Writing

I had an epiphany last night while I was lying awake in the middle of the night

I love writing

For pretty much all of my life I've thought I hated it.  I was good at it in school, but I hated it.

I'm very introverted but I love talking to people, sharing ideas, helping people understand things and writing is a PERFECT match for that.

My husband and I have our best conversations, debates and even arguments in writing.  There's no interruptions in writing.  No formulating your next point while the other speaks so you miss what they're saying.  If something is hard to hear it's easy to break away to think about it and come back, the thoughts are there to ponder.  They don't vanish like spoken word does.

Writing helps me focus my thoughts and make them much clearer than they ever get rolling around in my head and it also gives me another level of filter  to help me avoid saying words that truly shouldn't be said.

But for almost all of my life I've thought I hated writing, and I know why:

School.

Where most (if not all) of the writing was meaningless assignments to write x pages about something specific that had been written many times before, that I didn't care about, and that no one actually wanted to read.

The purpose of writing is to share an idea or to remember something important (are there any other reasons to write?)  the vast majority of writing in school never met either of those and since doing pointless shit with no purpose is something I'm really averse to (abhorrent to me was the first thought but that seemed a bit extreme ;)) I internalized it as though I hated writing itself.  School couldn't be wrong after all...

A couple things came together to trigger this realization.  An unschooling discussion in a live chat room where Sandra Dodd discussed that the medium was hard for lots of people (the fast moving chat with interweaving threads and typing responses while the chat kept moving) and the thought that it could be difficult to follow was a surprise to me.

With that percolating in the back of my mind I took a Myers-Briggs type personality test and reading the results was interesting.  It said my type are almost universally writers and poets.  My first thought was ick, wrong there.  But I guess it percolated together to form last night's epiphany.  Without the overlay of school's idea of what writing is damaging my understanding of what it can be I could have been loving it all these years.

Added to all of this someone shared: Mary Lambert: Secrets

Well, better late than never.  I've got a lot of thoughts in my head that could use the polishing effect that writing has for me and I don't think I need to be quite so private any more.