Voices in my head often tell me not to write. Not in those exact words, of course. They tell me to move on. They tell me not to think so much. They tell me to focus on work, on family, on money, on my ambitions, on the future. Sometimes they tell me to keep myself busy. Sometimes they tell me that writing about things only makes them bigger than they actually are. They believe that if I stop writing, I will eventually stop thinking about those things, too.
I have always found that interesting because I don’t think writing has ever been the problem. Writing has always been the consequence. It is only after my mind has travelled through every possible corner of a thought, only after it has built arguments, questioned itself, questioned people, questioned situations and somehow managed to connect one incident with another, that I eventually sit down to write. By the time I begin writing, the conversation has already happened inside my head a hundred times. The page simply becomes the place where I try to make sense of it.
It is as if I’m brimming with thoughts again. These are the thoughts which have originated from the worst of the happenings, again. These are the thoughts which exist in direct relation to the logic and the patterns that I have built over the years. These are the thoughts that are capable of pushing me deep into the loops of everything that has happened so far.
I have often wondered why this happens. The funny part is that these thoughts rarely visit me when life is going badly. They usually visit me when life is actually going well. There is enough work to keep me occupied. There are dreams which are slowly becoming plans and plans which are slowly becoming reality. There are conversations around the future which, a few years ago, would have felt impossible. There are responsibilities which I genuinely enjoy carrying. There are moments when I sit quietly and acknowledge that life has become much kinder than it had been for a very long time.
Still, one small incident is enough, presumably because a single incident changes my life and possibly because it somehow reminds my mind of everything that has happened before it. Frankly speaking, I don’t even think the incident matters anymore. It could be anything. The people may be different. The place may be different. The circumstances may be different. But the mind somehow refuses to see them as different. It quietly opens an old chapter, begins reading from where it had stopped years ago and convinces itself that this story, too, is going to end exactly the same way.
That is perhaps the most fascinating part. We often say that life repeats itself. I don’t think it does. I think the mind repeats itself. As a matter of fact, I don’t even think I am hurt by these things anymore. I am certainly not surprised. I have been through these loops enough times to know what they look like. I know how hope quietly enters. I know how expectations slowly begin building themselves. I know how the mind starts making room for possibilities that reality has not yet promised. And I also know how quickly all of that can disappear.
So, no. I don’t write because I am heartbroken. I don’t write because I am unable to move on. I don’t write because I enjoy revisiting things that should have ended. I write because I don’t understand why the mind works the way it does. I don’t sit down to preserve pain. I sit down because I want to understand why the same patterns continue appearing in different forms. Somewhere inside me, there is always an assumption waiting to be questioned, a conclusion waiting to be challenged or a thought waiting to be understood a little better than I understood it yesterday.
Maybe that is why I have never been able to stop writing. If I don’t write, the thoughts don’t disappear. They simply continue existing inside me without ever being questioned. They slowly become beliefs. They begin influencing the way I look at people, the way I interpret situations and, eventually, the way I look at myself.
Writing interrupts that process. Writing asks me to stop for a while and separate the facts from the conclusions I have quietly attached to them. Did this really happen? Or did it merely remind me of something that had happened before? Am I reacting to the present? Or am I carrying the past into the present once again? I don’t always find the answers. In fact, most of the time I don’t, but I almost always end up asking better questions than the ones I had when I started writing. Perhaps that is the only reason I continue doing it.
Writing simply stops me from accepting every thought as truth. It gives me an opportunity to argue with myself before life forces me to live with conclusions that I never examined in the first place. I think that is important because I have seen how easily thoughts become beliefs, beliefs become habits and habits quietly become identities.
Maybe writing has been protecting me from that all along, or maybe I’m completely wrong. I don’t know. What I do know is that every single time I finish writing something like this, I somehow feel lighter. Nothing around me has changed. The people haven’t changed. The circumstances haven’t changed. The future hasn’t suddenly become clearer. The only thing that has changed is that my mind has become a little less noisy than it was an hour ago, and perhaps that is all writing has ever been for me.
Just a conversation with myself that I don’t think I can afford to stop having. Maybe that’s why I write.
