Alyssa Lopez

Why do I write?

            … because the world is a terrifying place.  

 

And believe me, I know terrifying.  My long list of fears include both your generic worries about finding a nasty eight-legged spider crawling around, to more obscure anxieties surrounding escalators and fire hydrants.  And even more scary than those?                Writing.

In fact, just sitting here writing these words, I can feel my heart beating a bit quicker and my palms starting to sweat.  But don’t worry -- this is completely normal.  It’s this added anxiety that helps me think, this state of mind where I finally begin to realize that the general haze of ideas floating in my head, waiting to be organized and typed on the beat-up keys of my laptop, could make some sort of sense.  It’s the feeling of comprehending how little I know, and how much there is to know about the world.  It’s the allure of perspective.

            It sets you apart, it’s unique to yourself.  And perspective in itself, whether it stems from my own experiences or from reading the ones of those around me, influences my writing in most every way.  Writing to understand the environment, our culture, and myself, allows me to share my perspective, and can show me that

 

1. Many of us are more similar than we think – we can find solace in the genuine self-deprecation we share with the world, or the little moments of triumph found in our day.

2. Voices matter.  They deserve to be heard, to be recorded in writing.  But there’s no point in sharing yours and rejecting all others – with perspective comes personal growth, and with growth begins the blossoming of acceptance.  It makes the world seem a lot less mean and scary when you can read the powerful words of someone so different from yourself and appreciate them for what they are:  a perspective

 

And while it’s still difficult to face the scary world I see around me, I have begun to realize that this desire to learn more and to make sense of the lack of justice I see in my everyday life, pushes me to write as an explorer, inquisitor, and as an advocate for social justice.

 

I write

            … to gain clarity.

 

Most of the time I have no idea how to process the emotions in my head clearly.  The first personal narrative that I ever turned in was completely written the night before it was due.  Now before you start judging me, please hear me out.  I had a draft already written and ready to turn in, peer-reviews done and spell-check complete.  Then, one sudden phone-call and a ten hour drive later, I found myself visiting a side of my family that I hadn’t seen in nine years.  My dad’s family are all loud, loving Puerto Ricans who live to stuff you with banana pasteles and dance to reggae music after dinner.  But one thing about me stuck out to almost every aunt or cousin that I saw -- how white I was.  Now, that’s not to say that this is a bad thing, but it’s pretty jarring when an aunt you haven’t seen in almost a decade can’t control the amazed look on her face when she finds out you’re Frankie’s gringa [spanish for “white”] daughter.  In those three days there, I held in so many emotions that I didn’t know what to do with.  

             Was I upset with my family for pointing out such an obvious difference between me and them?  Was I frustrated with myself because I was so white?  Was I just overly-tired?  I wasn’t sure what I was feeling.  So when I finally got home that Thursday night, I wrote.  And I wrote.  And I began to feel better.  What was so frustratingly confusing just hours before spilled out in a mix of words and tears.  As I was able to write down these convoluted thoughts, emotions, and even just random words, I realized that I wasn’t mad at my family or myself, like I believed I was before I started writing.  It was my perspective that was changing, surrounding my family, my race in our society, and my self-image.  Everything wasn’t answered, I didn’t reach a conclusion.  But I gained more clarity about parts of myself I had never considered.  I wrote to understand.

 

            Being able to see my inner thoughts down on paper or on a computer screen is such a different experience than trying to sort through the ideas in my head.  And it functions not only with personal experiences, but in terms of learning from new topics or subjects as well.  Seeing those ideas and expressing them through writing provides me with organization, yet the freedom to explore multiple trains of thought with no wrong answers.  It helps me to think more creatively and to figure out what I really believe and want to examine as I move forward.

 

 

 

And so, I have to write

            ...for a purpose.

 

Being one of those usual organizational, outline-driven writers that many might find eccentric and a little bit unusual, I’ve come to see that my writing has to have a greater meaning -- a purpose.  I want to be understood and to understand the multitude of other perspectives around me, and writing can bridge those gaps and connect so many people of differing opinions and beliefs.  Writing for me is the chance to collect my thoughts, work through them, and to be heard.  But at the same time, I write with the hope that my words could give voice to others as well, that they could spur activism or thought-provoking questions in those who may read and go on to write in this world.

            When I found out in Mrs. Ignatowski’s first-grade class that trees are living organisms, I thought it was the most innovative discovery of the century.  This interesting lesson soon gave way to the horrifying truth however, as I found out that so many trees in the rainforests were (and still are) being bulldozed every year.  I couldn’t believe that people were killing all of those trees -- they were alive, after all!  I vividly remember telling everyone on the bus home about this incredible fact, and confusedly asking questions to my parents about what I had learned at the dinner table. That night, with the support of my mom and a box of construction paper and staples, I wrote my first “book” for a specific purpose -- to convince everyone to stop cutting down trees.  Written and illustrated in very professional “crayon” text, the one line I’ll always remember on the last page was a boldly written “DON’T KILL TREES” in red writing.  My dad still keeps that book by his chair in the living room.

            And while this book may never have made it to the men cutting down the rainforest in the Amazon, I remember feeling as though I had made a difference -- I had written what I felt, and what I had wanted to be heard.  I still feel the same way today.  When I write something, I write to make a difference, to help shed light on something that others might be able to connect to or relate with.  I try to write to show that one voice can make the difference, and that every voice matters.  Isn’t that how change happens?  All it takes is one person’s perspective, whether they agree or disagree with my writing, to begin contributing their thoughts to others and hopefully joining the fight for social equality and social justice. Without writing with this purpose in mind, I am not as passionate about my words.  And passion for perspectives and understandings make the scary, confusing process of writing worthwhile to me.

 

So while the world might be a scary place to navigate most of the time, there are so many different stories and ways to help us see and understand pieces of what’s around us through the act of writing.  To me, writing is an art – it takes the cold, calculating process of sentence structure and blends it with the artistry of emotion and possibility.

 

 

It can make the world seem a little less frightening and a lot more beautiful.