On The Need To Write.
Or is it the desire?
Hello again,
I have always wanted to write and journal, but never figured it out. Let me get this out of the way: if you know how, please let me know! comment on this, email me, reach out, whichever way! I want to start, but I’m not able to for some unknown reason.
Not only that, I feel the pressure to write. And it’s not from anyone, it is from myself. And this pressure is mainly due to the fact that I’m always reminded by things, people, events, incidents, and memories from my own life by other people. I have been going through “somewhat of an unconventional life” according to my social circles, and that also adds to the pressure and the need to document my life, or life in general as I see it.
But why do we document our lives? Or where does this need to document our come from?
The “examined life”.
Socrates might have meant something else, but isn’t writing part of examining life? This is my main motivation for writing, examining it, and seeing how this experiment goes, as far as one lives. Yet, the desire to write and journal was mainly a form of self-preservation. The ability to make sure that how I felt isn’t forgotten. But, I forget a lot of things. I forget most things. Important, and not-so-important things. And this worries me, and also in a way saddens me. But why do people write?
I have a close friend of mine (something coming up at the end about friends) that I see from time to time, and every time I meet him, he’s always eager to hear from me due to my travels and sometimes extended absence. Every time he says: “Come tell us about a new adventure”, I feel that existential dread about the lack of stories, that I have for people like him, expecting me to come back as a storyteller, not as a friend. We all have friends whom we love to hear their stories, and listen to them talk about travels and stories, because we believe those people lead interesting lives.
Also, due to the nature of the places I’ve been, and the constant state of motion I’m in (can be an intellectual state of motion too), people somewhat expect me to be some kind of a John Silver: someone who talks to them about stories, dangers, and somewhat of an anthropological observation type of commentary. This is self-inflected in ways; These are my interests too! I love to observe society and always try to find the interesting stories and interesting people, and interesting things, and interesting incidents and encounters. And it happens to me a lot. I just fail to document.
I’ve tried.
And did bits and pieces of documentation. I carry a journal that is in my backpack. I take it sometimes with me to places where I want to just sit and write, and bring a book, so I read the book and forget/ignore to write and journal.
I’ve read on the benefits of journaling, and the many tips and tricks about how to start journaling, and where to start, and what is the ideal size of a notebook to take with you everywhere so you start journaling more frequently. All this prep, but no execution whatsoever.
It is not the lack of interesting things, or the life that is as one of my friends describe it: ‘slapping us left and right’, that makes journaling not interesting enough, but it is something that I am not able to pinpoint. I remember discussing this with a friend and the way I described that feeling was so telling even to myself. I said: “It feels like a bottle that needs to overflow, but the lid is not coming off.”
Or as the Arabs used this line of poetry as a parable when the frog said: “There’s water in my mouth.”1 It is a feeling of the need to say things, without being able to say them.
So, what motivates us to write?
The need to document life I think differs from the need to write about life. I believe we document our lives in 2 main ways:
The way we currently do through pictures, videos, and general events, in our smartphone revolution type.
The way we document to extract meaning and learning in general, such as journalling.
Let me get to the first one briefly: I do think that photos generally have lost a lot of meaning in our lives. I don’t think I’ve taken photos of meaningful times for a while now, but instead, photos generally tend to get more random as time goes by. I think of this as a symptom/consequence for the over saturation of photos in our lives. We see them in every moment in our lives, and they lost a lot of meaning to our lives when our friends’ daily lives are shown to us in photos. I’ve lost the appetite to take photos (generally after covid), but due to the normalcy of everyone ‘having their phones up’, I don’t want to do it anymore.
I’m more concerned with the 2nd type. The way in which we document our lives (mainly in writing) to reflect on this life when the time comes.
I am by no means a great person that is worthy of writing a memoir or biography type book, but I feel that there’s something to share from this life with everyone, and to learn from everyone. Hence my inclination towards this type of writing. Hence, this space in which I’m writing to you. (I was thinking of adding “for you” but then I was thinking: am I writing for others?).
“Who do you write for?”
My close friend Abdulrahman (yeah I know.) was asking me this question as I was talking to him about it. he said: “No one before said: I think I have something important to say, that’s why I write. But they wrote for themselves.” And I think I need to realign myself with this, and think about it a bit more. The need to write seems to me to come from within, but I’m not sure what my goal for writing is. Is it to share with myself & others? or to discover something new? or is it do preserve my life as I see it and as I go through it? I’m debating this as I go on. If you’re thinking of these questions like I do, can you answer me in a comment?
