When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time putting words on paper. Not homework, but stories and poems. The occasional music-less song. Not a typical activity for a teenage boy, but I didn’t have a lot of extracurriculars and writing felt natural to me. I got relatively good grades in English and Composition. I once wrote a story about a group of men in the Middle Ages who spent a Sabbath night gambling in a tavern. A stranger joined them, won all their money, and then offered to return it if they followed him home to help with a simple task. The final reveal was that the stranger was the Devil himself, bargaining for their souls. I wish I still had a copy of that story. It’s probably a high-school sophomore level of cringe, but I was proud of it at the time.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing. I’m not sure why. Life I suppose. Jobs, kids, bills, routines. All the usual things that have a way of swallowing whatever sparks you had when you were young.

I still wanted to think of myself as a writer. I kept telling myself I would get back to it someday, and that thought concluded the effort I would put into it. Funny how we tend to cling to identities we are no longer connected to.

But, it turns out identities have a kind of gravity. Even the neglected ones keep tugging at you. Mine eventually pulled hard enough that I had to listen.

A couple years ago I decided to ease my way back into a writing practice with the simple task of writing a full novel, a modern retelling of Peter and the Wolf. Without really intending to, I began to see a lot of myself in how I wrote Peter. The hubris and stubbornness that eventually leads to Peter’s unnecessary demise. (Psychoanalyze that.) I worked on it for a long time. It was painfully slow. Calling myself a writer was too generous. But I was learning how to dream again. How to translate the stories in my head to printed words. I built a decent manuscript before setting it aside, realizing that setting out to write a novel after not writing in years was its own sort of hubris. But that project was healthy for me. It reminded me how much I love taking an idea and turning it into words. It gave me a voice again.

I’ve spent the majority of my adult life programming and writing code, and while you can find a certain kind of beauty, harmony, and story in well constructed programming, the analogy only goes so far. Code is by necessity declarative and utilitarian. Code is sterile and emotionless. And, in my experience, once you start making an income from an activity, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the pleasure you had at the start.

Creative writing gives me a place to spread out all of the fragmented thoughts and emotions in my head and organize them into properly formed ideas and beliefs and opinions. It’s a creative outlet to speak things I don’t feel comfortable saying with my voice.

In the last few months, I have challenged myself to deliberately write something every day. It does not have to be good. Hopefully it’s not terrible, but I’m aware that my magnum opus will probably not be composed in the Notes app while waiting for Evey’s gymnastics practice to end. It doesn’t have to be long. If I have two sentences that feel clever, I count that as a win. I don’t actually write every day. Not even close. That’s the goal, but I miss days. Sometimes multiple days. I’m not that disciplined. I don’t beat myself up over it. I’m supposed to enjoy it, and I don’t like rules anyway.

Most of what I write is not good (or safe) enough for public consumption, but every now and then I hit on something that feels decent. I will noodle on a couple paragraphs for a while, walk away for a while and revisit with a clearer head, and try to find the voice or the tone or the volume.

I don’t have many places to share things. I sometimes send pieces to friends or family who humor me by telling me they read it. Or post them anonymously on Reddit. Social media is not the best outlet for anything long form or personal, but when I am chasing a little validation or craving a tiny dopamine hit in the form of likes, I post something there.

What I am trying to say is simple. I stopped writing for a long time and my life was smaller because of it. Writing is not something I do for an audience (let the irony of this piece slide). It is something that makes me feel alive, even when the work is uneven or strange or half finished. So I am trying again. I am trying to make space for the part of myself that has been waiting to speak.