Why I Write
Recollections of Sleepless Nights Recording the Self
I: Overture
For a long time, I went to bed late.
I would go the entire day, trying to avoid confronting my weaknesses and worries, much like a procrastinator who puts off completing their tasks.
But by night, when I had all the time in the world to myself — to think, to reflect, to recall all the instances that day when I was reminded of my shortcomings — I would ponder my life for hours on end.
I thought the night, a time of reflection and calm, would somehow remedy the turmoil of the day since it gave me the time to analyze that day’s events.
Fleeting lapses into my memories would stir up impressions of missed opportunities, situations in which I found myself gauche, other worries. And tinged with regret, I wallowed in self-disappointment for not having done things just slightly differently, in self-deprecation for my inadequacy upon comparing myself to those around me, interrogating myself—why can I not be like them in this way or that?
At times, I would resign myself to the status quo, in a woe-is-me attitude, that I should forever lack the confidence to escape my present solitude and reserve and, therefore, be socially unsuccessful far into the future.
At other times, I would resolve to follow through with something I had wanted to do but put off for the entire day, like getting to know an acquaintance a bit better, hoping for this exact moment when I found the courage in me to approach them.
Naturally, it was never this simple. Steeling myself at one o’clock in the morning, for something I would do seven or eight hours later, was painless. To be able to follow through when the opportunity arose was an entirely separate question.
And it was a question to which I would frequently answer in the negative, each time disillusioning myself of the naïve optimism that had seduced me.
But this was only temporary. In a few days, I would resolve, with newly found hope and determination, to try once more.
From time to time, staying up at night was a form of procrastination.
Imagine — the entire night! When must I get up? At six in the morning. What time is it now? Ten o’clock at night.
Eight whole hours, four hundred eighty minutes, twenty-eight thousand eight hundred seconds — all to myself! No distractions or calls, no expectation to respond to messages (I’ll just tell them I fell asleep), not even the sensation that I should go to bed on account of my unavoidable fatigue tomorrow.
Struggling to keep my eyelids from closing, I would persist in my attempts to read or just do something interesting to pass the time, undeterred by my inability to focus.
I wanted to lengthen each day as far as possible.
To sleep was to let consciousness slip away and finally return, several hours later; to sleep was to travel forward in time instantly; to sleep was to make tomorrow — and all of its troubles and worries — come so much more quickly.
I did not want the next day to come. The current day had concluded, and I desired a sanctum where my consciousness could relax before I had to rise again at dawn.
If there was something to look forward to when I awoke, I would readily fall asleep, but when merely the thought of tomorrow would cause my heart to jump with anxiety, I strove to keep myself — my conscious self, that is — snuggled under the comfortable duvet for as long as I could, at least until Somnus would inevitably come to disperse what remained of my voluntary insomnia and, in due course, I would regain consciousness — half-disoriented, half-exhausted — at the sound of my alarm.
Once in a while, I would also stay up late to do work, not necessarily because a deadline was upon me, but because I would feel unproductive otherwise.
Whenever I had not achieved much during the day, panic would set in some time in the evening, prodding me with a certain disquiet, at first unidentifiable, but which I would ultimately recognize as a neurotic apprehension about the future — whether things would bode well if I essentially took the day off.
All the projects on my desk remained inactive for the entire day. And I found myself questioning whether I should be able to attain my goals with that indolence — that sense that I could put my projects off for some other time when I could work without reluctance, which, in retrospect, would often fail to surface from the depths of my lackluster diligence.
But this tingling worry late into the evening would suddenly startle me, provoking a certain reflex, as though a bucket of cold water were emptied over me, to dive into the work I had laid out, without even my customary “few minutes to settle in” before I began my work.
The provocation was so strong — the anxieties behind it so immense — that I would force myself to toil well into the night before I considered myself worthy of sleep.
I felt that I had to earn the “existence” of every day, that there was some finish line I had to cross before I could call it a day, which could not be done through the completion of quotidian tasks, but only through substantive progress — something that would actually further my advancement toward an end.
It was also a punishment of sorts. The toil would, so I thought, discipline me to not procrastinate or loll about so much and be more productive during the day.
Insofar as I felt unsatisfied with myself, and even after I had reasonably allayed my worries, I would still brood on the future, in a constant state of agitation, much like a traveler in a remote location preparing to catch a train or bus that comes only once a week, concerned they would miss it and thus be forced to endure another seven days, during which they would surely miss several engagements that they had intended to keep.
The thought of failure would haunt me.
What if? What if I were to fail to achieve this or that? What then? I had expectations to live up to and objectives to meet, for I attempted to anticipate far in advance what my future might resemble. Fearing misery and isolation, I was desperate to avoid the unexpected.
