Why I write...

Writing might be the only habit I have maintained for the past five decades.

It has served me well personally and professionally, and I can’t imagine not doing it.

Yet I seldom think about why I do it.

I hated writing when I was young…

As a kid in elementary school I struggled to sit still and focus.

My curiosity led me to ask a lot of questions that often annoyed my teachers.

Often that would result in me being assigned to ‘write sentences’ as punishment for interrupting the teacher’s desired flow.

For the uninformed that usually meant writing the same sentence somewhere between 50 and 100 times, then turning them into the teacher.

Not exactly a path to making a student enjoy writing!

And, in case you’re wondering, it didn’t work.

Writing some random sentence suggesting what I would or would not do moving forward served no real purpose and failed to stop my questions.

It did destroy my handwriting (at the very time I was learning how to do it).

And it led me to dislike the very idea of writing.

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Writing became my coping strategy…

When I was ten years old I experienced sexual trauma (this post shares a bit more about why I share that story).

As a child trying to process what had happened and keep it hidden from the world, I struggled a lot.

Questions constantly raced through my brain as I tried to figure out why it happened and what it meant.

Because I did not want anyone to know, I had nowhere to turn to process what I was thinking and feeling (and being a verbal processor, I needed a way to do that).

That led me to search for a way to ‘talk through’ my thoughts.

I found it in an old notebook filled with empty pages that I kept it hidden under my bed.

Whenever I felt stressed I’d pull it out and spend a few minutes writing about what I was thinking and feeling.

I still have that notebook—it was the start of a lifelong journaling process that continues today.

Once I filled all of the pages in the notebook I shifted to spiral notebooks and later shifted to typing.

From hating writing to loving and living it…

In my junior year of college I took a class where the professor assigned a paper every two weeks.

That’s when my journaling efforts started to pay off and my love of writing began to develop.

Researching a topic and writing about it connected who I had become through my journaling with who I was becoming as a student.

The ability I’d developed as a writer in private (without even knowing it) opened the door to my career in academia.

My thesis and dissertation were simply new writing adventures.

Journal articles were easy to knock out.

Project proposals were fun to create.

Trade press articles were a breeze to write.

When I left academia after a decade and became a professional speaker, coach, and consultant, speeches, proposals and agreements, and summary reports were no problem.

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Where to from here…

One thing I know for certain is as long as my mind will allow me, I will continue to write.

The reason is simple: my always active mind, my ongoing search for meaning, and my need to ‘verbally process my ideas on paper’ are who I am.

Multiple times a week that will be journaling…I am now on my third journal using Google docs (having reached the character limit for a file in my first two iterations).

Regularly it will be drafting (and hopefully completing and sharing) posts for Earned Lessons…my intention is to always publish weekly, and to not publish content that is not ready or relevant.

And perhaps it will take other forms…who knows.

QUESTION OF THE WEEK

I’m adding this to this post and will likely include it in future posts…and hope it will lead some of my readers to share their thoughts.

Where does writing fit into your life, what do you write, and why do you write?

Please share a link to your writing with us.

Happy Writing!!