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'Why do you write?'
Posted March 12th 2010 at 10:02 PM by LlamaLlamaDuck
English homework. 1000 word reflective essay on 'Why do you write?'
Since my english teacher -and possibly class- are now going to realise how crazy and messed up I am, I figured I might as well share it with the rest of the world. Why not broadcast insanity?
(I also made it rainbow coloured so it's not too boring
)
Why do I write?
I guess that there could many plausible answers to that question. Because I have to, for school. Because I’m bored. Because I like it. Because I’m good at it, etc.
I don’t really think that any of these apply to me, although once upon a time, they did.
When I was 11, in my final year of Primary School, my teacher got everyone in the class to write an ‘Underwater’ poem and she entered the ones she thought were particularly good in an Ottaker’s and Faber’s Poetry Competition. I was one of the few to be entered. We just filled out the forms, wrote our poems in the space and forgot about it. It wasn’t till a month or so later when my head teacher came into the class with a letter for me, telling me to read it out to the class, that I remembered I’d even entered it. They had written to inform me I was a runner up.
Before that, I never really had much interest in writing as such. I remember when I was around 8 I handmade a small book out of paper about the Easter Bunny helping out Santa Clause for my little brother who would have been about 2. I often played make believe in my head and imagined what would happen if I’d done X instead of Y. I lived in a dream world but I never thought to channel that creativity into something constructive. For me, creative writing didn’t exist. We did story writing every Tuesday morning in school and I hated it with a passion because we were always told what to write about. Being told I was a runner up in a real competition with real people changed my perspective slightly. I’d never been good at anything really and didn’t see what I wrote as much to be proud of, but, like any child at primary, I was praised for what I did so I wrote some other things. One particular one sticks out in my mind called ‘In The Forest’ which my teacher particularly liked.
When I started high school, I wrote a story for my english class called ‘Murder on the 23rd Floor’. My teacher enjoyed it and I loved writing it. I realised that I had a passion for writing short stories in the genre of supernatural fiction. I set about writing some more and putting them together to form a book. A task which I worked on for the next 3 years or so.
By the time I hit fourth year, I wasn’t writing much. Just for school and if I got bored at home I would try to work a little on one of my many unfinished stories. But like any teenager, I just didn’t really have the motivation. I eventually gave up writing more and just printed off the stories and poems that I had already and called it a book. I let my english teacher of that time see it along with some classmates who had requested a look at it. Everyone praised me and told me how ‘freaked’ they got by some of the stories I’d written but I wasn’t really paying much attention to that. I was beginning to realise the extent of a problem I’d had for a while. My friends had noticed that I hadn’t eaten at school for at least a few months and when confronted by a close friend, I admitted to skipping breakfast as well. She kept telling me I had to eat and I ignored it. I wasn’t aware of the effect that it was having at the time, but eating as little as I was, caused me to lose focus and made it very difficult to concentrate on anything, especially things like writing stories where I was required to create and sustain a plot. So I just, didn’t.
A couple of months after my fifth year started, I came to realise just how stressful highers were. I hadn’t passed a single biology NAB. I was failing maths. I struggled a lot with Spanish and the only class I felt I was making even the slightest progress was in English. I spent my history periods randomly writing whatever came into my head instead of concentrating on the topic. In the November of my 5th year, one of my great aunts fell, hit her head, went into a week long coma and died. Added to the already stressful time I was having with schoolwork along with my friend telling me I had some kind of eating disorder because I still refused to eat and I just lost control completely.
After I found that harming myself was a good way to feel better and clear my head, I started to write more. I used writing as a way of expressing my emotions. There were many times when even just writing everything and anything that came into my head was pretty much what kept me sane, if you can call it that.
