I think that a lot of people, especially young children and teens, feel like they don’t have a voice. They feel too much, too little, too passionately about the wrong things, their ideologies aren’t perfect, they don’t know everything about everything - and on, and on, and on. I’ve noticed that it comes out in different ways, but inevitably, a lot of people write about it. Their experiences are documented through words.

An English teacher last semester once asked us why we all write when we do it voluntarily, and it made me think. Why do I write?

At the time, I said that I wrote because when I was younger, I tried to predict the title of the last two Harry Potter books. It was the first time I’d ever thought of writing something that wasn’t a journal entry or something for school (homework answers, copying letters to learn the alphabet, etc). When I turned out to be wrong, I didn’t really think about writing until I got older.

When I turned twelve, I had started to keep a journal again, as you might do when you’re a pre-teen. I felt comfortable enough in my writing abilities to start writing a bit of non-rhyming poetry. I stopped pursuing that, eventually. What I wrote was short and just a snapshot of where I was emotionally. Instead of stopping, though, I turned to writing lyrics for original songs with an obsessive frenzy; somehow I wrote eighty of them in a short week. Afterwards, I put them all into a binder and felt done with that. Then I turned to writing an alternate ending for The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis.

In eighth grade, I tried writing poetry again. I needed a coping mechanism that wasn’t self-destructive. Once I entered high school, I only wrote poetry (there were journal entries, but those were sporadic; I didn’t keep up with it much). It felt like I was overflowing with all these things I needed to say.

Now that I’m in college, I don’t really have a fixation on writing in the same way. My attention has turned writing novels and short stories. I write more regularly in a journal. Now I am overflowing with things that I want to say, but they come out differently: I want to write short stories, and long stories, and plays. I want to write poems for spoken word. I want to speak through my writing, not hole it up in a cocoon.

I used to write because it helped keep me alive. I don’t know if my work helped numb my feelings, if it served as Advil for my pain/. Or maybe I wrote because it made me realize I had a lot of issues that I needed help with. So I asked for help, because it was too much to handle on my own.

Now I write because I’m alive, and writing is my oxygen.