304. Writing To Awareness

To write is to talk about yourself. Regardless of the form it takes, everything you write is an expression of yourself. It’s your feelings, thoughts, ideas, memories, and imaginings that shape the texts you create.

Through the act of writing, you bring a part of your interior self into the world using language. You compose the contents of your mind in a way that makes sense on the page. The kind of sense it makes changes depending on what you’re writing. A poem makes sense in a different way than an academic paper makes sense. This practice of sense-making through writing also develops your awareness. As you think and write, you come to understand yourself a little better.

To read your own writing is to talk to yourself. By reading yourself you gain a more distant perspective of yourself. The distance increases as the time between writing and reading increases. When you read a text you just finished, you might not see anything new in it. But when you read something you wrote years ago, there is the potential for insight. Not only are you no longer in the mindset of composition, you are no longer the same person who wrote the words. The self that was no longer exists, and the self that is has had new experiences in the meantime.

Your present self necessarily sees the world a bit differently from your past self. Having experienced more, you’ve also become more aware. By reading the words of your past self, you have an opportunity to discover something about the structure of your own being. Even though you might have changed greatly, you are also in many ways the same, just as any two people have more similarities than differences because of their shared humanity.

It is, in fact, partly this shared humanity that you will find in your old writing. But perhaps more importantly, you also get to encounter the structure of your own idiosyncratic intentions — all of the desires, aversions, and beliefs that you were (and possibly still are) holding too tightly. By seeing this structure more clearly, you gain a broader awareness of yourself and a chance for liberation from the attachments that bind you.