Why I write

"The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought, this in turn makes us think more deeply about life, which helps us regain our equilibrium." ~ Norbet Platt

I've never considered myself much of a writer. As most of us now do in our professional lives, I find myself writing all day in the form of emails, IMs, Powerpoint presentations and the like. This form of writing is merely a tool to communicate asynchronously with one or more counterparts, often in different locations. But since I do so much of that, writing in my spare time (whatever that is anymore), writing to express thoughts, as opposed to communicate information or guide co-workers, had never really occurred to me.

I remember what triggered my desire to start a blog. In 2007 I attended a marketing leadership offsite in Istanbul, where one of our senior marketers went on about the future of things like blogging and micro-blogging (this is where I first heard of Twitter). And it turns out he is an active blogger. Calls himself a 'serial opinionator', I could relate to that!

So here I was, thinking I should give this a go, to understand the mechanics of it more than anything. And what happened really surprised me: I found I really liked writing, and the more I wrote the more I found I had things to say.

Every once in a while I'm asked for whom I write. Good marketing question: who's your audience? I don't actually know how many read this blog, but it can't be that many. Dozens, maybe hundreds. But the answer is really simple: First and foremost, I write for me.

Platt's quote cited at the top of this blog resonates with me. Writing about a topic helps me slow down my own thoughts on the subject, helps me externalize my own opinions and ideas, in order to react to them in a different way.

There is also something incredibly liberating about unleashing one's thoughts onto a medium where they will be preserved. It frees the mind in a surprising way. I often find myself with many thoughts and emotions and ideas swirling inside my head. And just the act of capturing them on a piece of paper or electronically acts like a relief valve, giving me peace about not losing the thought while not having to keep it suspended in mid-brain by fear of it falling into the murky abyss of my subconscious. For those of you who have read or watched Harry Potter, how incredible is Dumbledore's Pensieve, allowing him to forever capture intact memories for future retrieval and actually relive them as an observer?

I guess this is not new. People have been keeping journals and diaries for centuries, probably for these very reasons. So why not just do that, instead of writing publicly? I've been thinking about that question lately, and I think the answer is that writing with the potential of being read by others forces more discipline, more rigor, and hopefully yields a better outcome. But I think it goes beyond that: Writing my own thoughts in a way to make sense to someone else challenges me to think through them in a deeper way. I'm not merely writing them down in a clerical way, I'm hoping to evoke an emotion, prove an argument, convey a message - both to myself and to whomever cares to read what I write.

Catharsis is a word I've often heard but never truly understood. So I looked it up. And I was surprised by how well the definition captured what I'm feeling here: '..Purification of the emotions, primarily through art, that brings about spiritual renewal or release from tension. Elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression.' Bullseye! In fact, three colleagues of mine in the past couple of years, when diagnosed with cancer (all in their 30's!), started blogging about their journey fighting this terrible disease. They described it as cathartic... (Two successfully recovered, one very sadly didn't make it).

So here we are. Now that I've surprised myself more than anyone at how much I enjoy writing, I think I'll keep at it. I actually love that I really don't care whether I'm any good at it, this is not a criteria for me. Sort of like the wise words 'dance like nobody's watching, laugh like nobody's listening', I write like nobody's reading :-)