There was a time when I wrote without understanding why I wrote. I would write my ideas down, and on those occasions when I penned something particularly insightful or important, I would imagine myself sharing my discovery with the world. A moment of fantasy in which I imagined all the reactions; shock and horror, insight and revelation, praise and admiration. Imaginary people and their imaginary reactions played an important part in the process for me. I engaged in different genres of writing at different times in my life, but always there was the persistent idea that I wrote in service of people. Their entertainment, their knowledge and growth, their education.
Not understanding the motivation behind my writing left a big void that was filled by fantasy. I imagined that the reactions of loved ones, friends, and strangers alike would give me what I was searching for because I never allowed myself to remember what I was truly searching for: peace, escape, Home. My writing has nothing to do with people, and their imaginary reactions that once provided tiny morsels of satisfaction are unimportant.
Now I know what I search for, and I know that path has nothing to do with the imaginary self-shaped creatures I encounter in my awakenings called “people”. In truth, people are in the opposite direction of where I am truly going, so if I find myself searching for something from people when I write, that is a sign that I am oriented in the wrong direction. I search only for a way out, and by their very definition, people are a sign that I am moving in.
Now as I write I do not believe that I am writing for people. When I occasionally ideate something insightful or impactful, I briefly entertain an imaginary situation in which an intelligent, educated, thinking person reads it and somehow reacts. But I quickly dispose of that because I know that is only imaginary: I do not take any satisfaction from it in the same way an author would not glean satisfaction from his fictional characters reading his writing in which they are featured. What I truly seek I cannot get from the characters I write into existence every time I awaken, and when I realize and believe that, I understand why any satisfaction I did once receive was hollow and unfulfilling: I was proffering my story to the characters I had written in that very story for validation.
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