During the winter of 2008, I stumbled across an organisation called To Write Love On Her Arms. (1) I had heard of them before and was briefly interested but soon forgot about it. It was when I was trying to find something on the internet and my search came up with ‘To Write Love On Her Arms London’ I became excited at this, if they had been in London, maybe they would come to Scotland and maybe they could help me. It wasn’t what I thought it was but I gained an obsession with this organisation. One of their many beliefs is that everyone has a story and they should tell it. I believed that and it was a mixture of both TWLOHA and writing down what I was feeling that kept my head above the water when it got hard. Even now I still have notebooks with pages full of random thoughts, dark drawings, messages to myself to die and lots of what I was feeling and what I wanted to do expressed through poetry and stories. The darker life became and the deeper I sunk into a depressive state, the more I would write and the more I wrote, the darker it became. Poems of bloodshed, tears and suicide filled my life and I found myself spending a lot of time in class doing this instead of concentrating.
As an alternative to bottling everything up, I wrote it down, I started to keep a diary, I wrote stories, poems, songs, letters. I would spend hours per day just writing in my notebook or typing into my diary which was kept on my computer and it helped a lot. Expressing my emotions through writing prevented me from keeping it all to myself, it was like telling someone and knowing my secrets were safe. Writing saved my life on more than one occasion. It calmed me down, brought me back from the edge and allowed me to think clearly and rationally and reconsider whatever it was that I wanted to do.
There are so many reasons why people write, whether it be because they like it or because they have to. But I owe my life to writing and it’s something that I really take great pleasure in doing. It means a lot to me and although a lot of what I write isn’t really positive, it’s proof of what I’ve been through and it’s proof that I came out on the other side.
Writing is how I tell my story and I will continue to do so until my story comes to it’s end, and I hope that maybe my story will help someone else one day, just as Renee’s (2) story helped me.
1. To Write Love On Her Arms is a non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for those struggling with depression, addiction, self injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery (www.twloha.com)
2. Renee Yohe is the name of the girl that the TWLOHA story is about. It's because of her that it was formed and she is the true message of hope that they inspire in the hearts of those who are struggling.
Since my english teacher -and possibly class- are now going to realise how crazy and messed up I am, I figured I might as well share it with the rest of the world. Why not broadcast insanity?
(I also made it rainbow coloured so it's not too boring
)Why do I write?
I guess that there could many plausible answers to that question. Because I have to, for school. Because I’m bored. Because I like it. Because I’m good at it, etc.
I don’t really think that any of these apply to me, although once upon a time, they did.
When I was 11, in my final year of Primary School, my teacher got everyone in the class to write an ‘Underwater’ poem and she entered the ones she thought were particularly good in an Ottaker’s and Faber’s Poetry Competition. I was one of the few to be entered. We just filled out the forms, wrote our poems in the space and forgot about it. It wasn’t till a month or so later when my head teacher came into the class with a letter for me, telling me to read it out to the class, that I remembered I’d even entered it. They had written to inform me I was a runner up.
Before that, I never really had much interest in writing as such. I remember when I was around 8 I handmade a small book out of paper about the Easter Bunny helping out Santa Clause for my little brother who would have been about 2. I often played make believe in my head and imagined what would happen if I’d done X instead of Y. I lived in a dream world but I never thought to channel that creativity into something constructive. For me, creative writing didn’t exist. We did story writing every Tuesday morning in school and I hated it with a passion because we were always told what to write about. Being told I was a runner up in a real competition with real people changed my perspective slightly. I’d never been good at anything really and didn’t see what I wrote as much to be proud of, but, like any child at primary, I was praised for what I did so I wrote some other things. One particular one sticks out in my mind called ‘In The Forest’ which my teacher particularly liked.
When I started high school, I wrote a story for my english class called ‘Murder on the 23rd Floor’. My teacher enjoyed it and I loved writing it. I realised that I had a passion for writing short stories in the genre of supernatural fiction. I set about writing some more and putting them together to form a book. A task which I worked on for the next 3 years or so.
