The Importance of Writing

When I was younger I tried keeping a diary.  I didn't get very far with it.  I tried again over the years but the most I ever got to was a month.  I kept a diary when I worked as a volunteer and some of the things in it are really interesting, not because of how I felt at the time but because of what happened later that completely changed the tone of the diary from happiness to delusion.  Delusion caused by what I believe to be genuine support and assurance that was later found out to be false and ridicule.  The whole experience now has left me quite unwilling to do anything for charities as a result.

What these diaries represent however is what they were intended to do, that is they documented my thoughts and feelings that I had at the time of writing.  With all of these diaries however they were abandoned for many different reasons but the one thing they all shared was quite simply that I did not think what I had to write at the time would be relevant to me in the future and I did not think I would want to read them at all.  While I have not followed through with any of my diaries or the journals I tried to keep as well, this blog on the other hand has lasted quite a bit.  Even though it has had a few very distinct appearances over the years from the black and red darkness that it began with to the explosion of colour that was the tie dye background, up until today which is a lot more simplistic; and even though it has been purged a few times and brought back it's still managed to hang around.

The reason that is so remarkable for me is because my old diaries are long gone as are my journals.  They were physical - admittedly a little more difficult to recover if you decide to get rid of them, nigh impossible depending on how you did it.  This is digital, which is a blessing and a curse at the same time.  Blessing in that they are more resilient in digital form, but a curse in that they are remarkably easy to lose forever.  Paired with my diaries and journals there were hundreds of word documents I had written all of which were lost when one of my old computers crashed catastrophically.  More still were lost in an accidental reformat of a hard drive I realised I had not backed up.  The blogs however hang around a little longer for the simple reason that they are hosted on other services that are more redundant.  This one is on blogger for example.

Blogger itself is interesting for me as this is not my first blog.  I have had about 8 or 9, I can't remember them exactly now and I am sure I have probably missed a few.  They all had different themes though except for this one.  This one exists for me to write and nothing more.  Apart from that there is no guaranteed theme to posts.  They represent all the things that go through my head and the issues I want to share my thoughts and feelings on.  They also serve indirectly as a diary.  While I don't talk about specifics of my life on here as I would in a diary which is private, there are posts on here that allude to private thoughts and the connections and associations within them remain, to the point where I can read them and remember what was going on in my life at that moment in time.  Likewise there are many posts that despite having no names or mention of specific people in them, are inexorably linked to them.  There are poems about specific guys on here and posts about specific people and how their lives and circumstances inspired me to write.

My English teacher once told me to write, even if you think what you write is crap or to borrow her terminology "keek" then you still need to write.  Even if you scrap it after you wrote it and start again you have to write and keep writing.  The importance of writing is something that I have kept with me throughout my life thanks to her.  It has stood by me through a lot because it is a form of self therapy, it is a an outlet for thoughts and feelings, it allows you to process grander thoughts that on their own would be too much to think about.  It helps you work through things bit by bit and above all else it helps you to clear your mind of things that are bothering you, because once it is written and preserved you can stop thinking about things a lot easier than it is to do through will power alone.

The other thing that is important about writing is that it inspires you to read.  That might not seem logical at first but I assure you the most well written people I know are also the most well read.  Conversely the most well read I wish would write because the things that go on inside their heads are fascinating to me.  If you are a writer you will be a reader, there is no denying that.  Whether you read prose or if you stick to non fiction or publications you will be a reader.  More so in recent years there is also the side of reading what people think which has become a lot easier with the likes of twitter.  Whereas you would study peoples' behaviour before and learn through quiet observation, we now get to read what you actually think without leaving it to guesswork.  There are a lot of writers on twitter and while many of them are there for promotion, if you look at how active they are on twitter they do read and reply to quite a bit.

The only other thing about writing I would add is something that has often been said about writing - that it is a socially accepted form of talking to yourself.  This is true and I don't even know how to convey the importance of this but it really does help with processing your thoughts and feelings, especially those that go against the rest of your personality and cause you to be hypocritical in nature.  To give those thoughts to a character that can vocalise them, which you can then contradict freely as another character helps to resolve internal self struggle.