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An Individual Analysis on the Meaning of Writing

What does writing mean to you?

Teen years:

Writing was a vehicle for rampant emotions. Daily, I felt too much, too deeply. I found myself swinging from one end of an emotional spectrum to the opposite end in a matter of seconds. The emotions were foreign to me, at that time; they bore no names, and I had yet to predictably profile their faces, therefore, I found it a difficult ordeal to speak about them with peers or adult advisors.

Instead, I withdrew into myself, and spent hours lying on the ground of my bedroom, acting as an audience to the voices in my head. At first, it was indiscernible white noise; a kind of debilitating, numbing white noise, which as with a migraine, forces you to slow down and rest to recover.

Eventually, however, the voices began to differentiate. Like tugging fabric strings from a sheet, the voices introduced themselves individually and the white noise dwindled into comprehension. Compelled by the clarity of their meaning, I would quickly and hungrily jot down what they spoke. It amassed to a near dozen journals nestled into different nooks of my bedroom, and the yellow-bound one I carried with me everywhere I went.

You see, during my teen years, writing was like breathing, when I otherwise felt as though I was drowning for the majority of my days. Writing was like coughing up all the water that had infiltrated my lungs, finally making enough space to gasp for breath.

I didn't care much whether people read or understood what I wrote. I wrote because I had this painful need to understand myself. To understand these potent emotions sweeping me off my feet with little reason. To dissect them and personalize them. These emotions took the form of characters in stories and drabbles, and fictional scenes that bobbed around my mind.

2022 onward:

Writing has since become less of a necessity, and more of a luxury. I no longer swing as dramatically as I used to; my emotions still flip violently for no rhyme or reason, but I am better at responding with neutrality or indifference. I guess I could say I've found a way to ground myself, like a deeply rooted palm tree amidst a raging storm. I am shaken, beaten, tussled, but I still stand.

I no longer run to writing as the sole provider of my breath, which means I write less hungrily, less desperately. I miss the days when writing used to encompass me entirely; when words poured out of me so naturally. They were pure and condensed, accurate embodiments of emotions.

Nowadays, I write in short spurts, the emotions diluted down. Within those spurts, I guess I could say I write with more intention and direction. I've developed a better sense of story outlines in that I no longer dread making them. The unintentional consequence of that is that I now enjoy outlining far more than the actual writing part; it seems that spoiling the ending for myself deprives me of the enjoyment when writing it. I fall into pits wondering "Why am I writing this again? What's the point? What lesson are you trying to communicate, and to who?" I can easily fast-forward scenes in my mental imagery, and spend hours daydreaming around central themes. "Why are you subjecting yourself to the hassle of writing an entire novel when you already know the theme in your head through a brief reverie?"

All these questions are less attempts to discourage or constipate my writing, and more attempts at getting to the core of my motivation, my purpose. Writing coaches always ask you to identify your "Why?"

I find myself increasingly questioning everything, arriving at no single conclusion. Truthfully, I have no more clarity than when I started writing in my teenage years. I do not know why I write, more during some months, and barely anything during others. I do not have a rhyme, reason or pattern that I can explain; other writers may. I simply do not - not yet, perhaps.

One plausible motivator is this: having an audience validate my writing as an extension of my values and personality.

You know the saying "When you love a story, you love the writer's mind." I guess I seek a place to belong to in this world. Originally, I thought writing was my only ticket to finding it, but I have since opened my eyes and realized there are various mediums of expression. Perhaps I shouldn't limit myself to one. Moreover on that thought, if a creation is an expression of the authentic self, the more reason for you to create freely; do not limit yourself to the patterns of other popular creators of the same field; do not try to mimic or echo their successes out of greed and desperation for spotlight, rather, seek to express yourself more genuinely with every subsequent creation, even if no one gets it. But that's the issue, isn't it? To have something authentically emanate you, and have it rejected. It opens old wounds, hm? Guess that's why it is easier and preferable to conform and pop out the same graphic smut that garners statistics over something that communicates genuine human condition.

Leaving all those nuances aside and zooming out to envision the bigger picture, I suppose I write to escape. I write as a form of romanticizing an otherwise disillusioning life. As a child, I used to dream quite bravely. I guess bravery is naivete, and growing-up soils that naivete so that you shrivel into a coward. I no longer dream so valiantly. I mock my hopes and dreams as nothing more than pipe dreams. I tell myself that "I'll be rich" in another life, that "I'll fall in love" when I am someone else, in another life, that "I'll be kinder, softer, caring" in another life where I am born into a soft crib. Other dreams I resuscitate through stories and live vicariously there. I guess writing is a medium for transcending universes; a way to be all that you ever dreamed of without actually uprooting yourself from your current life.

(The meaning of writing is ever changing. I hope to keep updating this post through the years. I wonder how much it could change).

An echo resounds through me as my fist collides with my chest. A forlorn reminder of the empty, hollow, nameless thing that I am. I don't even feel human most times.

Perhaps it all really is some simulation. No memory ever really ours; only some ploy meant for entertainment of the bored creator.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)

I feel like I’m falling. Not in the occasional positional vertigo way. The room and everything around me is steady, save for me. It’s like a rug has been pulled from beneath my heart, and I can feel it descend into an abyss. Like the epicenter of gravity resides within my chest and pulls me down from within. the way land feels when it caves in. like i can’t breath because my lungs have collapsed under the gravitational pull of the pole of magnetism that impales me. like the butterflies meant to reside my belly have escaped and fluttered into my chest. it’s not dizzying. it’s not dizzy. it’s a feeling of caving in, imploding quietly while everything around me remains, and everyone watches unbeknownst. like i could shrivel and compress into a single dimensional plane, thin as a sheet of paper, and no one would grieve my disappearance.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)

a question to all the writers out there

How do you know when to stop writing (a piece, a scene, an exchange)?

Often times, I find myself rambling incessantly over the vivid details of a scene that abuse the storage of my mind and haphazardly call those rambles purple prose.

It's a weird conundrum to phase, this tension between there never being enough words in the English language to paint the picture in your head, and the way the perspective grows increasingly blurry the more words you add.

It feels so criminal to cut out pieces you carefully articulated, though it is often necessary for the sake of the pace and the word-count. I guess the issue originates from a deeply rooted desire for control - that has less to do with writing, more to do with the psychologically imbalanced battle-field that is my brain.

I should detach from the piece and allow the reader the liberty to perceive what is written as their individual lens is capable, rather than forcing my exact vision onto foreign eyes. Sure, this may lend itself to reader's loving my characters far less than I do (since I bear all the highly-detailed lore behind them); just as commonly, though, one could argue, that the readers will weave their own imagination and memories with the characters, using them as scaffolds, and creating (in co-creation with the author) something that by far exceeds the original vision.

-penned by j. m. medna (2024)