What is your why? I grew up an athlete. I think that’s an important distinction from saying I wanted to be an athlete. I simply was. I had speed and agility. I had an abundance of energy that needed to work it’s way out of me somehow. It was born in me. It was the thing I did when I left the house, went to school, even walked the streets of the city I made it a game where I was racing towards or away from something. Athletics took me to the doorstep of college football where I wound up as a walk-on for Iowa State University. It was there someone first asked me the question I’ve asked athletes for years since: What is your why?
You see, a why is intrinsic. It isn’t so much about what you do as it is about what you cannot avoid doing. In every single one of my childhood memories, from running through the streets all the way up to that dank locker room at Iowa State, there was another story running underneath the action. At every turn I was imagining myself telling the story of what I was doing or, more often, imagining other stories that branched off my actions like flowers. My why wasn’t sports or athletics. My why was story.
I’ve been writing stories since I could form thoughts in my head. My first memory is sitting in a stroller on 135th street in Harlem and thinking that it was a throne and wondering how I’d come to be in it. My son likes to call the time before you remember anything pre-sentience, so in that case my sentience began with a story. I’ve been telling them ever since. In college I majored in Aerospace Engineering, because I wanted to learn the science behind the machines I wanted to write about. I switched to sociology because, well, I hate math, but also because I wanted to learn about how people work in a collective. Criminal Justice was more of the same. I needed to understand recidivism to understand why my characters would go back to a life they know to be dangerous. And on and upward in a spiral of shifting obsessions that make no sense unless in service of story.
I write because it is my why. It is the core reason I exist. It is the one thing I’ve been able to come back to since my earliest memory and see the thread of life from then to now. I do it every single day, if only for ten minutes some days. I do it because I don’t want to ever not do it. Writing is as critical as breathing to me. Though the work of it is far less automatic, I could quit one no less easier than the other. I’ve tried quitting and the feeling, much like holding one’s breath is as if life itself is forcing me to continue. That is a why. That is my why.
Some Thoughts:
- Just reflecting on writing for a bit. Sometimes that needs to happen from time to time.