Writing as an Obsession, Therapy, and Need

By: Linda Villamarin

In my writings, the seasons are as long as I want. Some do not arrive. Others are repeated. Still others are eternal. I even create some of them myself, and hot snow falls with rainbows in the background.

I painted, with beautiful words, a paradise in which I sheltered under giant green trees that had pollen from which I let myself get high. I looked away from the paper in front of me and out the window. I saw white snowflakes falling, which, through my eyes, reflected the thousands of ideas floating in my head. They fell from very high, all passing in front of my eyes. There were too many of them, and I decided which one to keep, which one to observe. But they all left quickly, and I had to concentrate.

I looked down and kept writing, refusing to leave my shelter between spring moods. It was a magical realism I didn't want to wake up from. Everything seemed as sublime and sedative as I wanted it to be. I stopped feeling my hand on the paper. The ink slipped, with the grace of dancer's feet, and moved along the wooden floor.

I had to stop at some point, because reality was not infinite and fantastic, like my writings. In real life, I had a thousand other things to do that suddenly landed on the ground.

I went out into the street and only then did I realize that winter had begun. I didn't know how long ago; in my shelter, it was always spring.

I met real people, writing truths and reading serious things. I saw myself in the real world and started to panic. I feared I wouldn't be able to articulate a decent phrase, because I was thinking about the world of fantastic words I planned to write.

I didn't want to take conscience. When I finished all the “real" things I had to do, I went back to my paper shelter and continued with the fantasy. I noticed my breathing as I wrote and felt happier and more alive than ever. Writing itself was my salvation, the escape from reality that I had built for myself.

That's me, a woman who creates realities parallel in which she escapes when she wants to, or even better, when she needs to. A woman who’s not good at speaking in person, but when she writes, she pulls out every word in her mind and doesn't stop.

Writing is a way of life. Sometimes a necessity, sometimes a pleasure. It's real, like art itself. It is an escape to the life that we want. It is a way of letting off steam, of communicating all the emotions of the world. Writing is the most real way of communication that exists, because it allows us to re-read and re-think ourselves, and thanks to this, to know ourselves, to understand those pieces of inner lives that we sometimes can't decipher. It's the circle of trust we create for ourselves. What our writing can tell us about ourselves is as real as taking a blood sample to decipher our DNA. That's why it's necessary to keep writing. It's a way to detoxify the soul and feed it at the same time.

Every time we are in front of the paper, whatever we’re writing, we have the opportunity to be as honest and creative as we want to be. We’re in front of someone who will not judge us and will welcome our words as if they were the most sacred thing in the world.

Every time you are faced with a problem, a moment in your life that seems to have no way out, a relationship that worries you, whatever it is, literally, whatever it is, write it down, and read it again a few days later. This is always my advice. Everything on paper becomes real and possible. Writing has that power, the power to heal, to put everything into perspective, to advise, even from reading our own words. Writing gives us answers when we think we're writing problems. There's no guilt in writing. There's no shame in drawing a reality that makes sense to us.

Writing is being. Really being.