Why Writers Are Relentless, Restless, and Reckless

The Jazz of Writing

Before writing, you feel like a misfit, at times a scumbag, sometimes a god. You're too analytical to be an actor, too creative to hold a blue-collar job, too fidgety to stay still. The challenge isn't the beginning. Starting is easy, electric, inevitable. The dilemma is staying. People have blocks; they're scared of the novelty, of the unknown. But you? You're relentless. Restless. Reckless.

Sometimes you act like a fish jumping through the void, and you like it, love it, live because of it. You let the creepy guy talk to you at the bus stop. You lean in when others tilt away. Why? Because you're too curious. Everything is material. Where is this thing going? What's the peak of this relationship? Why does she do what she does? Questions flow like water, never enough answers to fill the space they carve.

You're not intimidated by life or extreme thinking. Sometimes people are scared of you. They're afraid when you speak truth without regard for their comfort, their ego, their defenses. You witness their walls crumble, knowing they'll shut down and shut you out—but it's your nature, this compulsion to excavate what others bury.

You fit everywhere and nowhere. You can befriend everyone, but no one comprehends you. Despite pouring your soul into pages, people fill these spaces with their context. They feel the writing but not the writer. When you've done your job well, you disappear, omnipresent and invisible. This is your god moment: controlling everything without trying, understanding there's no good and evil anymore, only the Tao of story. The dance of opposites. Good and evil. Silence and noise. The words you write and the spaces between lines.

Your parents wanted you to be a surgeon. You aspired to be a mathematician. You became a writer instead because life closed every other door. Now you have to compose. Not want to, have to. It's compulsion masquerading as calling. Everyone knows. They notice it in your eyes when you haven't written, the storm building under your skin. You become moody and mean when words stay trapped inside, fermenting into poison.

But then you sit with your favorite music and write. You arrange words like a musician composes a jazz piece. That's your Tao.