Why I Write (And Maybe Why You Do Too)

It gives your obsessive thoughts a home.

Before I wrote, they curled in the corners of my mind like smoke in a locked room.
Always circling. Always rising.
No doors. No windows.
Just me and the fog of what I couldn’t say.

The worst thing about obsessive thoughts is that they pretend to be helpful.
They whisper like problem-solvers.
Maybe if you just think it through one more time...
Maybe if you relive it with more detail, it’ll finally make sense...

But it doesn’t make sense.
It just loops.
Until you are less person, more orbit.

So I wrote.
Not to solve it, but to set it down.
To say: Here. You live here now. Not in my ribcage.

And in doing so, I realized something:

Writing gives your obsessive thoughts a home.

Where once they spiraled inward, they now spin webs that catch others.

That’s the magic, isn’t it?

You think you’re writing alone.
In a room.
In the dark.
With no audience but the ghosts you carry.

But then someone reads it.
Someone far away. Someone you’ve never met.
And suddenly…they’re not alone either.

What once burrowed only in your skull now stretches outward, threading its way into other people’s hearts like a quiet filament of understanding.
You didn’t mean to catch anyone.
But connection is sticky like that.

Your pain becomes a mirror.
Not a cry for help.
But a quiet offering: “This is what it felt like for me. What did it feel like for you?”

You spin your web and someone else walks into it…not trapped, but held.

Your spirals become metaphors.

There’s something sacred in metaphor.
A kind of mercy.

Instead of saying “I was shattered,” you say “I felt like sea glass: tumbled and translucent and not quite myself.”
And just like that, the pain becomes art.

When you can’t say “I’m afraid,” you write about wolves at the door.
When you can’t say “I was abandoned,” you write about a lighthouse with no keeper.

It’s not lying.
It’s translation.

Because sometimes the direct words are too sharp, and metaphor dulls the blade just enough to pick it up.

In metaphor, you finally have the language for what silence never taught you.

Your panic becomes prose.

Have you ever tried to describe a panic attack mid-panic?
The words don’t come.
Only gasps. Only frantic gestures toward the air you can’t quite reach.

But later (maybe much later) you can whisper it into sentences.

You can say:

“It felt like my body was a building and every alarm had gone off.
But there was no fire.
Only me.
Standing in the center of myself,
trying to remember where the exit was.”

And that becomes something.

Panic doesn’t go away just because you wrote about it.
But now it has a shape.
An outline.
And things with outlines are easier to stand beside than things that loom amorphous in the dark.

Your trauma alchemizes into something useful.

This is the part people misunderstand.

Writing doesn’t erase trauma.
It doesn’t “heal” you in the clean, final way we wish it would.
But it moves it.
And movement matters.

You take the thing that sat like stone on your chest, and you grind it into pigment.
And then…you paint.

You shape it into poems.
Into blog posts.
Into journal entries no one will ever see.

You give it color, contrast, form.
And for a moment, it’s not just pain.
It’s story.

And stories are transportable.
You can carry them in a notebook instead of your bloodstream.

And in doing so, you lighten your own load.

Even if just by a gram.
Even if just for a page.

There’s a kind of exhale that only happens when the thing you’ve been holding too long is finally given language.

It doesn’t solve everything.
But it makes the next breath easier.

Writing is an act of weight redistribution.
You don’t get rid of the heavy things, but you stop carrying them in silence.

Writing makes meaning out of chaos.

There is nothing neat about grief.
Nothing poetic about trauma…at least not at first.
It’s messy. Unfair. Loud.

But writing walks into that mess with bare feet and says,
“Let’s see what we can make with this.”

It’s the human instinct to carve coherence out of noise.

We shape our pain into paragraphs.
Our fear into rhythm.
Our confusion into cadence.

Because we need to know:
Did this mean anything?
Was there a reason?
If I can shape it into a story, maybe I can survive it.

Writing helps you remember…

but not in the way you think.

It’s not about recalling dates, names, or clean timelines.
It’s about remembering who you were when everything went wrong.

It’s about reconstructing the broken version of yourself and saying: She mattered too.
She was worth writing about.
They deserved a voice, even if no one listened back then.

You become your own witness.
Your own scribe.
The historian of your own heartbeat.

Sometimes the grief is for your own soul…how it looked and felt before it was torn and scattered.

And it gives you something to come back to.

There will be days you forget what you’ve survived.
Days when you feel too soft, too shattered, too unfinished.

On those days, you can open your old notebooks and see proof:

You were there. You felt this. You named it. You survived it.

You might cry reading it.
You might cringe.
But you’ll also remember that there is a you capable of turning agony into language.
And that’s no small thing.

So maybe that’s why I write.

And maybe that’s why you do too.

Not to get famous.
Not to be understood.

But to understand.
To build a little room where your spirals can live outside your body.
Where your ghosts have somewhere to sit.

A place where your thoughts no longer rattle the walls of your skull, because they have a home now.
A home with paragraphs for floorboards, and light filtering in through the curtains of metaphor.

Writing won’t fix everything.
But it might fix this moment.
And sometimes, that’s enough.

Feeling Worthless? Here’s Why the Odds of You Existing Are the Most Beautiful Miracle