I Write To Be Able To Go Places Inside Myself

My earliest memory of writing included taking down dictations as a child, writing down memorised lines of poetry penned by dead poets, tricky spellings that had silent ‘h’ and ‘t’ that were invented only so that little children can be trapped and condemned. At times while finishing off home-tasks that included tracing the country’s map or taking down date-and-events from History textbooks, I remember asking my mother – ‘Can I instead write something from my mind?’ She’d say yes first; but then she’d say I could do that only after I finished ‘everything else’ I had to do. By that time my time would be up, often. By that time I’d need to be fed and tucked up in bed. Else we’d run late for the next day!

How that ‘everything else’ never quite finished...

It took me many years, a lifetime almost, to realise how that ‘everything else’ never quite finished. Maths homework, Science quiz. Admission forms for courses that needed little writing. Job resume. PowerPoint presentations and Quarterly reports. Dinner menu and grocery lists. And no matter how much I tried, I still ran late for the next day.

So now, I write to be able to give myself permission to write. Because, they won’t let me. Because, the time wouldn’t ever come, otherwise. Nor would ‘everything else’ ever gets over.

Writing is my guilty pleasure.

Writing is my guilty pleasure. My access to a world where one can write from one’s own mind, even!

For every time that I do “everything else” a part of me kills a living, breathing story inside me that wants to be born.

But wait, that didn’t come easy. Truth be told, it doesn’t come easy now, too. Now that the words under my name changed on my visiting card. Once an actuary, now an author. Awards, even. The staleness of ‘practical choices’ has been stumped, clean bowled over. They say this almost as if it’s a triumph, this moving over, this change of hats. From a careerist job into an artistic pursuit. As if the right has reigned over the wrong. Wrong! Because every day till today I wage a strange, inexplicable war with myself as I try and not try to write. It’s a strange animal, this thing called guilt of the subconscious. For every time that I do “everything else” a part of me kills a living, breathing story inside me that wants to be born. And for every time that I keep away “everything else” so that I accept my feelings and let them be legitimized with written words, I begin to feel a certain sense of evasion. A sense of breaking rules. Fear. Panic. A need to run away. I cannot bring myself to my writing desk without that feeling of being on the edge, without that funny panic about being caught, for doing what I must not do. That guilt. That pleasure.

Wrong! Because every day till today I wage a strange, inexplicable war with myself as I try and not try to write.

I write to be able to accept the way I feel.

I write to be able to accept the way I feel. Every time that I sit down to write. And every time that I don’t.

Once at a psychological counsellor’s chamber, excavating through my hidden shames, broken trusts, shards of glass-like promises, I was told to write a letter to someone who I wanted to say something but couldn’t say. Someone who I needed to deal with, but could not. Someone who must forgive me, or I must to him or her. I did. I wrote a letter after so long, that I baffled myself. “Who did you write to,” the lady had asked me by the end of it. And it was then that I had realised I had written to myself.

I write, to be able to write a letter to myself. That too.

At a later point in my life, fallen face down with a number of medical conditions I’d then take a lifetime to recuperate from, writing became my way out. I do wish I could say I picked up the pen and won a battle, but I didn’t. It was the pen that picked me up. Even as I didn’t write ever since I left school, for years together. Even as my reading, too, went down with time. It took my hand and walked the way like an old friend who I could not scare away. The deeper I fell, the stronger its grip grew on me. Catharsis, is that what they call it is?

I do wish I could say I picked up the pen and won a battle, but I didn’t. It was the pen that picked me up.

And so I came around, and so I eventually made friends again with writing.

Writing Elixir

When I wrote my first book Elixir, I had cried and laughed through the process along the way. In the months that I wrote the first draft, the ‘outpouring’ as they say, the nature of the story had me to dip myself inside me almost incisively. Inside my loneliness and doubts. Why do I feel this way, exactly? - To ask myself over and over. Masochistic, almost, to nail and pin and probe your long-kept secrets to which you had lost your keys. In search of things we don’t ourselves admit, of things we don’t let ourselves feel, stop by. Writing Elixir took me to places inside me, I had not had the occasion to visit earlier. And then, in pursuit of further perspectives, it then made me take a tour to places inside others who, had I not sat down to write the book, I wouldn’t take off my coloured pair of glasses and take a close, empathetic look. Once you do that you know fears and failures that look strangely familiar. To understand why they did what they did, what would happen if I were them, you ask when you write. The answers you get are precious.

Writing Elixir took me to places inside me, I had not had the occasion to visit earlier. And then, in pursuit of further perspectives, it then made me take a tour to places inside others who, had I not sat down to write the book, I wouldn’t take off my coloured pair of glasses and take a close, empathetic look.

So I write to stop muddling with my emotions. I write to stop gaslighting myself, to stop invalidating my own feelings. To let me tell myself how I really feel underneath when I pull up a smile and tell the world I’m just fine.

I write to be able to go places inside myself. It’s fearsome to go there, at times. At other times, it’s reassuring. I write to assure myself - that we are more similar than it seems from outside. All of us.

Often to think of myself, I think of things that made me who I’ve been. And I end up listing down more names of books than of people. I wonder about their authors, though. Did they know they were shaping and moulding people’s mind when they sat at their writing desks to write? Did they wonder how, even after their petty mortal lives would be over, they may go on to live, breathe, walk the earth on the legs of their words? And now as I write, wild as it may sound, I wonder about such things closer home. When on strange moments on strange mornings at times when a stranger’s note wait for me in my inbox, to tell me how reading my words mattered to them after all, how they identified, cried, nodded heads… I tell you!!

And so I write, for it’s my only chance. To leave a part of me behind when I leave.

It is writing that has given me a certain permission in life –to stop and listen, to not hurry – which I had hardly allowed myself so long. For writing has nowhere to go without smelling the roses on its way, without hurting itself with its thorns. The home-tasks can wait, I know now. The dinner menu to set, the groceries to order, answer-scripts I have left to check. The map pointing, the dates and the events that others made history with, business numbers, PowerPoint slides. It is okay to let things wait for a while so that we can allow ourselves to stop and ask how we feel. And, let us listen. Write down. From the mind. Even as “everything else” is yet to be over, even as we run late for the next day.

“There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground,” Rumi had said. This thing called writing is perhaps mine.

Sinjini Sengupta is an author and a TEDx speaker. Her first novel – ELIXIR: a dream of a story, a story of a dream – has been adapted from an award-winning and internationally acclaimed short-film written by her. The views expressed are the author's own.