is that figuring myself out has helped me in figuring out how to be a writer in more ways than I’ll share in this post.

As for the final thing that helped get me through the hardest bits of my life, writing affects me in ways that I still struggle to explain. On the one hand there is this constant push that compels me to continue. On the other, going down this road, and putting as much time, energy and effort into it as I have with things being how they are is, difficult, at times. But, overall, it has been a net positive. I’m pretty certain that one of the main reasons I’m still around at all is because I took the time to start writing my novels.

There were several main reasons behind why I was so fundamentally depressed for so long, and one of them was the lack of purpose in my life. For so long I wasn’t doing anything, and I didn’t want to do anything so I didn’t feel like I was anything. But then I started writing. I did something. I achieved something. Sure, it was nothing but small things at first. But, over time my first word turned into my first sentence and so on until I’ve reached the point where I am sitting here writing this for you today. Deciding to do all of this on my own with the sole purpose being that I wanted to do it for me has quelled many of the fires that burned in me for over a decade.

For a few years I wasn’t certain what was really causing this shift in perspective, but then I noticed that every time I stopped writing for a few months at a time, my mental state would start to slip back into how the people who probably don’t have anything positive to say about me most likely remember me. Seeing that sliding scale and knowing that the one thing that truly armors me from it is pursuing my purpose is equal parts interesting and unnerving.

I think that’s why I like writing more than I like reading. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy reading a lot. In fact, books are my second favorite type of media, but not even reading my favorite book for the first time can compare in anyway to crafting my own. It’s all of the small things, but also all of the big things. Back when I didn’t know how my story was going to go, I found a lot of joy and entertainment in figuring things out. It’s difficult to put into words, but anyone who enjoys the granular details that go into tinkering with things should be able to understand what I’m getting at.

Based on a lot of reading, watching and listening I’ve done, as well as my own personal hands-on experience, there seems to be a primitive compulsion to create, fix, or put together in all of us. It’s like how mechanics enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together when they were younger. I didn’t enjoy much of anything at all when I was younger, but now that I have found this, my novels are my car collection, and things like sentence structure, plot and character are my wrenches and screwdrivers.

So, in summation, I like writing because I like tinkering with words. Seeing all of the different ways they can go together and trying to figure out which combination works the best for what I’m trying to achieve is infinitely fascinating to me. At first I wrote because the spectacle of what I saw in my head when I was writing my fantasy short story for that creative writing class was captivating to me. Then I realized that the act of writing and creating was making me feel better wholistically. Now I write because realizing my vision is my purpose, and I will achieve that goal no matter what.