Once I was at a bar in New York listening to a singer-songwriter talk about her creative process.
She introduced a song, saying, “I wrote this song on a day when [something significant] happened. When I experience [something significant], my way of dealing with it is to go home and write a song about it.”
This has stuck with me for many years. My desire to write was with me then, as it is now – but, similar to now, I struggled to make space for my writing, to allow my writing to have power in my life. As I sat there listening to her song, I thought about the ways that I dealt with things that happened to me – binge-watching TV shows I’ve seen a hundred times, eating candy, crying on the subway. And I wished that I had a process more like this songwriter’s process – experience something in the world, go home to my little writing corner, and write it out.
That’s what I’m trying to do now – I’m trying to utilize writing as a way to make sense of things, to sift through my thoughts and my feelings. And it’s making me really happy.