Why Do I Write?

I do not believe that my purpose for writing can be simplified into one firm reason or explanation. I write for a multitude of reasons within a multitude of contexts. Fresh out of bed in the morning, I write two pages of my stream of consciousness. Throughout the day, I juggle the ideas that I glean from various texts around in a notebook and sometimes manage to arrive at appreciable conclusions. Within the realm of my life, I articulate the interconnectedness and significance of various information that I find particularly relevant in various essays in order to solidify my thinking and live a more centered life.

Within my own personal sphere of existence, I treat writing as the opportunity to projectile vomit all of my thoughts, feelings, and emotions in a hideously creative manner of expression. Every morning, I wake up and write two pages before I do anything else in my day. Do those two pages contain blog posts or philosophical considerations? Certainly not! They contain all of the lingering gunk that was clogging up my mental machinery since the last time I took a nice brain dump. However, within those steamy piles of fresh mental feces, I sometimes find valuable seeds that I take note of and may choose to plant at a later time. A few blog posts have originated from my morning pages, but for the most part it’s two pages of crap-- but it’s the process of taking that crap that is so revitalizing and freeing. It lightens my mental burden and allows me to orient myself amidst a whirlwind of objective and perceived chaos.

Above all,I write as a way to organize my thinking and assemble my thoughts into formal, coherent ideas that are both useful and beneficial. Writing allows you to assemble your knowledge about various subjects into strong frameworks that serve you much better than random chunks of fact. When you engage with the world, you inevitably process a series of inputs that are stored in some form or another within your memory. Writing allows you to spin these inputs into outputs. However, the input tidbits are essentially useless if they remain as tidbits. It is not until you deliberately connect them that you are able to extract meaning and arrive at the deepest level of understanding about a subject. Once you consolidate the interconnectedness of the ideas in your head through writing, you become an intellectual superpower and can wield your ideas as a dangerous weapon in the real world. On the same note, writing allows you to identify the flaws in your logic and comprehension. This provides you the perfect opportunity to patch up any holes in your mental framework and strengthen your intellectual forcefield.

Why do I write?

Ultimately, because I know what writing gives me. It gives me power in the form of competency and skillful articulation. The man who can solidify his thoughts on paper, identify and then eradicate any flaws, and assemble them into refined weapons of competency is a dangerous man who always wins. His words will outlast the most dangerous warrior; for bodies are perishable in their existence, but wise ideas are immortal in their impact. Writers gain eternal dominance by becoming better thinkers and propounding their ideas to the world in a manner that most often lands them at the top of the most illustrious hierarchies in society.