Find your way (Not the FFVIII song)
You know, I think there is a... particular kind of disorientation that has nothing to do with being lost in a physical sense. It is the kind where you are sitting in a familiar room, surrounded by familiar things, maybe with familiar people even, and you look up and realise you cannot quite remember what you actually think about anything. Not what you are supposed to think. Not what is expected of you. What you actually think, in the quiet part of yourself that exists before you start performing for an audience of obligations.
It happens gradually and it happens to almost everyone at least once, I think. The accumulation of responsibilities, of other people's expectations, of roles you agreed to play at some point and have been playing so consistently that you can no longer tell where the performance ends and the person, the real you, begins. You make decisions by consensus. You carry weight you volunteered for because it seemed like the right thing to do, and then one day the weight is heavier than you budgeted for and you realise you have been so busy holding things up that you stopped checking whether you were still standing.
I am not, by disposition, someone who falls apart easily. I find the funny angle on things when possible and occasionally when it isn't. But even people with a natural inclination toward lightness have moments where they look inward and find the lights on but nobody particularly home. Where the version of themselves looking back from the mirror is made entirely of other people's requirements and none of their own.
When that happens to me, I write.
Not necessarily well. Not necessarily anything that anyone will ever read, or that I will want to read later, or that has a point. It's just the act of it. Getting words onto a page about something that is real to me, whether it is a scene from a story I have been carrying around for years or an observation about something I noticed that morning or a character doing something I did not plan for them to do and that feels more true than anything I had scripted. It is the place I go when I cannot find myself anywhere else.
There is something that happens in the act of writing, specifically, that I do not experience in quite the same way doing anything else. It requires enough of your attention that the noise gets quieter. The ambient pressure of being a person with obligations and relationships and a long running list of things you are supposed to be: all of it recedes, just enough, just for the duration. And in that space, something that is more purely you than anything else gets a moment to simply exist without being required to justify itself.
I think about the writers and storytellers I love most and how often their work carries the mark of this: the sense that making this thing was, for them, the same kind of return to self that reading it becomes for me. That the story was also a place. That the characters were also company. That the world built on the page was somewhere the person who built it could go and be something more specific than the sum of their anxieties.
I'm not sure if writing is therapy, though I know people sometimes use it that way. It is not escapism, exactly, though it involves leaving, so to speak. It is more like a compass? Something that, when you hold it correctly and stop moving long enough to read it, tells you which way is actually yours.
But say what, I do not think it has to be writing. I suspect it is different for everyone, and I suspect most people have something, even if they have not named it as such: the thing they do that strips everything else away and leaves them feeling, temporarily and with enormous relief, like themselves. Some people have music. Some people have painting, or running, or cooking something complicated enough to require complete attention. Some people have a game they return to the way you return to a place that knows you.
The medium is not the point. The point is the returning.
What I would say is: if you have found yours, protect it. Not aggressively or defensively, but with the quiet and sustained seriousness of someone who knows what it is for. Make space for it even when the space has to be taken rather than given. Especially then.
And... if you have not found it yet, keep looking. You will know it when you do, because it will be the thing that, at the end of it, makes you feel slightly more like yourself than you did at the beginning.
For me it is writing. It has always been writing.
I do not always know where I am going. But I know how to find my way back!