Write anything

"What, like it's hard?"

I think I am a writer. It feels weird to say that; I’m eighteen and in my first year of university studying a health science degree and I have no real proof of the matter but I think I am a writer. So, regardless of what anyone else might say, some part of that statement must be true - because it’s true to me. I have struggled and struggled, over and over, to write what I want, to not only trust the process but to enjoy it too. I’m still not sure if I’m there yet. I have written (over the course of my very short life) essays and poems, stories and reports, lyrics and journal entries, birthday cards and love letters, etc etc that I have absolutely - and to an insane degree - agonised over. I have pored over the details, the order of words, the flow of sentences, how it might sound (because yes, I have developed a religious habit of speaking what I write out loud in order for the words to feel real to me).

It’s hard. It’s hard to write something you like. It’s hard to write something good, something worth reading. What does it mean to write something good, anyway? Even good writers write shit sometimes. Even shit writers write good sometimes. I don’t know if there’s even any point distinguishing between good and shit writing because no piece of writing, no prose in existence, no particular sequence of words, seems to be unanimously decided upon as being “good”. The bible is good, the bible is shit. Shakespeare is good, Shakespeare is shit. Wattpad fanfiction is good shit. Maybe there is no point in anxiously picking apart or crying about what I write (about anything I write) because I’m scared that it’s bad. I don’t think it matters. Like all art, good is subjective. There is no correct way to do anything. There is no formula, no answer, and no question when it comes to writing. That’s why, at the ripe age of eighteen when my neurons are still firing and I still have a lot of shit to say, I aspire to write whatever I want, to write anything at all. I don’t aspire to be a good writer.

Anyone who knows me knows that I talk a lot. Writing comes naturally to me because words are how I understand things. Not numbers or pictures or objects. Words. I learn the most about someone when I begin to understand how they use words, what they say, and how they said it. I’ve realised that all my friends are people who speak the same language as me. Not literally, I mean we all speak English, but I mean that I feel this unnameable capital g Good feeling when we talk to each other, a feeling that is otherwise very hard to find. I suppose the people in my life have to put up with my tangents and longwinded stories and unnecessarily long voice messages. But I would like to think that they care about what I have to say, and that they find me interesting. I read (almost exclusively) about love and life and longing and heartbreak and family and friendship. Some people think these kinds of books are not important. But aren’t love and life and longing and heartbreak and family and friendship the exact things we all think about more than anything? Aren’t these things what keep most people up at night? Things that drive most people to do and say insane things? Things that most people think about right before they die? Experiencing life like that is what makes us all so weirdly human.

In Sally Rooney’s wonderful words: “I love that about humanity, and in fact it's the very reason I root for us to survive - because we are so stupid about each other” (Beautiful World, Where are You).

But maybe monkeys and bonobos and I don’t know, fruitflies also experience these things and we just have no way of knowing. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t really know. Anyway, this is what I wanted to write about today. I wonder what I will write about tomorrow. And the day after that. And every day until I can no more. Until I die. Until everybody dies.