A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity

Franz Kafka

Today, while writing this post, the house is very calm. My mother’s-in-law radio is off, my husband has taken my sons to the barbershop, and only the chirps of different birds, the windy weather, the shuffling of the leaves of trees, and some muffled distant sounds enter my ears.

I love to write within the embrace of that kind of intimate ambiance, for the things that I wanna say flow out more easily… my inspiration quadruples. The television playing loud all day, my mind that remains alert when my boys are alone in the other room, and all of these upheavals, have contributed to a drop in my energy level and inspiration. I have lost my writing cadence, thus write less, thus feel miserable and irritated, I feel that there’s something missing in my life.

I guess that the very fact that I feel like suffocating when I am not writing, and that I need it just like I need to breathe, is a sign that writing is this one thing that I want to keep doing forever. After all, it’s writing that has taken me out of my depression. It gave me a purpose, makes me happy, and I guess that’s why I don’t feel well when everyday I’m not writing.

If I haven’t written a poem or a paragraph for more than two days I feel diminished, tired, and I feel like I am regressing, while my mind is very agitated by all of these words and voices that are stuck inside of me, hammering at the door of my mind so as to be free. These imprisoned ideas and words give me nightmares of all sorts, they push me outside of my boundaries, they alienate me, torment me like ghosts, and it all stops… only after that I’ve freed my mind, only when they’ve become concrete, only when I vomit what has been choking me. And afterwards my heart and head feel light as a feather. Indeed, suppressed emotions, ideas, or any other thoughts that want to bubble up bring their load of frustrations and alienations.

The ideas are there, that’s for sure, but the lack of time (for I write turtleishly), and my constant fear of badly editing my writings are causing inside of me a warfare between my ego (for it’s always telling me to write-and-publish-no-matter-what-I’m-good) and reasoning (I need to write very well so that readers might get a good experience), and I am there, trying to reason and tame my ego, and trying to balance reasoning with a pint of self-importance.

Bringing balance to my body and mind is indeed very exhausting. But still, I need to write, no matter how difficult it is to master the English language as a non-English speaker. I make so many embarrassing writing mistakes, that’s for sure, even though unintentionally, but you know what?… I’ll keep doing it, because writing simply makes me happy.

I know that I still have a long way to go; I need to practice more so that I can get better at writing; practice and learn from my mistakes so that I don’t make those same mistakes again; learn and practice until that my writing process becomes so easy that I am able to gain the necessary confidence that will help me naturally write more every day, thus, relieve my mind and heart of all these worlds that haunt my imagination and cause my alienation.

Writing. Writing. Writing. In the end, this method of artistic expression has been the only medium through which I had been able to express myself when I was choking on destructive feelings — when my truth couldn’t flow towards your sea, or when the repressed words and my repressed thoughts were strangling me until I couldn’t breathe, until I was losing my mind. And then writing opened its benevolent arms so as to welcome me, and my life changed completely; writing is indeed an effective panacea.

I have to take everything out, alight my heart and brain, or else I accumulate a poison that slowly kills me from the inside. So yes, a non-writing writer is really a monster courting insanity, I confirm.