What Makes Poets Write and Artists Create (Reflection Paper #4)
Alicia Foster
I am a writer. My entire life, it has been my single overarching passion. I want to be published one day, whether it be my novels, my short stories, my poems - or all of the above. I want to write scripts for movies and songs for musicians.
From that perspective, the philosophical point I find the most interesting is Anzaldua’s mention of “limbo” and the “psychic unrest” that puts artists such as writers there. I never really thought of it that way. But even if I hadn’t been on the border in other ways, this would surely place me there, after all.
Anzaldua says that to be a writer, she must trust and believe in herself “as a voice for the images”. These images are as much a part of her, and of all writers, as a limb. I know I cried for days when I thought I’d lost one of my lyric books in the city. This is interesting philosophically because it speaks to the notion that in order to escape limbo, you have to believe in yourself. And trust.
Trust on its own is difficult enough, but I think, as a writer, it’s that much harder to trust yourself, because you’re constantly second-guessing and taking leaps of faith that sometimes go nowhere, or drag you around in circles. It’s a bit of a paradox, considering that’s what you must do to be free enough to write. Besides that, it’s more than difficult to believe in yourself, especially in a society that can and likely will scream at you than anything and everything you’re doing is wrong. So perhaps it isn’t society’s dictations and definitions and rules that places us in these borderlands, not always. Perhaps sometimes, or even most of the time, it is how we deal with those things. We are our own borders a lot of time, and it’s completely unnecessary.
Anzaldua says that, for her, writing is “an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience”. I find that beautiful, and all too true. The meaning may not always feel good or be what we want to hear, but at least it’s not meaningless. We have to believe in ourselves and that the negative things will be positive in the long-term because it will make us stronger. We have to consider them all lessons learned.