Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker. - Arthur M. Jolly
Hello, again, world wide web. It's been a long time since I started trying to record my random thoughts online. It was always for my own enjoyment more than anything else. I have nothing very particularly important to say. I say a lot of things people don't agree with, or find unusual, or just don't think make any sense. But I like to write. Let me tell you, oh imagined readers, why.
When I was fifteen, I was in desperate need of an outlet. Many teenagers are, and that proper creative outlets can help many young people today is a topic for another post. I had tried taking up art. Drawing and I did not get along. We were mortal enemies. I was constantly afraid that the poor, mangled stick figures I managed to create would come off the page and strangle me for daring to doom them to such a dismal existence. But that was the key.
I've always loved to read. Depending on which relative you ask, I was either reading at age four, or was born with a book in my hands. My mother says four, so we'll go with that. I loved to read. As I got older, my skills developed rapidly. But the time I was in the first grade, I was reading at a middle school level. After I was pulled out of public school and started home schooling, I advanced further. At ten years old, I was reading at a senior high school level. When I went to take an evaluation at age fourteen to start a high school correspondence course, I caught a few mistakes in the testing program's grammar, and aced the reading, comprehension, and grammar tests faster than anyone else at that particular testing center.
I don't say these things to brag, but just to point out that reading was a big damn deal to me. It was an escape, a place where I could go to learn, to entertain, to see what other lives, feasible or fantastic, lay out there. But it never occurred to me to try writing as a creative outlet. Until I found a software program in a bargain bin at an office supply store. It promised to make anyone that loved to read a prolific writer. I got my dad to buy it, I installed it that night, and in two weeks time I had went through every single exercise it provided. I started keeping an idea journal, I started writing little things here and there, things that couldn't properly be called stories by anyone other than me and my loving and encouraging parents.
Back to the drawing. Reading had instilled in me a vast, powerful imagination. After time and practice, I was able to dream up worlds, people, concepts, locations, anything at all without much effort. Sure, when I was starting out, my ideas were simple, or heavily borrowed. But they were mine. I was creating. And that aspect of creating is what makes writing such a powerful thing to me.
Over the years, bad things have happened. Bad things happen to everyone. When you're young, you feel untouchable. The world is yours to command. There are no consequences, bad things never happen to you, everything is right and fine and perfect all the time. We're forced by time, by circumstance, by life to give up those ideas. We suffer loss. We encounter hardship. We realize things cost money, money doesn't just appear in the bank. People get sick. People die. Things happen every single day to every person you know that you have no control over.
But. The power to create? Takes that away. You can hide from the pain, from the hurt, from the bad things, in places that you make entirely on your own. With people that you make, that you control. It becomes something of a high, almost. Escaping into fantasies isn't always a good thing, necessarily. But when done right, with the right balance, creating becomes cathartic. It's a release, a pressure valve that lets you take everything you have pent up inside you and get rid of it. It can clear your mind, clear your conscience, help you sleep at night, give you hope and something to look forward to.
Music, art, cooking, cleaning, decorating, acting, organizing, writing, all let you create something, in one form or another. There are dozens of methods, of outlets, to let these creations happen. I've found a few. Games like City of Heroes (may it rest in peace) and The Secret World, MMORPGs, have the capacity for creation in a structured environment. Roleplay (RP) is a combination of writing and acting. It requires creation, motivation, and improvisational skills. Blogs are online journals, a place to record stories, ideas, random thoughts. Even social media has the potential to allow for the sharing of thoughts and ideas on levels unprecedented. Of course, it's rarely used for that, but that's another post entirely.
Why do I write, though? It's my release valve. When the world is pressing in on me, when I'm pressing in on myself, when I'm lost, when I'm hurt, when I'm afraid, I can slip into someone else in some other world. Escapism at it's best. But it's not hiding from problems, not all the time. It's an encouragement. A pick me up. A shot in the arm, a motivation. When I feel inspired, I am in control. When I feel in control, a bit of that childhood idea of invincibility comes back to me. There's no problem I can't face, nothing I can't handle. I'm me, and I'm awesome.
Welcome to my release valve.
