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I started writing when I was seven years old. I still remember when my parents took me to the supermarket to do the weekly shopping, how fascinated I was by the office supplies section: Full of colorful notebooks and pens from all sizes and textures. Still today, I can spend hours just checking out agendas, notebooks, books, pencils, colorful pens, pencases and everything that reminds me of writing.
Why exactly I got the idea to start writing my memoirs as a young girl I am not really certain. It all simply started as a need for expression; as if I wanted to scream to the world what is on my mind; what are my thoughts and my observations about life; but I was too shy just to say it to somebody. A good solution was to simply write it down as a diary.
Writing is therapeutic. It has helped me to organize my mind and try to find internal coherence in a world that seemed too chaotic to make sense of.
It has also helped me to feel good on those days when everything seemed to go wrong. Just writing the things down, already had a much calmer influence on me than if I just leave the war of feelings and thoughts clouding on my mind in mysterious ways to the point that it drove me crazy.
From my childhood years until recently I had the habit to write by hand on notebooks; the classic way. It was only when my life started to get too packed with other responsibilities a.k.a. kids, husband, job demands…that I changed to the digital version to keep writing my memoirs. I miss those times where I just needed a pen and a notebook to escape the mad world we are living and go into a more fun, rich and inner world where anything is possible.
When someone asked me why I spent so much time writing instead of using that time for other things “in the real world”, I often thought: Why to confine myself to the miseries of the present state of things when I can create my own, richer, more exciting and colorful world in my mind by writing? I might not be able to change the burdens of daily life; but I could certainly put many colors on it in my own mind.
If you are also a writer, you might also agree that there is no straight forward answer on why you decided to write; You can’t simply do otherwise. You cannot just stop writing.
It never occurred to me to do it as a profession. Writing was so intimate for me that doing it for profit felt somehow wrong. With the passing years I have been changing my perspective towards writing for a living. The expressed word done in a brilliant way can enrich our lives in so many ways. Writing is actually a very noble profession and as ancient as the development of human language.
What about you, why do you write?
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ~ Maya Angelou