Why I Write
Because words are a feast and I am perpetually starving.
Because the wind is harsh and biting and the wolves are howling outside the door, and words are the only way I know to fortify the walls.
Because we all need protection and words are spells for safety, for warmth, for strength.
Because I learned early on at my mother’s knee that stories were necessary for survival, and if I can’t write those, I can at least write tiny windows into other worlds.
Because I have had nightmares since I was a child, so I write to dream better dreams where no one dies and everyone gets healed and the pursuer never catches up to me.
Because sometimes that’s not enough and when someone does inevitably die, or the healing comes too slow, words are the only kind of magic I know how to work to make it bearable.
Because C.S. Lewis and Astrid Lindgren and A.A. Milne and Lucy Maud Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott and Beatrix Potter and Michael Ende and L. Frank Baum and the Brothers Grimm and Frances Hodgson Burnett and countless others taught me how, and I won’t let their lessons be in vain.
Because I don’t know how to do anything else well.
Because I’m too clumsy with spoken words and I don’t know how to say what I mean, but I always know how to write it.
Because I’m anxious and afraid more often than not and I’ve been told that the pen is mightier than the sword.
Because I remember the joy of childhood even as it’s colored by the shades of what I choose to leave behind, I remember exploring and learning and playing and delighting in every new thing, and I want to get back to that.
Because writing is a form of time travel.
Because writing is a form of therapy, and even though I have a therapist, I’ve never felt more cleansed than after I leave it all on the page.
Because I love too much, too big, too messy, and when I can’t give that love as a gift, I can alchemize it into something more tidy and safe and present it without its fangs.
Because I want desperately to be understood.
Because writing is a way to find my people, the ones who dive into words and stay under until their lungs burn, only to then burst to the surface new and glistening with strange possibility.
Because writing allows me to learn established rules and break them flagrantly and without remorse.
Because poems.
Because novels.
Because everything in between.
Because words are resistance and protest and destruction and rebuilding and salvation and hope and care.
Because fictional characters were friends and companions long before I knew how to find them in the real world.
Because writing is medicine.
Because words are teachers.
Because I don’t fit comfortably into my body and never have, and writing allows me to slip into other skins.
Because I want a different life and this is the only way I know how to get it.
Because I love you and I love me and I know what we deserve, and if I have to set it all on fire to birth something better from the ashes, I will, like this, slow and soft and sweet becoming an inferno they never saw coming.