Whenever I hit a writer’s block or like I should stop writing, I remember that it took Lin-Manuel Miranda over six years to compose the broadway hit musical Hamilton. And even though I’m not going to create a huge success, I’m still trying to just create. The act of putting together words to formulate a deeper meaning was refreshing and something that I strived and plan to do. I grew up reading poems, stories, articles in school and just wanted to be part of the community that wrote and left some type of impact.
What always threw me off about writing when growing up is how people stated that it wouldn’t get me anywhere. That my dreams of writing novels, being part of the news, working alongside magazines wouldn’t cut it. But when you look around, it is everywhere. In songs, movies, TV shows, news, books, directions. Virtually everything has writing in it and to say that it wouldn’t get me anywhere always messed with my head. Writing and reading is crucial to our everyday lives as it lets us know what is happening in the world and allows stories to be told and voices to be heard.
The importance of writing is that it allows your mind to step into it’s element, to unlock whatever has been hiding away behind the doors of work and school. Whenever I get lost in my words, a euphoric sense takes over me as bits of my mind that have been suppressed by other external forces arise and make their way to the paper. When the ink meets the paper, it’s possibly one of the best combinations that I could ever hope for besides rap and history. It’s incredible how after being lost in a trance of straight scribbles, I can stare at my work and realize the words that I had strung together had come from my own mind and what I had written was truly mine. To write is to lose yourself in a mix of words that can either be beautifully or messily strung together to construct bits of yourself onto a piece of paper that can never truly hold all that you are but can hold enough. It’s a mesmerizing process to have words written, scribbled out, and written over just to capture the phrase just right. To see my life in retrospect and not just in the moment has given me insight into myself and others that I otherwise wouldn’t have noticed.
It’s silly to think that I was ever embarrassed of my work, because even though it may have been horrible in the past, it’s all part of the process. I would often put myself down for my past works, and it took a while to realize that I wouldn’t get any better if I didn’t ever be bad. I’m sculpting myself and it’s not as if I’m going to create the story of our founding fathers in one sitting. It also saddens me to think that others view reading and writing as ‘less important’ because from the moment you enter school, that’s what they want you to first learn. It’s a means of communication and shouldn’t be looked down upon because we wouldn’t be anywhere without writing.
