Writing the Self

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. 

                                                                   - Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I am not what one would call a "creative writer." The closest I come is that sometimes I think creative thoughts or questions and then I answer them in bland ways. I am, nevertheless, a writer, and so I spend a lot of my time thinking about writing. Mostly, I think (and write) about the writing and thoughts of others. My biggest question is always the same: Why do people write, especially since writing is so difficult? Why do I write?

I have no definitive answer to these questions, but I do have a theory. I am not sure why others write, but I feel like I write because it is the most personal form I have of expressing myself. My words are the fingerprints of my body that I leave on the page. They are the pieces of me that I need to write down before I can realize them. Is it any wonder that we call a writer's oeuvre his body of work, his corpus?

The fact that these words are so personal makes them all the more difficult to write. On one level, I need to write them; I need them to be heard and understood so that I can be heard and understood. But on another level, I'm always so afraid they won't be read the way I intend. And if they are misread, then I'll be misread by extension.

Writing is the only process I know that is so personal, so direct, and yet so indirect at the same time. If I write about the impossibility of male-male desire in the British Empire, an impossibility made so by both gender and space, is this all I mean? Can I not also be talking about the impossibility of a long distance relationship? About my own failures and fears? About the society I live in today? When I write about theories of space, geography, and history, am I not also talking about a Geography major who lives far away from here? Am I not attempting to map geography and space onto the field of history in a way that allows for travels in time to a space I will probably never see again? I am and I am not. I say all of this and I don't.

I've been thinking of all of this after days of working on my personal statement. Sometimes it feels so impossible to write this statement, to list all of the reasons I love literature, all of the reasons I write, and all of my interests. But isn't all of my writing already a personal statement?

I say all of this out of a love for writing and a desire to talk about it in a way that is more than just what's on the page. I say all of this to be honest, but also as a plea: Be careful, dear reader, my corpus is before you.