The Urge to Write

Sometimes the urge to write is so strong I feel distracted and unfocused until I write something down…

It doesn’t have to be profound, or even any good, but I always feel calmer once I have written down any tangled thoughts. Worries or anxieties that are pacing around in my head seem much more harmless on paper. I can look at them with perspective and dismiss them much more easily.

Writing is sometimes an itch that I need to scratch. My house is full of notebooks filled with half formed sentences, unfinished stories and illegible scribbles. Each notebook is a snapshot of a certain point in my life. From faithfully updated teenage diaries to books filled in from my student years, the notebooks cover huge chapters of my life.

Those scraps of writing don’t mean anything to anyone else, not even to me when I read them back. But those words were worth enough at one point for me to want to write them down. Hopefully I will continue to collect my notebooks, until one day I might even take the time to re-read my past.