why do we even write ?

If AI can now do all the writing work junk stuff, why do we continue writing? What's the point ?

i. hesitation
in january, i erased everything i had written over the last four years. four years of writing, gone in seconds. all the most transformative versions of me that had tried to make sense of the world through language, vanished. i’m still grieving them.

i never published any of it. i kept waiting. for the words to get better. for me to feel ready. for someone to tell me it mattered. maybe i was afraid. maybe i didn’t think i had anything worth saying. but once it was gone, i started asking why i ever wrote at all.

writing gave me quiet. not silence exactly, but a kind of noise that eased my mind. it felt like stitching together a person i was still trying to become. i used to reread old paragraphs and think: maybe i could be good, if only i found the right words. i thought the missing ingredient was talent or patience. it was courage.

but for years, i wrote to impress. not to connect.

dishonesty has a smell. like cologne on a bad date. writing has it too. the performance. the effort to be seen as wise. eventually i learned the most dangerous thing about writing isn’t rejection. it’s dishonesty.

still though, why write? why do writers write?

ii. ingrained
as a kid, i didn’t have many friends. books stayed. one year i read night by elie wiesel until the spine gave out. the first line was seared into my brain: they called him moishe the beadle, as if his entire life he had never had a surname.

i think i’m made of literature. my sense of right and wrong is stitched together from other people’s sentences. cite me in mla format and you’d list novels, poems, essays. wild geese, little women, the anthropocene reviewed, joan didion, mary oliver, john green. every line that made me want to live.

didion wrote “i write to find out what i’m thinking.” at first, it felt selfish. all those i’s. but maybe that’s the point. to look inward without shame.

self-obsession is just self-discovery in a bright pink pantsuit. and i don’t mind knowing i’m built from others. quotes, phrases, images that rewired me. they live inside me now. small, bright little organs.

i write because i don’t know how else to be alive.

iii. answer
so here it is. we write because we have to. because prayer feels too quiet. too uncertain. but words are proof. that we were here. that we felt something.

i’m terrible at speaking. i freeze. forget my mouth exists. but my hands know what to say.

we write because we are lonely. because therapy is expensive. because talking to yourself in the mirror is strange and screaming isn’t always an option. because ai can mimic grammar but not the ache of a memory. because we need someone to understand, even if it’s someone we’ll never meet.

because language is the closest thing we have to resurrection.

we write because we write because we write.

anyone can write. but it takes something else to be great. i’ve read essays that said everything and meant nothing. but once in a while, a line stops me. changes me. and suddenly the world is now different.

like gusteau said in ratatouille: anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great. so we keep going. we write scared. uninspired. tired. because every sentence is a tiny leap of faith.

maybe someone will see themselves in it. maybe that’s as much as we can hope for.

iv. good enough
not every story will make it to modern love. not every heartbreak will be narrated by megna chakrabarti. most of us will be forgotten.

but that isn’t the point.

you write anyway. you keep going. you let the words come because they’re yours.
and that, somehow, is enough.