Why I Write
“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
George Orwell, Why I Write
The desecration of religious symbolism and iconography is a common theme that I enjoy exploring within writing. Growing up religious meant that I got to learn about biblical mythology in an intimate sense. It had an element of storytelling that I was instinctively drawn to. I often wondered if Eve was wracked with grief knowing that a mistake born out of ignorance led to the genesis of man. Those tales of her blunder and condemnation continue to be retold in disdain for centuries. I wonder how Isaac must have felt on that mountain, knowing his father was prepared to end his life in the name of God. How a parent's love amounts to nothing compared to the word of the Lord. As he lies on that altar preparing to be slain, to whom did he cast his last desperate plea? To his father, or God? The gospels I grew up with were full of stories conveying similar themes — they spoke of sacrifice, subservience, and martyrdom. They’re the kind of tales that serve as a warning quietly commanding us to conform, one that’s bled into existing social structures.
Coming from a culture where religious beliefs dictate every facet of society, I’ve seen firsthand how it’s contributed to the decay of a nation. Theological ideology has no place in politics, where its gospels influence the jurisdictions that affect the lives of the masses. Nor in economics where its blatant emphasis on self-sacrifice leaves many hungry and rotting in poverty. I no longer believe in God, yet my religious upbringing continues to shape the way I perceive the world. My lack of reverence stems from a deep frustration with a society and a culture that hinges on religion. It’s a culture that teaches you shame and fear before acceptance and love — one that’s left me with a plethora of trauma and guilt that I often struggle to unpack through writing. When I write I like to imagine myself as a sort of Mary Magdalene, inviting clueless victims into the Garden of Eden. Tempting readers to take a bite of the forbidden fruit. To commit the ultimate sin of blasphemy. This enables me to channel intense emotions into creative pursuits and in doing so allows me to process my experiences in ways that aren’t destructive. That background has given me a passion for the arts and taught me faith and devotion more than any God ever could.
But writing is so much more than just an outlet for my anger and frustrations. Writing is intrinsically humane — it preys on our humanistic urge to create. Writing is a medium that forces you to deconstruct parts of yourself, to draw from the depths of your experiences and emotions. It’s a process that can feel catastrophic, yet within that destruction leaves room for creation. When I write I find myself thinking of home. It allows me to confront memories buried in the most tender recesses of my mind. Filling me with a sense of nostalgia that bleeds into my writing.
I often imagine the Philippines as like a childhood bedroom; it's the space I grew up in and it fills me with a unique sense of comfort and familiarity that I could never quite find anywhere else. But it’s a memory that’s suspended in time, one that no longer has space for me.
Joan Didion's Why I Write, emphasizes the importance of understanding writers holistically. She suggests that to grasp a writer’s motives, one must first delve into the forces that shaped their identity and worldview. In her essay, Didion states, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means,” suggesting that she views writing as a means of self-expression, driven by the desire to make sense of her thoughts and emotions. She echoes this same sentiment in another one of her essays On Keeping a Notebook, where she states that “the impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself [...]. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Both quotes converge on the idea of writing as a means of grappling with one’s internal sense of chaos and the transcience of the broader world. The presentiment of loss drives the compulsive need to write as a way of combating the ephemeral nature of life. In this sense, writing becomes a way to hold onto and understand what might otherwise be lost.
Didion speaks of writing as a means of self-discovery and meaning-making, an act of which allows us to understand the world and our place within it. Despite writing all this I still struggle to deliver a concise answer as to exactly why I write. At times I write because it allows me to lend a name to distant concepts, to weave disembodied thoughts and ideas in hopes that readers attach meaning to them. Other times I write because it helps me grapple with this innate feeling of loss and to impose a sense of order amidst internal conflict. Sometimes I write in an attempt to find my way back home to keep it from becoming this liminal space in the back of my head that only exists in the past. I write to immortalize its vibrancy and warmth so that even when I’m away, a part of it always stays with me. Writing is a compulsion driven by a presentiment of loss, a desire to hold onto what might otherwise be fleeting. It’s a process that allows me to not only relive distant memories but also redefine the meaning of home. It requires continuously examining and reinterpreting our experiences in a way that makes sense and in doing so allows us to create meaning in a world that often feels overwhelming.
