Why I write
A memory, and some whys I'm trying to befriend
This essay is inspired by many ‘why I write’ words of other brilliant writers. My thoughts led me to answer it for myself, although I didn’t quite start out that way. And somewhere through it, I found myself responding to the why behind my Substack name! Have been following the
‘Origin stories’ post, and the many writers responding to it, and I guess it was floating in my mind too.I always thought I had named my Substack quite hastily, but this essay helped me see it in a new light. It feels quite apt now. Here’s to more looking for words for myself, always.
This week I wrote to myself about my grandmum’s death. It has been swirling in my head every now and then. And I kept postponing the writing, telling myself I’ll do it when I’m ready.
A few days ago I woke up at 4am. Her face kept coming back and I couldn’t sleep again. It’s strange that although I experienced her love for nearly 27 years, the scenes coming back most often are from the last few days before she passed. We are in that dingy nursing home, and she is repeatedly telling me to let her go. She folds her hands in prayer above her face, keeps saying 'forgive me if i have done anything wrong', not to me but in general, as if she's keen to leave no dues behind. Once she sees me crying openly and gently pleads, don’t cry, it will be harder for me to go.
I wake up determined. Before the day ends I will write it out. At night, I drag myself unwillingly to type it on my phone. I revisit her love, pain and death. I remember our little silly traditions, her smiles, the soft wrinkles on her arms, and how she smelt. And this story is incomplete without someone else who I blamed deeply at that time. I was so angry for his neglect, harassment and fear, and how he had treated my favourite person over the years. The telling doesn’t make him as monstrous though. There are many puzzling questions about his own life. I end it, seeking peace for both of them.
A first draft sits in my inbox and oddly it doesn’t spook me, though I wonder why, given how I've written about two people on two sides of my own polarising seesaw. But I am too exhausted to think anymore. ‘I don't feel much better though’, I tell Rohan before we sleep. But I have managed to dredge it up one more time, and atleast that night I sleep fully, waking up the next day quite fresh.
I write to grieve my grandmother and to find words for her death. It’s still not adequate, or perhaps never will be. But there is something about sitting with it, feeling each emotion, and sometimes writing with it - around, beside, underneath or above it. I write to be the cloud in my own interactions and my own universe. I start, bursting with emotions and by the end my cloudiness has poured itself out on the page. Now I am a little less heavier, and I can fill up again with tiny dewdrops. Once I was scared of the fill up and the release, but now I feel okay to ease myself across both sides, almost feeling compelled to do this time and again.
I write to process things for myself, one more time. Sometimes I will need the one time many times over. I write, because I can give myself the luxury and the comfort, to make the one an infinite for me.
But first I write, just to get the guts for doing this. It’s taken me over three months of regular writing to write about my grandmum, even for myself. There are others like this topic, the determined dragons in my inbox. Half words and phrases, asking to be stretched to complete essays, even if one paragraph at a time. I write to face these dreaded demons, to try and convert them to gentle giants, sometimes even smaller gnomes, or even surprising myself with a few delightful fairy elves. I write to avoid my own mind mountains, or I find little cracks that start me on the pathway, and before I've thought too much I'm halfway up.
I write to soothe the question my grandmother left me with: Yes, I knew she would go one day, but why did she have to go like that?
I know I will never find the answer. But my writing lets me live with the illogicality of it. It helps me add words to our memories, and then the newer ones that I feel today. Writing helps me create a bubble, and I am moved myself by the reality and delusion of it. It gives me another chance to revisit corners I want to go to. And it gives me newer words each time, or just a sliver of a new shadow or a new light.
I write so I can read more, and add my own gumdrops to that cesspool of generous writers, who share themselves with such grace and guts. I write to be a tiny star within their constellation, to be moved and inspired by them, and to be provoked by some of those same thoughts, consciously and otherwise.
I write to remember, because life is too fast and often I want it to slow down. I write to make this confused voice a little more confident, and that’s why I guess I am always looking for words.
I love how you've ended it :)
Lovely writing!