Early in life, I realized that I needed to write to stay sane. Later on, when I was older, I learned from my reading, and from the teasing of others, that writing was one of the tasks given to people in some mental asylums so that they would be able to more quickly recover such a grasp on sanity as they possessed, but my discovery was rather serendipitous, given the fact that life could easily have gone much worse otherwise. There are few positive outlets for the sort of life that I have lived, given my extreme sensitivity and the difficulty of life. The combination of these two elements virtually foreordained that I would be an artistic or creative person in some fashion, because too much was trapped inside my heart and mind that could not be expressed through my speaking. And though I sang from my earliest days, it was very fortunate that I learned how to write creatively for my own sake, so that at least some of the toxic burden inside of me could be eased through leaking ink like blood from delicate veins onto pages of written and typed paper. And though I have never felt a burning desire to write my own tormented memoirs, at least my writing drop by drop has alleviated such a burden as I have felt as a result of my life, and has made it possible to live with a sense of equanimity and occasionally even joy.

In the 1910’s, as World War I approached, Joseph Conrad had become a famous writer after decades of labor at this craft in what must have been his second or third language. Yet he was old and written out, and he had no stories left to tell. While the reading public sought new material from him, all he could do was point them to his long-neglected stories, some of which have become well-regarded classics, like Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, the Secret Agent, and Nostromo, all novels that any novelist would be proud to write. To have worked in obscurity one’s entire life only to be out of words when someone finally wanted to read what you have to say must be among the most tragic fates that could ever befall a writer. I do not know what it would feel like to be out of words, to have nothing left to say, nothing left to tell, nothing left to share. One might as well be dead. At least if one was attentive enough to the stories of others one would be able to tell the stories of others, in one’s own patois, even if one had nothing new to say, and to hear stories in a different voice and from a different perspective is still something worthwhile, after all.

The alternative band Walk The Moon titled their sophomore album “Talking Is Hard.” Even if a lot of the music is disposable, albeit catchy, dance pop, the band is entirely right that talking is hard. When we are faced with the pressure of face-to-face interaction, it is hard to be comfortable enough to unburden ourselves, especially if we struggle to trust other people with what we think and what we feel. It is easier to write what we feel than it is to say it, and yet writing it can carry disadvantages too. Some of us, like myself, have terrible penmanship and to write so that we may be read it takes a long time, and even a great deal of pain through arthritic wrists. Anyone who has received a handwritten from letter from me has received something that cost a great amount of time, effort, and suffering in order to create. Perhaps the ease and speed at which I type makes it less obvious for others to understand just how painful and laborious physical writing is for me, and has been since I was young. In previous generations, I might have been thought barely literate because of my scrawl, while having a skill with a keyboard allows one to be much more free with one’s words, even if many of the readers lack the personal context to understand what is written with the proper tone and body language attached.

When I was young, I once heard a story that dealt with the power and danger of words. A young boy had gossiped about a matter all over town, felt remorse over his deed, and went to the old priest or minister of his village to be forgiven for his sin and to seek for the words to be taken back. The old man told him to take a bundle of sticks and to put one in front of the door of every door in the village. This the boy did, and he then came back asking what he needed to do next. The man told him to go back and pick up the sticks, and the boy despaired of this, saying, “The wind has blown those sticks all over by now.” “So it is with words,” the old man replied. If words are spoken and spread afar, at least we may (even if falsely) claim to be misquoted by those who report to us what others have said. Yet when our own written words on the page endure to be spread, we have no such defense. All we can do is to accept whatever repercussions follow for what we have poured out in ink onto paper and given to someone who could not be trusted to treasure our private thoughts and feelings, or cast out thoughtlessly into a hostile world. Does not our writing deserve a better fate than to bring upon us difficulty and frustration?