On writing
May 24, 2022
When I was younger, I tortured myself over the purpose of my life. What did my life contribute to society and what did my life bring to myself? When I was younger still, I wondered why everyone questioned the meaning of life. It seemed a lofty yet useless question, when really I did not understand its meaning. The truth, I have come to discover, is that eventually one can't help but to reflect on the question.
I don't have the answer yet. As for when I am even older, will I have the answer then? Will I be listless with despair or absorbed in joy over the mundane? At the moment I find myself teetering between both attitudes.
An easy answer, one that I considered years ago, is service to others. How better to reassure yourself of your life's value than to see the benefit of your own actions for others? At the time, I told my therapist: "Some people have inherent meaning: they want to make art or play sports. It makes them happy, it drives them. For everyone else without an inborn desire, our purpose must be to help those who do." She did not totally agree, but to me it seemed clear. Since I didn't want to paint or to play, the best use of my life was to enable others to paint and to play.
Several years later, I find myself returning to this sentiment from a different perspective. I find myself wanting to create. Maybe neither to paint nor to play specifically, but to write. I want to record what I've learned, to organise it in a way that is satisfying in its clarity. I want to preserve the story of my parents. I want to ignite joy and to share the warmth of human connection, to give anyone who reads a brain massage. (And, much later, I want to write a DnD campaign.)
People with the ambition to write are a dime a dozen, so I am not expressing anything new. But the feeling is new to me: an urge that is purely personal. I must now begin down the well-worn path familiar to aspiring writers of practicing writing: of transforming large formless ideas into specific words, of expressing myself clumsily, of frustration and of rewriting. I recently read William Zinsser's On writing well, in which he advises to just begin.
Consider this post a debut.