Does one need to know what to say or have a reason to say it to justify their call to speak?
Loaded question, nuanced answers. Brings the didacticisms to mind, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” and “think before you speak”. Entrapping idioms for an overthinker (like myself). How does one know if what they’re saying is nice or awful, good or bad, worthy or indulgent (choice words very telling of shadow self)? How does one know when they’ve thought enough to warrant speaking? To justify their chiming in to the conversation? Is it impulse, is it cognition… is it both? Does more of one make a voice more or less worthy? And what about the person who suffers the opposite affliction? Who speaks for the sake of being heard, with little thought to content and impact? Is one right and one wrong? One authentic and the other neurotic? Does intention transmute quality? Certainly not reverence.
Does writing serve when it is a form of cyclical self-analysis, exploring one’s depths through the unravelling of your thoughts? In essence, isn’t that all writing ever is? An embellished exposé of your inner world, enclosed within its expressor’s chosen style, fiction, article, screenplay, essay. Must writing serve to be of value or to justify itself? Is writing without purpose a form of ‘mental masturbation’, as the Italian’s have elegantly coined it? Going round and round in circles, never to arrive anywhere but asking the same questions under the guise of different ideas, in perpetuity. The investigation itself becoming more purpose-giving than arriving at the conclusions. So much so you divert any routes to an actual finish line, sacrificing fulfilment for the company that forever seeking offers. The search more tantalizing than the arrival.
Or is it, like all art, worthy for the very extraordinary fact that your existence, already so exquisitely implausible from conception, and your lone life story, are finding spontaneous expression in this unfathomably unlikely moment. Formless, floating thought born out of a coagulation of happenstance to form concepts out of words that fall one after the other.
No one has ever spoken or will ever speak like you again.
Now, isn’t that enough of a reason to write?