Why I write

Touching life without gloves....

Why I Write

I didn’t start writing because I wanted to be a writer.

I started writing because something inside me wouldn’t shut up.

I was five or six years old cranking out little jingles for my mother,

happy scraps of language,

tiny verbal fireworks meant to make people grin.

Didn’t even know she was reading them to her friends while I slept.

Which feels about right.

My words sneaking out into the world before I knew what the hell they were.

Already causing small disturbances.

Already escaping.

That should have been my first clue.

Then I was seventeen walking into Pilgrim State Hospital with a badge around my neck and absolutely no business being there.

A kid wandering into an industrial warehouse of human suffering.

People strapped down.

Shocked.

Electrocuted into compliance.

Numbed into something that technically passed for alive.

They called it treatment.

I called it a nightmare with fluorescent lighting.

I learned names.

José.

Jumped off a building.

Lived from the neck up.

Sarah.

Wrapped herself in a blanket.

Set it on fire.

Phoebe.

Hole in her neck.

Cancer winning.

Mr. Washington.

Gangrenous toe fell off in hydrotherapy.

Laughed about it like it was a party trick.

A man whose hand I held in the dark while he died alone.

No angels.

No soundtrack.

Just breathing slowing and then stopping.

I still remember their names.

That’s not nostalgia.

That’s evidence.

I even snuck in a camera once because I needed proof this place existed.

Proof I wasn’t insane.

Proof the world really could be this broken and still pretend to be normal.

Once you see that kind of thing,

you don’t get to become a casual person again.

You don’t get to look away.

You don’t get to pretend.

You either harden into a monster or you figure out a way to bleed without dying.

Writing became my way to bleed intelligently.

I can’t fix what I saw.

Admitting my mom into Brunswick Psychiatric Hospital by myself age 23. Admitted with a cold shower of quell…what were they thinking?

Addicted to valium, the suburban drug those days.

I can’t save most of what’s already gone.

But I can stay.

I can name.

I can remember.

I can refuse to let suffering become a rounding error.

I write because my nervous system is overloaded with ghosts.

Because some grief has no language unless you invent it.

Because some love demands a physical form.

Poetry lets me grab the unsayable by the collar.

It slows time down enough for me to get a breath in.

It gives sorrow somewhere to sit.

It gives wonder a door.

It gives memory a witness.

I don’t write to be impressive.

I don’t write to be correct.

I write so I don’t rot.

I write so I stay human

in a culture hell-bent on turning people into abstractions.

Somewhere inside me that five-year-old making happy jingles and that seventeen-year-old inside an asylum are still chained together.

Writing is the bolt cutter.

Words are how I touch life without wearing gloves.

I write because it keeps me alive.

And now I’m almost seventy-five

and here’s the real punchline:

I write as an elder because I love this world too much to quietly watch it destroy itself.

And I am just arrogant enough to believe that love, aimed properly, can still change the trajectory.

That’s it.

No manifesto.

No five-step program.

I write

so I can stay in the fight.