Creating Our Stories: Act 02 - To Write

There are things within us that have not yet found their words. What we have lived through, experienced, witnessed, imagined, and felt may exist only as fragments of moments, places, feelings, images, sounds, voices, or scents.

We try to capture them and write it into letters, journals, diaries, notes, or postcards. Sometimes to be shared with others, most of the time only for ourselves. It can be a thought we have not yet understood, a feeling we cannot quite explain, or a memory we are afraid might fade.

A letter can carry a feeling across distance. A journal can hold a version of ourselves from another time. A few words on a page can preserve something that might otherwise disappear. A page becomes a place where we can put something down and look at it from a distance.

Writing is an effort to comprehend and distill our memories into stories. A way of looking back, making sense of what has passed, and finding meaning in what still remains. It helps us see what we could not see before. What was once unclear becomes something we can name.

What feels fleeting becomes something we can hold.

When we leave those traces of us, we might never know where they will eventually end up. Someone may find our words years from now. They may read them without knowing who we were, where we came from, or what we meant when we first wrote them. They may simply recognise something familiar in what we left behind.

One of the wonderful possibilities of writing is that, as we turn it into a story, it enables us to return to what has been, to share it with someone else, and to pass it on. Something which began inside us can flourish into something beyond ourselves.

We write to understand what we carry.
We write to give things that only existed within us a form.

We write to stay true, and that truth holds the power to connect us as human beings.

Semper idem,
Selvi - Tulisan