I write to heal

(Post-writing) prologue: I don’t know if I was writing this with all my brain insides intact. It’s past 2 in the morning and I came close to injecting my weird theories again. Phew! It was as if some alien crept into me…yikes! But one last look at this, I’m ninety percent sure I wanted it to be written this way. (Attribute the remaining ten percent to the sleepy molecules.)

10 years ago: “I write because I want to express my heart’s deepest emotions…”
2 years ago: “I love writing. It’s like creating a world of your own through your pen and paper, immersing yourself and your readers into another dimension and in a new perspective. I never underestimated the power and influence of words. The scope is probably endless. I am not known to be an outspoken person but when I truly and deeply believe in something, one thing is clear to me: I want to be heard.”

I could chant a thousand clichés on why I write: to shout to the whole world what I want to say, to put stinging memories into words, to curse, to share crazy ideas and weird self-formulated theories, and all those sorts of crap you can think of. Thing is, the reasons vary from time to time, from age to age, and from person to person.

As a kid, writing was my way of warding off my summer loneliness – that instead of just sleeping, eating, and living a pig’s life, I’d write about what happened during the day and how I had forgotten how lonely summer was at our home in Leyte. In my early teens, I wrote about my crushes, spine-tingling (“kilig”) moments, and infatuated frustrations. (See? I’m still human despite my witchy lifestyles and swinging moods.) When I took up Mass Communication in college, writing took on a different meaning for someone who is relatively quiet and secretive but was shoved into a notoriously protest-active college brimming with too many ideas and too many loud people – I wanted to be heard, and although writing is not as transparent as the sputtering, saliva-drying declarations of whatever-subject-this-time, I dedicate my writing only to people who care to hear some logical, if not sensible reasoning amidst all the mayhem.

Today, still a struggling college student, I still write to be heard. (And oh, rumor has it that blogging is the in-thing now because most people are tired of being drenched in saliva after hours of being exposed to some senseless talk. Awww… By senseless, I mean those discussions that aren’t really going anywhere because people have already made up their minds.) But through the years, I have come to consider writing as my personal therapy. All this time, I have been writing to heal myself of all the inequities this life could give – that by putting words to emotions, scenarios, and details, even to the minutest, I am making a sanity out of all the madness and sense out of all the rubbish. Yes, my friends. When I write, I strip off the beautiful skin of the ugly hand – in the same manner that I make black out of white. This world has a weird sense of humor. So many things we never could understand. So many surprises. So many pains. So many questions. Writing is thus my own attempt to see things beyond what is plainly visible, along with the goal of assuring myself that something better comes out of the worst and something worse could come out of the best. After all, there are always two sides of the coin. If life is at its best or the worst or anywhere between, there will always be what-if’s and but’s.

Ten years from now, I wonder what will be my driving force to write. Because aside from age, time, and the person, the reasons for writing can be largely dependent upon life’s circumstances, both past and present. And as of now, I’m more of the past.