A COMPULSION TO WRITE

What gives me life? It is writing that gives me life. Since being a very little girl I have written, I am told that I used to write letters to my father when I was only 3. He left me and my mother and ran off into the army so that he could join Ralph Reader’s Gang shows. He always had a yen to go on the stage and indeed throughout his life he did this.

When I was eight years old my father had left us to go and live with another woman, but eventually he came back to us. We met him in an hotel and, when he arrived my mother and I were sitting at a table in the restaurant, and he got out of his bag lots of little notebooks with beautiful tortoiseshell covers. He emptied them onto the table along with lots of pencils. It was the best gift I could ever have been given. Even then, writing was part of me.

I have always written things down. I have a compulsion to write things down. It is as if writing it seals it, it starts in my head but then travels down to my fingers, and then through the pen or pencil and onto paper. I love the very act of writing and forming the letters.

I have a desire, sometimes, to “WRITE IT BIG.” Oh I don’t know if you have ever read the book “Mr. God This is Anna.” Anna used to have to “write it big” when any significant discovery about the world was made. I feel just like Anna.

Since becoming blind I can no longer write in that way and I miss it very much. But however I have to do it, I HAVE to write. It is a compulsion. I cannot see myself ever not doing it at all, however difficult the practicalities of it are.

Does anyone else feel like this?