Writing as a weapon

Writing is not a career you ever feel good at. You sit down at a blank page in the morning and you feel like a complete idiot. Everything that comes out of your fingers is absolute drivel. But we writers are used to producing drivel. We know that it is part of the process. And on our best days we carry a sense of humility, like a shared joke amongst all of us, because we know how much crap we produce daily and how crap we feel sometimes when we’re producing it and how crap the pay is and how crap the publishing process is, and yet, here we are, at the page again. Writers are clearly under some sort of spell.

I have wanted to become a writer since the first time I held a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil in my hand. I was in kindergarten. I can still remember where I sat. The light poured into the classroom over my right shoulder, filtering through my right eyelashes and causing the golden blonde strands in my brunette hair to glow. We sat unreasonably close together on tiny plastic chairs, positioned around low tables that were pushed together at the center so we could form "pods." It makes sense—I guess when you have a room of tiny humans, you just kind of corral them together for ease of management. But I remember feeling too close to my neighbors on either side, so maybe some part of me thought this sharp No. 2 pencil would make a good weapon. I never stabbed anyone with it, but man did I want to.

Today writing is still my weapon of choice. I use it to fight for what I believe in, in a calm, collected way that I could never do if I had to stand at a podium like a filibustering politician. I can couch my beliefs in qualifying statements, admitting where there is uncertainty (like a good academic). And I can dig through historical writings and research papers for hours to enlighten, clarify, and bolster my thinking...an activity which for me is the candy, like the dark chocolate coating the dry wheat of actually putting words on the page.

But writing has also been a weapon for destruction. I have used writing inappropriately at times—okay, many times—to ward off the people whom I care about. I have burrowed myself into a room, behind a laptop, shielded by the bright glow of the screen more times than I care to admit. I was justified in isolating myself like this, I told myself, because I was writing something very important, both to me and to the world. This, of course, goes against our writers’ credo of humility.

It's hard to believe that I am the same person who gave a speech at my high-school graduation titled “People Matter,” in which I tried to persuade my peers that the achievement to be celebrated was not our graduating high school but the many people in the room who supported us through it. And yet, here I am in my thirties, using my No. 2 pencil again to fight off people, just like in kindergarten. Such growth.

I still don’t know why I do it. As a writer, I’m very slow. I tell myself that only by writing more may I one day hope to gain some insight into it. It’s almost like I love people so much that it’s painful, like when you have a sensation so strong that your nerves burn. Sometimes I love people so much that my heart, chest, and hands literally ache. Sometimes I walk away from conversations carrying a boulder on my back. I don’t think we, as a scientific community, understand just how powerful empathy is for the human body, or the power it likely has for other social animals.

Oftentimes it’s easier to think than it is to feel. There are books out there about the existence of “empaths” as a tiny echelon of the population. Maybe it’s true—maybe I’m one of them and I absorb other people’s emotions and feel their pain and it can all be way too overstimulating…but I wonder if we are not all empaths, if we’re not all wired like this and if some of us are just better than others at dampening it, or numbing out. Some of us drink whiskey. Others of us carry a sharp No. 2 pencil in our pocket, just in case.

What I know for sure is that on my deathbed I won’t be saying, “If only I could have pumped out another 10,000 words!” Almost certainly, I’ll be saying, “people matter!” just as my wiser self has been whispering all along.