Alas, there was no point in worrying at that moment; I could do little in the remaining hours of my fugitive wakefulness.
II: Inspiration
My most insightful, profound, inspired thoughts, nevertheless, came to me, in flashes of enlightenment, during the night.
The notion of having so many minutes before me — before I felt the urge to go to bed, whether physiological (plain exhaustion) or psychological (my concern that I would be too fatigued to function the next day) — allowed my mind to wander.
Just as when on a journey, seeing unfamiliar sights and places, the mind subconsciously processes the constantly new, constantly shifting scenery before our eyes, which generates a steady stream of details from which we can be inspired in unfathomable ways, the calm and repose of the night allowed my mind to subconsciously wander away from a particular subject matter and find inspiration.
It would be during the night, with no disturbances to disrupt my thinking, that interesting trains of thought suddenly unraveled, like when untying a shoe, pulling on a single end of the lace would cause the entire knot to disintegrate. And there, in decoding that knot, I would come across some idea I had quite possibly never considered before.
So thus, even though I did not ask for new ideas, they sprang on me, and I would sit before my desk or lie on my bed, pondering them if I had nothing to do, if I wished to pass the time, if I was just hoping for the second hand of my watch to sweep across its face a bit faster.
My desire to write for me — purely myself, no one else — began here.
My thoughts, I discovered, would wander freely through the world that was my mind, leaping occasionally to a completely different terrain, where they might remain for a few seconds or over half an hour.
These thoughts I would come across were often provoked by the random resurfacing of a disappeared memory. And they were often rather trivial.
For instance, a few weeks back, after listening to Kazuo Ishiguro’s telling Nobel Lecture, I recalled a certain sentence near the very end, not because of its substance, but because of its grammar: “We may even find a new idea, a great humane vision, around which to rally” (emphasis mine).
These last four words stood out to me several hours after I had listened to them, at night, when they reappeared, my pedantic self silently erupting beneath other thoughts that had preoccupied my mind just moments before.
Despite my love for The Remains of the Day, I felt as though there was an overzealous attempt to follow that so-called grammar convention that goes, “Don’t end a sentence with a preposition.”
If I were to write, “a new idea which we can rally around,” strict grammarians would likely suggest placing the preposition before the relative clause. The sentence fragment would then become, “a new idea around which we can rally.”
But Ishiguro’s words “around which to rally” plainly make no grammatical sense in this context, since they do not form a relative clause. If we undo the construction, we get “which to rally around”—not exactly a natural sentence structure.
Likewise, even though “that” is a relative pronoun, like “which”, it doesn’t behave in the same way. We wouldn’t turn “an idea that we can rally around” into “an idea around that we can rally.”
These “rules” and their numerous exceptions are mere eccentricities of English to which we acquiesce in our daily use of the language. Yet they danced before me, to no apparent purpose, occupying the consciousness with little more than a clever observation.
Such was the randomness, the spontaneity, of the thoughts that came to my mind.
Despite my inclination to ponder them thoroughly, these thoughts frequently slipped away as quickly as they came. They were as fleeting as the seconds that would vanish until, alas, I could recall nothing more and my consciousness would fade.
I considered many of these ideas insignificant, but sometimes, I also experienced flashes of inspiration that produced revelations about myself, about a book I had just closed, about what someone had mentioned to me during the day, which, unknown to me at the time, had a certain profundity that I would likely have never discovered were it not late at night.
Like a patient listening to a physician’s elaborate explanations of their illness, knowing their memory would fail to record the latter’s words, yearning for some means of writing down what had been said, I would realize the magnitude of the personal insight I had just come across and similarly yearn for a way to ensure that, when I would awake in the morning, I would still be able to remember that idea I had last night.
Thus, it was beneath the moon that shone through a window that I composed my first words to myself in earnest. It was then that I discovered the lengths I would go to ensure that some revelation would not slip away into the shadows—that I would be able to reflect upon that inkling of an inspired thought long after the cloud of inspiration had dispersed.
I would pull out some scrap paper and a dull pencil—not a pen, lest the ink stain my fingers or bedsheets in the darkness—and begin to write, sometimes with a sharp sense of the overall structure of the piece I was to compose, at other times with the murky, fatigued wit of one who has stayed up too late. The words often flowed atop the page without direction, like raindrops on a window, without much grace or even substance, yet they were sufficient for the time being and the purpose they served: to allow me to record my late-night thoughts before I forgot about them.
At times, music would spur on my inner voice, which enunciated each word I was to write in the same tempo as the music in my ears, prompting my hand to move with less hesitation in the specific word I chose to convey a feeling and with more determination to keep going. The soft piano would hum in the background of my thoughts. The crescendos would cause me to write with a renewed velocity, while the decrescendos would make me unconsciously slow down, giving my mind more time to think. When the music was perfect, it waltzed in perfect harmony with my words, convincing me, in momentary lapses, that they were one and the same.
