In the education world, we talk about the idea of not just learning to write, but also writing to learn. This is precisely what I urge you to do.
I have always been writing: I started my first journal when I was six years old, logging what I got for Christmas, games my childhood friends and I played, details about the fights my sisters and I would have, and anything else that foolishly occupied my youthful mind.
Once high school started, I found that childish and silly. So, I stopped writing. I decided the only way to enrich one’s mind was to read critically acclaimed literature. This did make me more culturally literate, but it made me feel like I had nothing to say since I wasn’t one of the great classic writers.
It wasn’t until my second year of college that I started writing again. I had professors who encouraged journaling just for the sake of putting pen to paper, drilling me to say something even if I had nothing to say. And of course, the Chrony, where I was encouraged to be constantly writing about any and all things.
Now I write always — poetry, journaling, writing down thoughts that sting a bit more than others, logging surreal dreams, running a secret blog to write whatever, writing love letters. I write often, and I write for the sake of writing.
I want every young woman to do the same. I will spare you the speech about how writing is the key to success and power. You know that individual experience matters, but do you know that your experience matters? What I want to emphasize is that writing is the key to liberation. Women who write liberate themselves and their sisters in womanhood.
In the mid 20th century, there was the belief that a woman’s greatest fulfillment could come only from domestic labor, and women who felt dissatisfied were isolated and made to feel crazy.
Then, the women started writing. Betty Friedan sat down with multiple housewives and asked them if they were happy. One on one, the women informed her of their disaffection with current gender roles.
When women began to voice their unhappiness, Friedan wrote, “They realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name.”
Once these women sat down and shared their stories, with Friedan putting pen to page, women didn’t have to feel ostracized in their experience: they could read about everyone else experiencing the same thing and give a name to what they were feeling.
Perhaps you feel like there is nothing for you to uncover. Still, you must write.
Nina Simone was a singer and activist, but I want to pay attention to her songwriting. She may not have been a novelist, but she was still a writer. Her prose came in the form of songs.
She described how after the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four girls, she wanted to kill the men herself.
Her husband helped remind her of the importance of her writing. She says that he told her, “Nina, you can’t kill anyone. You are a musician. Do what you do,” so she sat down and wrote, and didn’t stop writing until her song was finished.
Simone’s writing was important. Friedan’s writing was important. Every female author’s writing is important, and so is yours.
So maybe you don’t write some feminist manifesto or civil rights anthem or discover a large, hidden, societal issue — but your writing is still necessary.
Your journal might hold the work of a generation. At least, that’s what happened to Sylvia Plath.
I mention Sylvia Plath not because of “The Bell Jar”, but instead because of another work: her diary. “The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath” is a publication of her journals from ages 18 and on, published posthumously.
She wrote this journal earnestly, honestly, with no idea that anyone else would ever read it. And now women today, myself included, hail this work as moving and monumental.
In her journal, she wrote how she “already wasted two hours writing stream-of-consciousness stuff in here when really your stream isn’t even much to brag about, after all.”
A great literary author thought what she was writing was useless and bad. You might think the same, all while writing a masterpiece. You never know how valued your experiences are until you write them.
So for the last time, I urge you:
Write today, write tomorrow, write always.
