Inside our writer instincts
i have a question for you all
do you consider yourself a writer
at this point many people say no they
back away and that’s very understandable
because
when we think of writers we don’t think
of us
we don’t think of me although we should
think of me because i’m very attractive
i’m sorry i’ll quit the jokes but um in
all seriousness i think
when we think of writers we think of
something like this
it’s either an extremely intense manner
woman hiding away somewhere in a forest
typing away ferociously while nursing a
bad back because writing gives you
arthritis
while nursing an alcohol habit because
alcohol is necessary for good writing
or while having a nicotine habit because
what inspiration comes
other than when you smoke cigarettes
that’s definition number one the other
definition is
the public intellectual someone who’s
sharp
someone who can think someone who can
give lectures and participate in debates
someone like shashi tarou or jordan
peterson
it’s not because of all of these things
they’re writers they’re writers because
they can write newspaper bylines and
books
like they’re not mortals like it’s too
easy for them
and the third kind of writer is a
definition we usually resign ourselves
to
it’s the struggling student of
literature the jhula chap
you know the the some the someone who
works at
buzzfeed but can’t fail to quote fairs
emmett affairs
the guy who keeps track of trends on
twitter but pretends to talk about
nature at parties you don’t know
nietzsche
but what if i rephrase my question let’s
do that you know instead of asking you
like hey are you a writer or not let me
ask you something simpler
did you write anything today
as in did you put words on paper today
better yet did you type
sentences on your phone
or on your laptop
suddenly many of you will say yes you
will say yes
number of course i texted my friends and
told them the party was on even when
there was a pandemic outside
of course the number i emailed my
professor saying that i’m no longer
coming to class
of course i made my grocery lists on a
sheet of paper of course
i established my smart goals
my friends when you were doing those
wonderful wonderful things
you were writing i know it comes off as
a surprise but
the act of that is no different
than writing a creative piece of fiction
an essay a blog post or a bloody poem
it’s literally the same both are acts of
writing except one you do
for specific creative publishing
purposes the other
you just do because you can write
because you’re literate
right because you know how to either use
your native language
or english letters you know that very
well right you’ve don’t learn that in
school
so then why do we still have the problem
of many of us
not claiming our identity as writers
as chroniclers of our personal histories
why do we hesitate
to describe the world we live in not to
everyone else but to ourself
why are we afraid of dialoguing with
ourselves why are we afraid
of calling ourselves writers where all
of us
are
once again i think the problem lies in
definitions
it isn’t that the intellectual elite
have hijacked the world of writing
it’s us we have pigeonholed ourselves
we have boxed ourselves in we have
decided this is the conventional
definition of oh writer is
and this is it is not
that limits us that runs
us the risk of living unexamined lives
that runs us the risk of having no
personal history
of having to rely on other people
to make sense of our past our present
and our future
that makes us leave
a gift that our ancestors could have
never received
because they did not know how to use the
written word
but in order to facilitate my argument
further
let me tell you a story because stories
well they work wonders
so in 2020 when the world was ravaged by
code 19 like many people i felt
broken and beaten by a force i didn’t
understand i
was um i felt small
against this merciless demon
for the lack of a better word anyway
while isolating i
struggled to deal with my thoughts and
emotions they were all over the place i
was depressed i was anxious
so to fix it i tried everything i mean i
tried a vigorous exercise i tried
meditation i tried rock climbing i tried
all kinds of voovoo stuff you can find
on the internet including
counselors all in an endeavor to
fix myself i even tried being nice to my
family and friends
and we know how hard that is
but the knot in my chest remained i mean
i was still anxious
i was still miserable like many in the
world
i was done with this
so one night while um scrolling away on
my phone and wasting my life i
chanced upon a notebook on my desk the
light was just perfect it was almost
like
god intended for me to see this notebook
but um
the notebook had a proposition
which said hey what if you
[Music]
write down everything that’s on your
head in your head onto a piece of paper
see what happens i mean i had journal in
the past i’ve been
journaling for about a decade here and
they’re talking about my day things i
could do right or wrong but
this was different this was
what if i document exactly how i’m
feeling what if
i put down all of my pains
my fears my hopes my worries my dreams
like a vomit
like you know how you vomit that’s an
again that’s an awful lot of
responsibility to place on one piece of
paper but i tried it
for almost 10 minutes i wrote like a
madman
like someone has gone crazy my hand hurt
my nerves hurt but i didn’t put my pen
up
i didn’t care about grammar i didn’t
care about legibility for
10 minutes i just wrote and wrote
and wrote gibberish stuff that
made
no sense
when i finally was done i kid you not
for the first time since the lockdown
had started in india
i felt centered it’s like i was at peace
it’s like the knot in my chest was gone
it’s like i
understood the term getting it off your
chest
what that means curious
i wrote every day for three months now
the benefits were obvious i could see
myself
transform into someone who is calmer
