On Writing

I used to write all the time.  It wasn’t always about important things—though one could make a reasonable argument that recording the everyday mundane is important—but it was always.  I wrote in class (usually not what I was supposed to be writing), in school assemblies, during (shudder) pep-rallies, watching T.V., eating lunch, sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and reach for journal because I’d just thought of something—some droll observation or lepid anecdote—that must be recorded before I had any hope of sleeping again.  Eventually I didn’t write as much in a paper journal, though I continued to keep copious notes about my daily thoughts and experiences on paper for later, and I had my first blog.  There was, of course, overlap, a time when I had both a paper and a virtual journal, but my journal had never been for solely private consumption anyway and keeping it online just made it easier to share.

Sometimes I go back and look at the old journals (both on the shelf and online) and wonder why I stopped.  The obvious reason is that I graduated: I’d moved from paper and pen to laptop upon graduation from high school, and then just stopped writing my blog once I finished with (what I now consider “round 1” of) graduate school.  I guess it seemed like a natural break, my blog was a student blog and I was no longer a student.  Now of course I look back and think, so what?  Yes, I talked about classes and homework, but I also talked about travel, and books, and going out with friends, and interactions with strangers at bus stops.  Looking back I think the blog was not about student life, it was about the life of a student and then I think: I didn’t stop traveling, or reading, or meeting odd strangers on public transportation, so why did I stop writing about those things?  I never seem to be able to answer myself in a satisfactory way, but I do have an answer for why I don’t writing now.  It’s not that I don’t do and think things any more, but rather that I am horribly out of practice writing all the time, and no longer posses the youthful arrogance that assumes anybody cares.  Or maybe I never had that, sure I enjoyed when people read my blog and thought it was funny, or insightful, but all the time I wrote it I wrote it for me, back then the catharsis of writing was far more important than the being read.

I suppose that didn’t change, not really anyway.  I still find myself writing on scraps of paper, or typing my thoughts on Word or Google Docs when I am at my computer, the difference now is that I don’t post it.  Usually it gets lost or recycled, and nothing remains by the feeling of having purged my thoughts onto the page.

When I started my MLIS program I thought maybe I would start writing again, after all I was a student again, falling back into all my other old habits (good and bad) so why not thing one too?  I even had a class that required me to start a blog, or at the very least write specific entries into a blog I already had.  It was perfect, I had made an attempt to start a blog while working in a bookshop to keep track of book reviews and recommendations, but had not steadily kept it up—this was my chance to revive it, to reflect on my experiences in, and while in, school the way I had though high school, undergrad, and graduate school (round 1), and to create a record of my time as MLIS student I could look back on down the road.  Obviously things didn’t quite work out that way.

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I never exactly fancied myself a writer, but I was a person who writes.  Even now I think of myself somewhat in those terms, my internal monologue certainly sounds like I’m writing and editing it even as I think (oddly, my internal monologue often speaks in a British accent—Fife, Yorkshire, or London mostly—depending on which friends I have been emailing or which BBC shows I have been watching.  It is actually quite jarring to hear myself speak when I have been left in my own head too long.  My external accent may not have been altered by my time abroad, but the little voices in my head have never quite left the UK), but I don’t write it down anymore, and I often find that not anchoring my thoughts on the page leaves them much more scattered than they used to be.

As may, or may not, be obvious from the asides, my thoughts don’t flow in a linear pattern.  They like to jump around and writing them down grounds them, the slowing down of the thought process that is the result of writing (mostly by hand, but to some degree typing as well) forces me to pay attention to the jumps and connections and I keep track of my own train of thought better.  In short, writing helps me be a better thinker; maybe that’s why it was always important to write EVERYTHING as a student, it cleared my mind to focus on my studies.  I very well may have finally figured out the purpose behind all those free writes my junior year English teacher made us do in high school, she wanted to teach us to think by forcing us to pay attention to our thoughts.  Of course the irony is the moment she told us to free write anything in our heads was the moment my inner monologue would practice being silent.