Why I’m Here

When I was eight years old, my father bought me a diary with a key lock. It became my most prized possession. Every day before sleeping, I’d pour out my heart in my diary. I know, eight-year-olds have it tough. Then one fine day, one of my brothers (I have six of them) broke the lock on my diary and that was the end of me trusting a diary to hold my secrets. But that was just the beginning of my identity as a writer. I was afraid of having so many important conversations while growing up and instead wrote about them. I know how to be expressive through only one means: writing. I find myself struggling to articulate my feelings through conversation and find it that much easier to just write.

Recently, a mentor shared this snippet in a writer’s group

Joan Didion has defined a writer as “a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid of.” She has also said that “all writing is an attempt to find out what matters, to find the pattern in disorder, to find the grammar in the shimmer. Actually I don’t know whether you find the grammar in the shimmer or you impose a grammar on the shimmer, but I am quite specific about the grammar — I mean it literally. The scene that you see in your mind finds its own structure; the structure dictates the arrangement of the words. ... All the writer has to do really is to find the words.” However, she warns, “You have to be alone to do this.”

Joan Didion has been a writer I’ve looked up to from the time I read her short story Play It as It Lays in high school. Britannica describes her as an “American novelist and essayist known for her lucid prose style and incisive depictions of social unrest and psychological fragmentation.” I’d like to believe that this is the sort of writing I strive for: inspiring and purposeful.

I find joy in writing about feminism, society and culture, faith, psychology, technology. Oh and sometimes I write poetry. Weirdly, I’m most reflective on Instagram. I guess photos really do speak a thousand words.

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