By the time I hit fourth year, I wasn’t writing much. Just for school and if I got bored at home I would try to work a little on one of my many unfinished stories. But like any teenager, I just didn’t really have the motivation. I eventually gave up writing more and just printed off the stories and poems that I had already and called it a book. I let my english teacher of that time see it along with some classmates who had requested a look at it. Everyone praised me and told me how ‘freaked’ they got by some of the stories I’d written but I wasn’t really paying much attention to that. I was beginning to realise the extent of a problem I’d had for a while. My friends had noticed that I hadn’t eaten at school for at least a few months and when confronted by a close friend, I admitted to skipping breakfast as well. She kept telling me I had to eat and I ignored it. I wasn’t aware of the effect that it was having at the time, but eating as little as I was, caused me to lose focus and made it very difficult to concentrate on anything, especially things like writing stories where I was required to create and sustain a plot. So I just, didn’t.
A couple of months after my fifth year started, I came to realise just how stressful highers were. I hadn’t passed a single biology NAB. I was failing maths. I struggled a lot with Spanish and the only class I felt I was making even the slightest progress was in English. I spent my history periods randomly writing whatever came into my head instead of concentrating on the topic. In the November of my 5th year, one of my great aunts fell, hit her head, went into a week long coma and died. Added to the already stressful time I was having with schoolwork along with my friend telling me I had some kind of eating disorder because I still refused to eat and I just lost control completely.
After I found that harming myself was a good way to feel better and clear my head, I started to write more. I used writing as a way of expressing my emotions. There were many times when even just writing everything and anything that came into my head was pretty much what kept me sane, if you can call it that.
During the winter of 2008, I stumbled across an organisation called To Write Love On Her Arms. (1) I had heard of them before and was briefly interested but soon forgot about it. It was when I was trying to find something on the internet and my search came up with ‘To Write Love On Her Arms London’ I became excited at this, if they had been in London, maybe they would come to Scotland and maybe they could help me. It wasn’t what I thought it was but I gained an obsession with this organisation. One of their many beliefs is that everyone has a story and they should tell it. I believed that and it was a mixture of both TWLOHA and writing down what I was feeling that kept my head above the water when it got hard. Even now I still have notebooks with pages full of random thoughts, dark drawings, messages to myself to die and lots of what I was feeling and what I wanted to do expressed through poetry and stories. The darker life became and the deeper I sunk into a depressive state, the more I would write and the more I wrote, the darker it became. Poems of bloodshed, tears and suicide filled my life and I found myself spending a lot of time in class doing this instead of concentrating.
As an alternative to bottling everything up, I wrote it down, I started to keep a diary, I wrote stories, poems, songs, letters. I would spend hours per day just writing in my notebook or typing into my diary which was kept on my computer and it helped a lot. Expressing my emotions through writing prevented me from keeping it all to myself, it was like telling someone and knowing my secrets were safe. Writing saved my life on more than one occasion. It calmed me down, brought me back from the edge and allowed me to think clearly and rationally and reconsider whatever it was that I wanted to do.
There are so many reasons why people write, whether it be because they like it or because they have to. But I owe my life to writing and it’s something that I really take great pleasure in doing. It means a lot to me and although a lot of what I write isn’t really positive, it’s proof of what I’ve been through and it’s proof that I came out on the other side.
Writing is how I tell my story and I will continue to do so until my story comes to it’s end, and I hope that maybe my story will help someone else one day, just as Renee’s (2) story helped me.
1. To Write Love On Her Arms is a non-profit organisation dedicated to presenting hope and finding help for those struggling with depression, addiction, self injury and suicide. TWLOHA exists to encourage, inform, inspire and also to invest directly into treatment and recovery (www.twloha.com)
2. Renee Yohe is the name of the girl that the TWLOHA story is about. It's because of her that it was formed and she is the true message of hope that they inspire in the hearts of those who are struggling.
Total Comments 1
Comments
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Wow, this is such a deep story. I know this took a lot of courage to write and share, so I really praise you for doing that. I am so very sorry that you have had to go through such rough times throughout your life. I hope that you will always have your writing to express yourself.
You can always feel free to talk to me about anything.
Posted March 13th 2010 at 02:04 PM by DomoKay
