Don't Ask Me What This Was

I wrote it for my English class. I don't know... Can you tell I'm feeling pessimistic about this whole English-language-as-an-art thing lately?

Because I totally am. True Story.

"I am not a heap of adjectives. I am not a hunk of prose. I am not a poem, or a song, or a story, or a blog post, or an encyclopedia entry. What I am is a soul. A girl who refuses to be defined by the way I write or by the words I speak, but rather by the way I live. Music, people, and the gospel are the three most important things in my life, and with that, perhaps you could say that I write simply because I have no better reason to.

I was once one of those writers who would hand-pick words for hours just to show my English teacher that I was the one with the most beautiful bouquet. I didn’t care what I wrote or what my words said—As long as they sounded pretty, witty, or otherwise intelligent, I stamped my name at the top of the paper, sent it off to the basket, and waited for that cute little “A” to appear a few days later. It was all about the grade, and so for years I wrote in a way that would earn me the most points or allow the universe to smile down on me for what I considered to be my noble contribution to that vast and ever-increasing collection of thoughts and words.

It was all going perfectly well… That is, until I realized one important fact. Writing isn’t a self-existent art. To write for writing’s sake will always be a futile endeavor, because until something or someone comes along to give it meaning, words are dead. Language is really only a tool we use to describe the things that really matter: people, experiences, feelings, ideas. 

 These days, I prefer to write what matters. While for so long I have been accustomed to writing for the grade, I am now more fully committed to write only what matters to me. I write for myself, for my family, for my friends and my peers. I write to record the thoughts in my head and to comment on the little things nobody else notices. I write to keep myself sane, but to encourage insanity in other people. I also write to discover the real reason I write. While I’ll deny any claims that words can somehow describe the person I consider myself to be, I do admit that I describe words as a river that lives inside of me—flowing, shaping, and changing me until one of these days, I might actually understand a bit of what I’m talking about."