WHY
I WRITE
I admit that I do not have one bona fide reason as to why I have chosen to write. I’m in a minor that is dedicated to the field. So why do I even do it if I don’t know why I’m driven to in the first place? The answer doesn’t lie in some monumental event that changed my life forever, nor does it have anything to do with one certain person who inspired me to write. Nevertheless, I will attempt to explain my drive to write with the satisfaction I get when I read my old pieces, write them just to re-write them, all in an attempt to see myself grow.
It's probably so difficult for me to attack this question, because I don’t feel as if I write for anyone. It may seem that I do write for people since I have been a student for most of my life: I write essays that professors assign, I write out notes and presentations, and most importantly, I have learned to write a well-formed business email. All of these things are motivated by the grading process or getting a job. But let me not bore you with more examples of how I know most of my writing has been meaningless. I am well aware of this fact. No matter the material I am writing, though, I write with something rather than writing for something. Although meaningless in content, each piece I have handed in is meaningful in context, because it is a timeline of my prose throughout the years. I see myself in the context of each past piece and remember how I felt and who I was, because I re-read it as a totally different person-- a radically new mind. I write with the hopes of changing.
I write with the image of an older version of myself in my mind. I see myself sitting in a massive, red velvet armchair some years down the line, reading an old philosophy paper from when I was twenty years old, remembering how naïvely I once perceived the world. I would not be laughing at how wrong I was, but smiling at the difference between past me and future me. The differences in style, vocabulary, and point of view. I write with the hopes that I will change, because although everyone I know says that people do, I want proof. I write with the desire to record all my current thoughts on a topic in the most honest way I possibly see it. It may not be the most factual or accurate account of the subject, but it is how I saw it in that moment. And that's crazy. It is subjectivity at its finest, because I can be wrong and that's okay. I can be a little right, also and just keep digging. The English language is always changing and so are my thoughts. I think differently now from how I thought then, but hey, that doesn't discount my piece from 11th grade about how the Internet is a silent killer. The truth for each person in that single moment they write it down is something wonderful and solidly beauitful about the written word. This may be mostly why I do it, but I also could be wrong about that fact too.
My journal entries, my random poems scrawled upon scrap paper, and one-page essays from high school will be proof down the line. They will be proof that, although what I was feeling and believing then was less developed, all those thoughts were valid in the context of my past life. College essays and book reviews all seem so menial in the grand scheme of things, but I choose to keep writing because I want to see how my style and rhetoric grow. I choose to hold on to every last thing that I have written so I can show an older Amanda, "hey look what you used to think!"
Growth suggests maturity or some kind of "improvement," and yes, I want to see how my writing has grown, but I want to see how it has grown into different forms and voices, not grown into something "better." I want to see how my words crunch up, roll around, and distort themselves each and every year. I want to keep a record because without it I would not be able to make a clear estimation of who I am in the present. If I cannot see who I was and what I was thinking, my memory of myself would be inaccurate. If I did not write and I tried to think back on my junior year of high school, which was one of the worst years of my life, I would fail in remembering it accurately. I would have nothing to refer to, no mosaic of feelings or thoughts on paper, no drawings in my journal, or confessional poems that I shared in class. My small English class, run by our existentialist teacher Mr. Leon, was when I became most intimate with my writing and my inner self. I still have every bit of poetry I wrote and I am so happy that I do. I am so happy that I write.
In this writing course, I decided to write about my Greek condition, about my Greek mother and her family who has stayed in Greece. I wanted to write about them and myself in terms of the Greek-American condition, and I tried to analyze the situation to the best of my ability. I tried to tie in my past life moments and current feelings on the topic in hopes of making sense of something beyond myself. I don't know if what I wrote and posted on this website is true for everyone, but it is true for me right now.
In terms of writing range, my canon is pretty minimal to date, but I write to build an immense repertoire, one full of successful papers, shitty short stories, and funny dialogue. This is so I can have my own canon— a canon full of range, including great and not-so-great material, that I can look back upon while I sip on a whiskey sour whilst in that lush red chair. Preferably with the sounds of buses and honking cars wafting through my apartment window in New York. I write to end up there. Content and smiling at my own adolescent thoughts, like a haughty Yale club-goer who has nothing better to do with her time but sit and reminisce.