Why I Have Started Writing

I have had many hangups about writing for many years. Honesty, I’m a terrible writer. I had a good friend during college (of whom I’m endlessly grateful) who would edit my papers. Every time I’d open the Google Doc I sent her would end up a sea of edits and I would end up demoralized about just how childish I sounded. I think a key part of this was that I never really read(fn 1). Half way through college, I stared reading more seriously and my writing got much better. My crowing achievement of writing in college was my two religious art history research papers. They were by far the longest, about 25 pages each, and likely the only things I wrote in college that had anything close to something novel to say.

At the same time, thinking critically about myself, my context, and what I want to do has always been a part of the way that I think and much of what I talked about with my friends. There are a handful of ideas in high school and college that I’m proud of. Ideas that changed my life and sometimes the lives those around me. I’ve had this pattern in much of my life in which I’d mull over a perspective or idea for weeks or months and my friends would have to suffer through me trying to work through early stages of these ideas in conversation. When the idea would finally become clear to me, I’d change in some small way and then essentially forget the idea.

By essentially never writing these ideas down, I’ve create a perfect little nightmare for myself. I can remember with incredible detail when it was, who I was with, where it happened, and the subject of when so many ideas finally became clear to me, but I can’t for the life of me remember what the thoughts were. I remember walking through Howth with SK. It was a classic Irish spring, slightly cold breeze, but nice in the sun. The hike was incredible and I was deeply enjoying the day we were having together. We were probably 1/5th of the way through the hike and past most of the elevation gain. We’d been hiking with a beautiful view for about twenty minutes by then. We were talking about the girl I was seeing at the time and I had a critical realization about my own sexuality in that conversation. I remembered this moment a few weeks ago and since then I’ve been completely unable to remember what I had realized about my sexuality.

I remember sitting DC of the office of the professor who guided me through my religious art history research. The time spent doing this research profoundly changed me and my perception of what college can do to develop one’s perception of the world around them. I had been thinking about it for months and I couldn’t wait to tell him how our time together had changed me. He loved what I had to say and asked me to write it down and sending it to him. And now, I have no idea what I said to him. I genuinely can’t remember a single part of my idea that I expressed to him that warm September day in the Mid-Atlantic, in his beautiful sun lit office in the brick walkup the religion department had their offices in. Not once piece of it.

The even more frustrating thing about this perfect little nightmare is that I that I never really realized that I had been forgetting these ideas until recently. My roommate and I were talking about coffee and about how we made coffee in college, at which point I realized that I had no fucking idea how I made coffee in college. Also I only graduated college 2 years ago, so it’s not like this was ancient personal history.

The only obvious way out of this fun hell I’ve constructed for myself is to write. Once I realized that I needed to start writing, I couldn’t image not doing it. I still don’t know what I’m going to write about, at what cadence, who, if anyone, my audience will be, and what the point of it all really is, but I know for certain that it’s a journey I must go on.

I have many goals that I believe I could achieve by writing, but a foundational desire is a collection of passages that serve as an idea photo album. I look back through photos and think about what I used to do and what I used to look like and I want the same thing for ideas. So that I can look back upon them and think about the ideas and perspectives I used to have.