On Why I Write

I don’t have one why. I have ecosystems of whys. They come and go like weather patterns, building pressure and kicking up dust. In the beginning, they were babbled feelings in diaries with Holly Hobby covers and tiny locks. They were whys long before I knew I was writing for a reason. They were curious smatterings of my youngest self, archiving first experiences. But soon the glossy voice in those early entries turned and became inspired by the frenzied anxieties of prepubescence.

One night, in the heat of the pubening, I was outside when the sky went dark and the air turned electric. I remember feeling like the storm was as much inside me as it was out. I held my arms up, threw back my head, and started to spin. The wind snapped and bit my cheeks, and my insides surged with excitement. In hindsight, I’m sure it was massive amounts of unbridled hormones. But at the time, I knew I was on the edge of some great adventure. And I was.

Just not the kind I imagined.

My adventure was cinematic. A Goonies-esque version of becoming. It wasn’t the closed fist of expectation management disguised as wisdom. Or the long series of corrections, adjustments, and containments that young girls are simmered in.

Terrible things happen to children. One day you’re a child standing in the street with lightning in your veins, and the next, you’re a girl learning how to shift in your skin to survive.

I thought it unfortunate that every flap of the butterfly’s wing became part of me, and I was too young to understand the concept of weathering a storm. So for years, the world was just a really scary place. A soft white underbelly where I lived as prey for feral men. Had I been older, I’d have known that this would pass. That this wouldn’t define me. That I would be ok. But I was a child, and it just felt like a perpetual dark and stormy night. Just a girl, a journal, and her whys trying to write herself right in a very wrong world.

Sometimes kids can be brave and escape unimaginable things—a journey that banged out galaxies of whys. I remember a Marine telling me once that he had an out-of-body experience at a Walmart after returning home from deployment. He stood there staring at all the abundance, with the sands of Iraq still stuck in the soles of his boots. He listened to bits of conversation around him and wondered suddenly what else might be clinging to his shoes. Blood, perhaps, from a buddy shot in the Humvee just days before he left? How could these people not smell the death on his skin or see it in his face? This is what “after” feels like.

I fumbled around in the “after” for a long time. I tried to gain my footing through marriages and more men than I’d like to admit. I’d been groomed and trained for containment. When I met my military husband, I knew I could rest comfortably under his wing. He was good and made me feel safe for the first time in my life. I knew with him I could nest and create a place of love and safety for my children. In this ecosystem, there was decorum, motherhood, femininity, and obedience.

I became good at having my finger on the pulse of my family. It was a relief to focus less on myself. Military culture rewards containment and correction, and I quickly learned which parts of myself were palatable and which parts were better tucked away. There were rules for everything in military life: protocol, politeness, sacrifice. Even desire had become orderly. I don’t say this bitterly. There was beauty there, too. Loyalty. Community. Ritual. These were things I lacked in my childhood, and I craved them as I raised my own children. But I think writing began to accumulate in me during those years, like static. Quietly. Invisibly. In notebooks stuffed into drawers beside grocery lists and PTA forms.

For twenty-five years, I nurtured what would become the best years of my life. As I closed in on my empty nest, I found myself surrounded by my writing. There were photographs, notebooks—so many notebooks—along with essays and poems. The ecosystems of memory began to feel like the closet in Narnia: strange, frightening, wonderful, and endless. Returning to college in my fifties as a high school dropout felt absurd at first. I sat in classrooms beside students young enough to be my children and carried decades of life inside me like contraband. Sometimes I felt ancient. Sometimes I felt feral. Sometimes I felt more awake than I had in years.

I felt like I was at such a deficit most of the time, like I knew nothing. I felt like such a joke. I’ll never forget that first English class, omg. I cried. But it’s been three years now, and I can honestly say I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be. I can see where I fit in. I spent years learning the language of survival, womanhood, performance, silence, and reinvention. I knew how to read tension in a room before anyone spoke. I understood the architecture of shame. I understood longing. I understood how women disappear inside roles and how they claw their way back out again. I just didn’t know how these things belonged to literature.

Somewhere along the way, I also began confronting parts of myself I had denied for decades. Desire has weather too. Sexuality has weather. There are entire climates living inside us that can remain dormant for years before suddenly blooming all at once. My queer awakening wasn’t a big sashay out of the closet, but more a quiet clarification, like finally putting on a pair of glasses and realizing the world had been blurry the whole time. I began understanding how much of my life had been performance, how much energy had gone into trying to become acceptable, desirable, safe.

So, why do I write?

Because at 56, I’m in a place of retrospect and ready to examine the ecosystems of my years. I want to assess storm damage and rebuild. I want to explore the versions of myself that survived the elements and be in conversation with the parts of me that are still getting used to being seen. This is my third and final act in this world, and I feel like I’m returning to a version of myself that got interrupted. I’m returning to my body, my desires, and my language. I want to revisit the seasons of my life and talk about the weather.