Why I Write
Disclaimer: This feels self-indulgent but one must write what one knows. I’ve found, you don’t know what you know until you write it.
Writing is a process that gives you time and space to determine what you think about something and why you might think it.
I think I started writing because a teacher encouraged me. In my first grade class we were were provided some scraps of wall paper samples with blank pages stapled inside to write our own books. The idea of something I did being important enough to be a book was very exciting. I filled tiny books with scribbles and short sentences.
I continued writing as I grew up because it was a relatively inexpensive hobby to continue — writing materials are so cheaply available, and my only limits were entirely self-imposed other than the required home chores. It tickled me to create stories.
As a child and teenager, I wrote compulsively— thoughts, words, lyrics, phrases I heard, and curse words I spelled out in the dust with a stick— so they’d leave no evidence.
Writing has provided me a way in to a world and a way out of another, it’s all at once a red light exit sign and a gleaming yellow brick road. Writing has never lead me down a path I didn’t want to go. At the age of 16, I was hired to freelance for my local newspaper, the San Benito News. I first interviewed conjunto musician Santiago Jimenez for my first assignment. What was better than receiving a check, was my byline on the front page. It was validating. Words I wrote had written had weight and provided me currency. I remember purchasing the paper from Johnny’s Country Store on FM 281 where I frequently purchased my $.25 Little Debbie snack cakes. I paid for the paper and beamed up at the clerk that I’d written the story on the bottom fold.
Now at 35, I work in the field of communication. In my experience, not many people like writing, they’re intimidated by it or they think their vocabulary isn’t broad enough. Writing is equal-opportunity, I think everyone can do it. The work I do doesn’t require a byline and the reward is in the writing process — finding the right word to convey the message in the clearest way sometimes feels like finding a final missing puzzle piece. Like a small internal lottery, I feel in tune with my purpose and invisible fireworks burst around my heart.
Whether for myself or for the thrill of the act alone, I write on my blog RGVMomLife. I hoped to chronicle my experience with motherhood and a career as a modern Mexican American millennial but life or exhaustion sometimes accost my muse.
Writing is my longest relationship, whether paid or not, I’ll continue the rest of my life but like Texas writer Shea Serrano tweets, “Someone’s gonna get paid to do the thing you want to do, so f**k it, it might was well be you.”
Now in my first ever creative writing class, the fluidity of writing has found a new reason for being. It’s for hope— hope that I can write something someone wants to read and connects with, hope that I can support my family with writing, hope that I can show my children that their art is worthy of this world and it can help them get through life. Coming from a family that has struggled with depression, incarceration and drug use, my hope is that when they’re going through a rough time, they can pass it by writing their feelings down and review their work once their internal storm has cleared and read their words with clarity. I want writing or art in any form to be a straight shot exit out of a bad situation.
I want my writing to be a real life Dr. Seuss book:
I want to write here, I want to write there
I want to write in my underwear
I want to write about being Mexican-American and a woman and a mother and
how none of those titles exist singularly
Writing gives me a sense of belonging within my own self which somehow expands outside myself and becomes a table for friends to join me. I write because at this point, I don’t know another way and I’m too committed to finding the next right word and getting better at it. I write because writing isn’t going anywhere and neither am I so we might as well do something good together.
Writing is my longest relationship, whether paid or not, I’ll continue the rest of my life but like Texas writer Shea Serrano tweets, “Someone’s gonna get paid to do the thing you want to do, so f**k it, it might was well be you.”
