Why I write

It's hard to explain why I no longer keep a journal. I used to. Writing daily used to be the activity that kept me sane. Do I not write because I can't face myself? Possibly.

I read a review of Susan Sontag's recently published journals. It wasn't very nice. The reviewer complained, it seems to me, because Sontag used the form to do what most people do in their journal: record their feelings, their emotional responses to events or thoughts that take place. He searched in vain for polished prose, complex sociological analyses, political commentary, and found the record of the heart's movements. This disappointed him. What a jerk.

I don't keep this diary to count the number of men I've slept with, or to pronounce wittily on public phenomena, or to explore philosophical issues, or whatever it is that Mr. Reviewer looked for and could not find in Sontag's journal. I write here because it helps me to express. It's vital to my sanity. And if i worry about how intelligent or sophisticated or stylistically correct I'm going to appear to some future reader, if I write for any reader at all, then I tend to fail to achieve what it is that I want to achieve when i write--which is mostly to express, to let out, to think through, to relieve my mind and heart of its burdens.

Writing here, in this public blog (which no one ever reads, which no one is likely to read) then seems rather wrong. It's not technically personal, hidden, private enough a venue to serve the function for which I'm theoretically writing. But I have to admit that I've never only written for myself. It's no so much that I want or need to be read and praised (what every writer truly longs for, obviously, is praise) but more to reach out, to communicate. To find myself and to find others with whom to communicate. Readers of the future, perhaps.

What makes a writer write? A need to get it out, to craft, to express--to get out of the head and onto paper what presses to be released, that which irritates until it is out. But also to figure out what it is that is inside, what needs to come out. To be seen, by the self, the writer, who shapes, molds, prods, teases, but also by the reader, who receives, acknowledges, and reshapes. Reading is never passive. But who is my reader?

Who do I imagine you are, dear reader, dear lovely, sweet, sugar-candied reader, you who have taken the time to read, to pay attention, to acknowledge my words. Fit, though few, you get me. I also fear you, of course. I fear your disdain, contempt, dislike. I long not for your love but rather your understanding, your generous sympathy. And also for your response. I want to communicate, to move you to reach out to me.

I write from a position of profound loneliness, isolation. I write to know that I am not alone. That what I experience, feel, say, formulate, make up, has some kind of reality and in its realness has meaning. To hear the sound of my own voice? Not so much. But more to see the evidence of my own being, and to have the opportunity to think about what I am thinking, to reflect, to consider, to evaluate and reevaluate. To make conscious what largely goes unconscious, unspoken, unheard, and unremembered. To see the mark of my wake in the water and to chart its direction in relation to the sea and landscape.

What prompts writing is often pain. The pain is always the same: I miss him, my son. I am always mourning the loss of time with him. It's worse, strangely enough, after we speak on the phone. Easier when we videochat. The voice alone, over the phone line, underscores the distance between us, the time lost. I don't want to write about it. And yet I want there to be a record of how much I have missed him, how terrible it has been to have been separated from him for so long. I want the record to be here. I can't bear to record it. It bores me, for one. It is always the same. There is never anything new to say. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts. He hurts. I hurt.