Notwithstanding my often imprecise and dry writing, upon waking, I would look back at the scribbles of the previous night and, with an almost guaranteed satisfaction, place the paper within a folder to save for the future or, if something new came to my mind, continue the composition.
What started as a way to record certain thoughts I would have in my mind’s wanderings late at night gradually spread to other things. I was obliged to notice, soon after, the impermanence which inhered in everything. It became impossible for me to fail to notice the brevity of small delights, other emotions, even minute ideas, whenever I came across them in my daily life.
Now, after my writings at night, it would terrify me to even entertain the notion—the fact, rather—that my memories would never be able to store what I had wished to keep for some future time so that I could look back, with photographic detail, on particular events during this period of my life.
In this sense, to write was to capture what could not be expressed in a picture or video, in a form more permanent than the memories of my brain.
Writing, then, became a habit.
It was one which I would perform not just at night, whether it took five minutes or fifty. My works at this point, however, were largely short and done by hand, never exceeding four or five pages, and went unedited—undeveloped any further.
III: Creation
But to whom did I write? To whom do I write now? Who is my audience?
These questions would trouble me, for I never truly felt any sort of connection to the reader who would, supposedly, read my words, given that no eyes other than my own would ever see them.
Perhaps, it is to myself that I write—to future me, who is detached from my present self. I have to explain to future me all my present circumstances and worries and guide future me through my thought processes. It was unlike some to-do list or jot note reminder in which we use shorthand and make no sense to anyone other than ourselves. It was something to be read in several years perhaps, requiring the utmost of care in writing, composing to my future self as though they were another person.
In another sense, I also write to the world, as a record of sorts. There is a particular permanence we expect from just the transference of our thoughts from its intangible form in our brains to more concrete, though still often nebulous, words on paper. Even if this record goes unopened, there remains this record that proves my existence as someone who thought and felt in a certain way.
Previously, I seldom wrote to share with others, even close friends, for I always lacked the confidence necessary to tell myself that others would appreciate reading what I had written, that it was good enough to be worth their time. But more broadly, I too often lacked a true desire to express myself to others, a characteristic fueled by my habitual reticence.
Such sentiments would change slightly over time, animated by others’ encouragement and my desire to express myself, but today, my tendency to share my writings openly is still hampered by a fear of complete incompetency, which would, I thought, be the subject of ridicule from those around me.
Writing by hand would disconcert me at times.
The permanence after which I had chased, I one day realized, could not be found in mere scratches or droplets of ink on thin pieces of wood pulp, which were too easily “destroyed”, not that I had any cause for concern since I took care to ensure that the papers would never be subjected to any sort of harshness.
Yet writing by hand, usually with a fountain pen, left me with an intense, nearly palpable connection to the physical forms of the letters and words and sentences and paragraphs I wrote. The smoothness of the paper, how the ink slowly dried upon its surface, the sensation of the pen’s nib gliding across the page—they would all delight me in the same way that a reader is delighted by the sensuality of freshly-printed books and disappointed by its absence in their digital counterparts.
Writing by the keyboard, however, has felt particularly attractive as of late. There comes with writing on a computer a flexibility of sorts that simply does not exist on paper.
It allows for longer compositions, on which I have, until this point, hesitated to embark, as my hand would grow sore after holding a pen after a certain duration, the pages would become unmanageable to edit, and my concentration on that subject would wane, as though in some half-life decay, by the time my hand had recovered and I could write once more.
But this is still far from the true reason why I start writing here now.
I still have a deep desire to keep a record of me, my thoughts at this time—however slim, however obscure or unknown by others—for the world, that would somehow stretch beyond me as an individual. The permanence and unchanging nature of writing online—a pseudo-publishing of sorts—appealed to this yearning.
Thus, I write here to sate this yearning, instead of leaving my words to die, so I inanely imagined in my mind, if only etched onto flimsy pieces of paper.
So we come to today, where I write on Medium intending to record myself—my thoughts, my feelings, snapshots from my today—with the immutability of transmitting something online, to myself and the world—not for people to read but just to exist in the public catalog of that which represents me.
I intend to write as a pastime, for personal pleasure.
I intend to write to record—not necessarily share—my views on various topics—literature, in particular.
I intend to write to improve my writing.
I intend to write under a level of anonymity such that I bear no burdens of the disquiet I would experience were I to imagine those around me discovering my writing here and reacting to it with distaste.
And, perhaps someday, there may be someone unknown to me, who reads this and comes to understand, in certain respects, a distant stranger.
But until then, this is primarily a personal record.
IV: Day
Writing obliges the writer to possess a clear sense of purpose.
Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Why I Write”, detailed the “four great motives for writing”:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one. . . .
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. . . . Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. . . .
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose — using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. . . .
Today, I remain subject to all four motives.
It would be supercilious to not admit to being heavily influenced by the first two motives—to take some sort of lofty moral high ground and claim that my writing is purely about substance, always filled with a purpose greater than myself. It would remiss, however, to claim that my aims when writing lack the latter two motives either. My desires for the preservation of the present—of my current self—are redolent of “historical impulse”, though lacking in its final objective to search for some “truth”. Political purpose, similarly, slips through at times, whereupon I attempt, in vain, to repress personal desires to see the world in a way that pleases me, which I believe have little place in much of what I write, as my words largely focus on the individual, with little regard for their role in the grander machine that is society.
So it goes that my writing is easily tinted by stylistic elements, by careful word choice and sentence construction, to sound a particular way that satisfied my ear, to be pleasant when read by others. Rather chimerically, I take a self-satisfied pleasure in imagining my writing impressing someone I admired, despite my lacking the confidence to allow others to read it.
I attempt to write with keen observation and description of personal experiences, flowing from one long sentence to the next, aware of its effect on the reader, springing from one idea to another as they arose in my mind when I first composed the words, like the flow between two contrasting, yet still related, movements in a musical composition. I aim to be reflective of my truest self, inspired by that same sort of sensation with which I would be closely acquainted when reading Proust—a description of human nature, as he saw it in his life, just as I see it in my own.
I attempt to write with a level of formality and “grace”. Perhaps, this is as a result of an obscure, conceited desire to prove something about myself in my control of language, but more broadly, it is because I wanted to feel as though my words were all put together with care and discretion. Consequently, I affect, rather unwillingly deep down since I recognize how condescending I must sound, a tone and style quite different from my natural voice. Writing for communication, I realized, far too late, was never at the top of my mind—something I consider a critical fault of my writing.
I attempt to write with as much candor as I can muster up in myself to confront my failings and weaknesses and put them down into something as permanent as words. Writing has as much become a means of recording the self or creating art as it has been a way to reflect on myself or merely pass the time.
For me, writing had long been a constant search for a sense of perfection.
This obsession with finding the perfect word, constructing each sentence in a certain way, making sure it flowed with a natural smoothness—all in my mind, of course (other people undeniably see things differently)—would attach itself to the back of my mind whenever I sought to write, forcing me to scour—sometimes for minutes—for that ideal way of expressing a thought.
Whenever I would write, it would never be long before I started hitting the backspace key or crossing something out because I felt dissatisfied with my work.
This irritating habit had the side effect of my never being able to compose without disruption to my flow of thought. How I expressed this or that would continually haunt me if I even attempted to move on before I fixed some “grave error”—often just minutiae in word choice or grammar.
I would, therefore, seldom write “drafts”. There was no “first draft” which I would complete before going back and editing. There was just “the draft” that I would unendingly edit all the way up until I finished writing, whereupon I was obliged by that habit to go back and edit even more.
It would disturb and annoy me to no end. My mind would be bursting with ideas I desperately wished to record, but this habit would stop me in my tracks, sometimes ending this train of thought, like a car hitting an unexpected speed bump, on account of nothing else but my own mind.
Alas, perfection was never within my grasp.
Since then, I have gradually changed, but the habit persists, strong enough to be distracting. There is still little I can do to quell that voice in the back of my head.
I had to realize that writing, in the first place, was never about perfection, despite its allure, as all readers and writers have different interpretations of what “flawlessness” means.
It ought, instead, to be about the inner self. With only modest regard to what people—and even other parts of one’s mind—say is the correct way to write.
Self-expression should never be constrained by the limitations of structures beyond the self, even if they are an inextricable aspect of how we perceive life.
V: Night
Now, my voluntary insomnia remains.
I continue in my nightly ponderings of the day, my savoring of the hours before I fall asleep; my mind continues to wander about aimlessly, which my midnight writings continue to capture.
And as I type this at night, I note the lethargy in my mind, in the speed at which I move my fingers.
My surroundings feel deathly in the near silence which surrounds me, so long as the keys on my keyboard are not clicking. I can hear the peculiar, electric humming of an old light bulb that I ought to soon replace. My eyelids are heavy and have begun to droop; my eyes are dry; my vision is painful. Yet the handsomeness of the night, luxurious in some sense, delights my soul and I continue.
I am bundled up in warm clothes; the chair on which I sit is soft and cozy.
It is past three o’clock.
The impressions my memory has created of events that have unfolded merely seconds ago have formed a diorama, as though I were some third-person spectator on this thin slice of my life.
Soon, my mind will fail me, and I will lapse into the depths of unconsciousness, where I will no longer caress the words that give me so much joy.
But for now, I write.