Life: changing us in front of our eyes.
What I fear the most about this ‘undocumented’ life, is the fear to forget life and the steps I’ve taken to get here, and all the things I have to go through. I want to be able to remember things, and the ability to remember things is not my special power, more like my kryptonite.
I want to be able to look back at the life that shaped the person that I am in a way in which I am able to remember key moments otherwise would be forgotten without the documentation. I also want to be able to document all these feelings, and all these emotions that I’m going through. Isn’t life the sum of our feelings in certain moments?
I feel like the past 3 years (the most significant of my life so far) all have gone without me putting pen to paper to preserve them in a way that is meaningful to me. I have photos, scribbles, emails, and other ways of things here and there. But I am not able to go about it and be ‘systemically’ able to chronologicalize it so that I am able to come back to it later on. I don’t know why I need to do this, but I need to. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I feel the pressure is building, but the water isn’t flowing.
Writing Every Day.
I know people who write in their journals every day, and that is something that I want to do. I’m not-so-secretly jealous of these people who are able to do so.
I always struggled with documenting the mundane, like people do. I know that this is the essence of journaling: finding the place in our heads to write, not obsessing about what we write, but more like obsessing about the act of writing itself.
I feel like the life in its mundane ebbs and flows isn’t worth documenting, but this makes me lose its ebbs and flows, and when the big moments come, I don’t find myself able to express in the way I want. Anyhow..
If you write in your journal daily or regularly, please send help this way..
One day. Maybe.
Currently Reading:
The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, by William Dalrymple. A suggestion from Rafi, my group’s resident scholar, and a self-appointed wiki. Book Cover magnificence.
The Earthly Paradise: Studies in American Culture, Abdelwahab Elmessiri. Adding to the library and getting close to completing reading all his books now.
🎵: 2 Songs are on the playlist:
My old Friends. Hiss Golden Messenger. Reminiscing while listening to this after over a year without seeing the old friends.
The lake. DeYarmond Edison. Old songs from 2005 just released. Here’s one that fits this publish.
The Arabs used the parable of the frog in the famous lines of poetry:
”The frog had said something, and the wise men were interpreting it: There’s water in my mouth, and does one with mouth in their water speak?”
It is a metaphor for not being able to express the feeling of or the opinion about something. More from a translated page: https://shorturl.at/BCJNT
This feels very familiar, especially from my 20-something writer self. One slight difference is that I don't think I've ever felt compelled to document much -- it's narration, not documentation, that pulls me.
I do write in a journal pretty much every day. However, I don't document much. I write down dreams, and irritations and annoyances and stressors, maybe something I'm looking forward to. Depends on my mood. I just think of it as a brain dump first thing in the morning. It would be hard for anyone reading these journals 20 years from now to have any idea what was happening in my life on a day to day basis. But nobody will be reading them because the essential ingredient for me to be able to be honest in my journals is that I burn them to ash when I'm done.
Two practices that might or might not be helpful for you: the journaling I do is the morning pages from Julia Cameron's book "The Artist's Way." Someone gave it to me 30 years ago. It's probably dated by now, but I think a lot of people still find her approach to creativity freeing and helpful. The morning pages are 3 pages, first thing every morning, in whatever kind of notebook you like. I've had many different sizes and types over the decades and it consistently takes me about 30 minutes. (I handwrite them.)
The other is something I picked up from Heather Sellers's book "Page After Page." I use this practice when I feel a bit stuck or burned out or out of ideas: Set a timer for 3 minutes. In that time, write down 10 things you remember from 2 days ago. The key here is that they have to be sensory things -- usually visual. Like, a grey jacket hanging on the back of a red chair in the sunlight. Specifics are best. THEN, set the timer again for 10 minutes. Choose one thing from that list and write about it for those 10 minutes, again in as much detail as possible. So not ideas about the things or meaning from them, just the facts.
I like this exercise because it helps me kickstart without too much pressure when I'm feeling stuck. I especially like it because it helps hone an ability to pay close attention to your world. Remembering things yesterday is much easier than remembering them from two days ago. When I'm doing that practice, I'm much better at giving attention to the world. I've even found that I use these lists of details years later if working on an essay that includes that time.