Writing is resistance.
Being a writer is often thankless. It means that even though you spend your life breaking and healing your backbone over and over, no one really sees that. Aside from maybe your family or partner, no one sees you typing away, scribbling down ideas on any scrap you can find, or going for aimless walks to work out a plan in your head. No one sees the dead laptops, lost work, shitty drafts, and rejection letters. It is a job that requires isolation—mentally but also sometimes physically—and most of the time, there are far more failures than wins.
But if you are a writer, you are for life. You can’t quit it. In my experience, it is not something you just stop doing. Even if you are never published or were once published and then never again, it doesn’t really matter in terms of identity. Being a writer is for life.
“The act of writing is in itself an act of resistance.”
Along with this life-long identity (or maybe sentence?) comes the over-romanticization of the craft. Movies and TV shows and even literature itself tells us that to be a writer, you need an old wooden desk, a solitary existence, and for some reason, a typewriter (Taylor Swift said it best: “Like, ‘Who uses typewriters anyway?’”). This is romantic and glamorous if not incredibly far-fetched, but the reality is, not many writers out in the world have that actual experience.
My desk is sometimes my couch or my bed or a rickety table at my local coffee shop. Sometimes my office is the dining room or the nursery. And sometimes, my writing is done—gasp!—on my phone.
Being a writer doesn’t always mean a perfectly cluttered office with eclectic tchotchkes surrounding a wall lined with awards. Being a writer means writing with what you’ve got, where you’ve got it.
The other important part of this equation is that being a writer doesn’t mean you write for publication; being a writer can simply be for yourself. Your mental health. Your happiness. You just need some curiosity and an open mind.
I tell my high school students that writing can be painful, it can be healing, and it can be vulnerable and terrifying. When my students set aside their fears of being “a good writer” or “not knowing what to say,” they produce the most beautiful, chill-bump-inducing narratives. They capture their stories, amazed at what they could do with just words on a page. I tell them everyone has a story to tell, and it is nothing short of awe-inspiring when they actually believe me. They tell their stories with courage and openness, and it is an honor to witness it.
Their bravery shows resistance. They shove down the little voice that tells them it’s wrong or not good enough or boring or unworthy. They type what they know and build and build and build until they have a piece that is uniquely and beautifully theirs. They learn to resist that little voice feeding them negativity.
They learn that the act of writing is in itself an act of resistance.
I want everyone to know this, too. We tell ourselves or are told lies about writing and what it means.
We say we don’t have time.
We don’t know how.
We are told we have nothing to say or that our words don’t matter.
All of that is nonsense.
Resist. Do it anyway. See what happens.
You might just find something within yourself that you needed to hear.
NOTE: The Write Yourself August Challenge (free) begins on August 1st. Sign up here and join us on Instagram.