Writing: The Millimeter Shift
I am a thinker. As a child, I could fill hours of my day allowing my imagination to run wild. I would lie in my bed, close my eyes, and conjure up worlds and alternate realities; at the time, they did not feel so “alternate,” but rather intricately intertwined with my reality. When other kids needed Gameboys to pass the ninety-minute drive back and forth from day camp, I needed only my mind. I was busy. Entertained. Engaged with the world in my mind.
As I grew older and grew away from my fantasies, my mind spent less and less time imagining, and more and more time contemplating life. I thought about every interaction from my day, I thought about what it means to be a moral person (and why some people aren’t), I thought about song lyrics, I thought about lessons learned in class – essentially I never stopped thinking.
Writing became a significant part of my life when the writing part of me was introduced to the thinking part of me. In elementary school and high school, writing was about responding to a prompt: “Analyze two events where Odysseus uses his intellectual prowess over his might and share what this conveys about the concept of a hero.” Or, “Should The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn be censored and all 200 uses of the n-word taken out? What would be gained and what would be lost?” I would read these prompts and within minutes start writing my paper. I would pick an approach and then skim back through the book to find quotes that would support my argument, ignoring contradictory evidence along the way. My thought process surrounding my writing was superficial and I would hammer out within a few hours’ time, what was then considered, an A-level paper.
It was not until college that thinking consumed the first few hours of my writing process. Long before I would start to click away on my keyboard, I began brainstorming. I would come up with elaborate essay ideas, and would then turn to my roommates or call my mom, and spend hours debating my ideas, finding the holes in my argument, patching them up, failing to patch them up, moving on to my next idea, twisting and developing my next idea to make it more powerful, and finally achieving the excitement of having a wonderfully thought out concept for an intriguing essay.
Only then did I start to write.
Only then did I start to truly write.
We tend to take writing for granted and think of it as something that has always existed – but writing was an invention. The original purposes for writing things down were to remember things, to make messages more far reaching, and to assist with trade. For me, the first purpose – writing to remember – is the most telling.
I keep journals on some of my travels. I do this for the same reason that I also take hundreds of pictures on these trips: to remember. When I scroll back through my photographs, I always have the sense that I captured the entire trip. But then, I open my journal, and I come to realize that without my words, there would have been entire days and meaningful experiences that I would have forgotten. Pictures cannot capture everything. They certainly cannot capture thoughts. I find it fascinating how much we assume we remember compared to how much we actually forget. All of our experiences in life are significant in shaping our character today; what a shame to let so many of these experiences slip away.
Similarly, you can never truly hold onto the feeling of an initial spark of inspiration. A day passes, and you forget the energy in that spark, you forget whatever drove you to make a change, have a passion, or take initiative. Writing is the only thing that can bring you back to that initial trigger. If you write down your thoughts and describe your spark of inspiration, when you turn back to your writing, unable to remember exactly what it is that you wrote down, when you read that thought – that feeling – it is new again. It still hits you with the power of the impact that it hit you with the first time.
During my Freshman year, I took a class on medical anthropology. We tackled complex moral topics: the aborting of deaf fetuses, the stigmas associated with depression, the distress of hermaphrodites. After class my head would be roaring with thoughts, and I could not move on with my day until I got them down on paper. Once writing down my thoughts after class became habitual, I started writing down my thoughts at any time. Thoughts that I felt were worth keeping around for the future. I found that the passage of time did not erase the power of those words – I could be captivated by them again. When I look back at my thoughts, in the moment where I connect with the words on the page, and recall that those words were written by me, I recover that initial extraordinary spark of inspiration. Writing gives me the power to relive beauty, pain, reflection, and inspiration again and again and again.
Paired with my internal desire to write, part of why I write is aimed externally. James Baldwin said, "You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” I get involved in causes I care about, I converse with people about issues I find to be important, I speak up when I feel someone has done wrong. I hope to continue to do all of these things, but I also hope, that as I develop as a writer, writing will become one of my actions towards making a difference.
Writing, not in a passive sense, but in an active sense. Writing to get involved.
As a child I escaped to my imagination, but now I escape to my writing. My imagination was just for me, but my writing can be shared. And so, through my writing and through my actions, I would love to alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality. In order that one day, perhaps, I can change, even by a millimeter, the world.