Writing Gave Me Power
Sometimes it’s easier to talk to no one than someone
Have you ever felt completely powerless? Like you had no way to change your situation? Did you feel like a pressure cooker, just building and building steam with no outlet to release your feelings — your energy?
Life is good at kicking us in the balls to the point that we just want to collapse under the sheer weight of things. “Fight or flight” may not necessarily apply, either. You can’t just run from your problems, and in many cases there’s seemingly no way to fight them either.
I grew up in a home where my thoughts were not welcome. “Children should be seen and not heard!” was the rule of our tribe, and it was brutally enforced. The biggest problem with that — for me, anyway — was that I was pretty clearly wired to communicate.
I think the worst thing in life must be to know what you are and what you’re capable of, but find yourself in a situation where you cannot be that thing. Singers sing, actors act, artists….art?
Talkers must talk.
Granted, not everything big talkers have to say is worth hearing to most of us. But to tell a kid who’s figuring himself out that his words are useless? I couldn’t fight this, and I couldn’t flee from it. Thankfully, I was emotionally intelligent enough to decide that my time would eventually come.
That kept me going.
So I escaped into books. Lots and lots of books. Everything I could get my hands on. I would literally sit at the kitchen table with a book and a dictionary. If I came across a word I didn’t know at the age of eight or nine or whatever, I looked it up, wrote it down, and said it over and over again.
In my room at night, after the lights were out and there was nothing but me and darkness, I talked. A lot. I told stories no ear would ever hear. I worked those words I looked up into them. I talked to my parents, telling them how I felt. I talked to God, though I wasn’t entirely sure back then that He was real.
It may sound crazy, but talking to a dark, empty room gave me comfort. Confidence. Power. It didn’t matter that I had no audience. That wasn’t really the point back then. What mattered was that I had a voice.
I knew I could talk long before I realized I could write. I went to college for talking — I earned a degree in Speech Communication — but I didn’t discover I could also write until I was in my mid-30s.
I stumbled into journalism mostly on a dare. I thought it would be fun to go to school for it, but the reward upon graduation was an all-expenses-paid trip back to Iraq for another year.
After piddling around with soft news stories and boring fluff about morale activities on our base, I made up my mind to tell stories that mattered. I didn’t really care what people were doing — I wanted to learn who they were.
I started with some random dude in our command, and it turned out he was a break dancer on MTV in the late ’80s. His story made me laugh, and I liked him for it.
Then I interviewed a member of the Army band who was a special-needs teacher back home. She made me feel for people I’d never really considered before, which came in handy when my daughter was born two years later with Down Syndrome.
In all, I told more than 150 stories in nine months, ranging from just random people I bumped into all over base to Iraqi dignitaries who were the religious and political decision-makers in our area of operations.
This experience taught me that I could write — oftentimes better than I could speak, even. The variety of stories stretched my mind in new and fascinating directions. They introduced me to many different kinds of people and taught me that the world was much more interesting than I was ever allowed to believe.
It gave me the courage to begin telling my own story. Out loud. To actual people rather than wallpaper and long shadows of trees and wind chimes from outside my window at night.
Writing gave me a real voice. It gave me actual power.
