Toddlers in the mud

What are we really speaking of when we speak of writing?

It is not merely words reflected and made tangible on paper, but the quiet effort of turning a pulse of thought, a flicker of feeling, into the alphabet.. into something external, tangible, and transferable. Writing makes the most private sensations so widely visible.

And even nobler still, it allows another human being to carry your thought into their own mind, to feel new feelings, to birth new thoughts like a secret seed, and in their soil it grows into something you’ll never fully know.

I've always admired writers for their ability to craft intricate narratives, a loop. And it is never the same loop twice. Words fracture differently in every reader. The same sentence that once consoled me might wound another, or make them laugh, or make them weep. This instability.. this public and quite often refusal of words to mean only one thing, I find more beautiful than anything the alphabet was ever meant to hold.

When I am asked how I am doing or where I stand in life, I stumble. I say ridiculous things that feel more honest than proper answers: I am a toddler in the mud, or I am lost somewhere in Neruda's ocean. But in truth, no spoken answer, no matter how poetic or precise, ever truly holds the depth and complexity of a feeling. Conversation, with its quick exchanges and social expectations, is too often a shallow container for the vastness of human experience. People rarely listen with the patience and intensity that living deeply, intensely requires; they wait for their turn to speak, they search for familiar patterns, they nod along to rhythms they already know. Talking reduces me to mere noise, to predictable pleasantries, to small replies carefully measured for small questions that were never designed to invite truth.

But in writing, I am more than myself. I am not “me”, I am an experience, an occurrence, a fragment of time. Writing frees me from bias, from the heaviness of self. And the reader, unlike the casual listener, approaches with intention. They lean into the page, searching. They meet me in the mud, they swim with me in the ocean, and more beautifully still: they expand my words into their own. My experience becomes theirs; their laughter, their grief, their secret recognition is altered forever by words I wrote in silence. And that, perhaps, is the most human thing we can ever do for each other.