more disciplined self-aware about
his flaws and his fortunes
but it wasn’t enough i wanted to test
this hypothesis
so like many people who feel entitled
enough to share their ideas in the world
i started a youtube channel the first
video i posted
was exactly about how anyone can start
writing at any moment
again the premise was simple you don’t
need a degree in literature you don’t
need to have the last name to root you
just need an
impeccable grammar i’m kidding you don’t
need any you don’t even need that
you just need a pen and paper and if
you’re a techno if you’re technology
friendly um
any app like microsoft word or pages
that allows you to write
okay i posted the video i waited
the response till this day continues to
be overwhelming
overwhelmingly positive hundreds of
people have reached out
many have never written anything outside
of school
outside the confines of cbse icsc ib
state board whatever
many haven’t even used a pen in yours
but almost
all report clarity better mental health
and understanding of their dark side
and an overall sense of well-being
this is still anecdotal evidence still
gathered from the 11 000 people who
follow me
but i knew something about this is right
there is something in this act of
spontaneously letting yourself go on
paper not caring about
what you write but just immersing
yourself
in the act of writing allows
the kind of relief that are unconscious
that are
that our psyches have been demanding in
these incredibly important times when
we’re bombarded with stimulus constantly
nonetheless i decided to go online and
look for answers and cement my
understanding about
why free writing worked
the next few lines um come from liz
cocker author of transforming memories
whose parents were alcoholics and i
think they best describe the benefit of
free writing for someone who’s been
through a lot someone has been through
depression anxiety ptsd
and for the general public here’s how it
goes
when you write it down the weight is on
paper
not on your heart when we carry painful
memories inside
there’s a weight that can drag us down
literally or figuratively
sharing memories of shame fear
neglect or abandonment even just on a
piece of paper
can lighten your load it can lead to
all sorts of unexpected results like
allowing you to sleep
giving you perspective and understanding
and helping you
make sense of what happened in the past
my friends writing allows you to freeze
your thinking on paper
it enables the deep nuggets of wisdom
hidden deep inside your psyche to
come out and surprise you
jordan peterson has a program dedicated
entirely to the process of free writing
it’s called the self-authoring program
it’s you can pay for it it relies on the
assumption that
your irrational mind the stuff that
hides inside
knows far more about you than what your
rational will present
allowing yourself to let go on paper as
you write carefully about your past your
present and your future
allows you the sort of clarity that mere
dialogue won’t
the difficulty with dialogue the
difficulty with verbal communication is
that
we often feel like we’ve achieved a
sense of catharsis we feel like we’ve
arrived at a better understanding of who
we are when we’re speaking with someone
else when we’re dialoguing
but as famous educationist thiago forte
says you know the mind was supposed to
come up with ideas not store ideas
which is why we need papers which is why
we need google drive which is why we
need storage which is why we need
a personal history captured in notebooks
that we can look at
one thing that has happened in this
lockdown is i have filled
notebook after notebook i have free
written so many times
that i can see the transformation of my
thinking
from extremely impulsive
and reactive to
an increasing degree of calm an
increasing degree of
deeper understanding of who i am
you don’t have to publish your free
rights and believe me when you first
write
they will be horrible so publishing goes
out the window anyway
you will most likely feel how stupid it
is to you and engage in an endeavor
where you’re
writing for you know four or five pages
and hoping something magical happens but
it’s often in those moments of
resistance that you will find
once you can get past that initial hum
gems of wisdom will flow many people
report
that things that were persistently
bothering them
finally come to a resolution the one
line
among a series of gibberish will unlock
something so deep about
yourself that might be that it might be
the only thing you need
for that day or month to figure yourself
out
you see the artist julia cameron
describes in her book
the artist’s way what she says all you
have to do
as a recipe as a prescription is do four
pages of free writing
every morning the premise once again is
simple
do not put your pen up if you’re on you
know if you’re doing it on a computer do
not move your fingers up put your
fingers up
don’t care about grammar don’t care
about eligibility just allow yourself to
flow
and see what happens when we
ride something my friends we tell our
brain that this is valuable
this is important while our culture may
lose the benefit of writing may lose the
importance of writing
our governments do not governments
people in legal businesses when they
want to make something official
official they write they ask for things
in writing
it is a gift our ancestors did not have
they had to go through wars and famines
all kinds of tragedies all they had was
old histories
all they had were fragmented memories
you and i have the gift of leaving our
personal
histories behind we have the gift of
understanding ourselves on paper for
free
you don’t need to publish it you don’t
need to write a book
you just need to write to yourself
every single day compounding growth
and i promise you if you revisit this
ted talk a month from now and you’ve
done free writing
your life will have changed
that’s all for today thank you so much
and i hope you enjoyed this