On Writing

Years ago, when I finished my walk across the Camino de Santiago, I returned to California to stay with my parents while figuring out what my next steps would be. The irony was that I had gone on the journey to do exactly this, to find direction. But all I came back with were clouded thoughts and vague impressions of what I cared about. My worldview had shifted, but in ways I didn’t quite yet understand. I felt like a fish who had just discovered he was swimming in something called water.

I walked around aimlessly every day on the long stretches of empty sidewalks, as if I were on the Camino, retracing footsteps and memories, longing to be seen. No one around me understood, and the few books I managed to read offered only abstractions. There was one person who could have helped, but we had parted ways in Belgium. I knew what she would say though if she saw me in this liminal state: that I had to give the gift of being seen to myself, the way I had given it to her.

This meant that I had to write about it. The extent of my writing was limited to online chat rooms and video games, but it seemed like the only way to make sense of the experience. I finished an incomplete version of the story in two months, but the point wasn’t to capture the totality of my walk and then be done with it. It was to engage in the act of writing.

In the attempt to put words and structure to feeling and thought, we claim full ownership over the narratives that we live by. As a result the meaning of our experiences changes, as does the experience itself. Writing about the Camino helped me process what I was feeling, but it also made me see and relive it in a different way. The most important bits went down on paper and became a part of me, which shaped how I remembered and wrote the rest of the story. In this cycle of extraction and refinement, we are created.

The practice has stuck with me since. Even when I think I have nothing to write about, I try to write something. In the process I’m often surprised and find that I did have more to say than previously thought. Feeling and thinking are clarified through writing. It’s sharper and more patient than conversation where words are thrown around like weightless rocks. In text they stick and leave us more vulnerable than when we started, the gift of which is to be truly seen.

I write for many reasons – to grow; to become a better person; to make the familiar and obvious strange and novel; to push others to reconsider their beliefs; to engage in meaningful conversation – but what really drives me is much simpler: I write because to do otherwise is unthinkable. Because I have something to say. Because it takes me beyond myself and into something sacred, something that requires devotion, focus, and attention. But that’s love baby. We are born and made in love.