Writing as Personal Alchemy
Toni Morrison, it is said, had a habit of writing early in the morning, a routine practiced with steadfast devotion. This is the kind of detail that finds its way into advice columns, those tidy narratives about how the people we admire shape their habits that structure their success. Morning routines, in particular, have become a cultural fixation — fetishized in the endless churn of social media posts promising productivity hacks and reduce greatness to the mechanics of habit. But when I watched The Pieces I Am, the profoundly meditative documentary about Morrison, what struck me was not her mornings but the omnipresence of her writing. Morrison’s real acts of writing weren’t confined to those early hours. She was always writing. Her mind was in perpetual narrative motion, shaping sentences from her observations, capturing serialized thoughts in a small notebook that seemed, to others, haphazard and spontaneous. To Morrison, they were part of an ongoing dialogue with herself and the world. There was no sanctified ritual of prescribed hours to “become” a writer. There was only writing. Writing as a way of seeing, of being, of existing in the world — not a practice set apart from life, but life itself. The routine was incidental. The writing was everything.
While thinking about my days, I find myself caught in a kind of rift. This year, in particular, has felt like an ambush — an onslaught of events, of behaviors in others that beg to be understood, and of shifts within myself I can barely begin to name. It was a deluge that resists easy comprehension, yet with a quietly persistent compulsion to articulate its meaning. I want to put it all into words, into sentences that can contain the chaos, that might draw some shape out of the torrent. Writing, after all, is not merely a record but an act of reclaiming the self, a process of reconnection that goes far beyond the distractions and compulsions of the present. To write is to resist dissolution, to assert a self beyond the flux of the immediate. It is reclamation, a way of carving out meaning where there was, at first, only noise.
The how of this, I came to realize while listening to other writers, was also a question of how not. The fragment, those disparate behaviors of people observed across space and time, are not just abstractions; they are tied to real people, to lives and histories that didn’t exist in isolation. We meet each other most acutely at our crossroads, and with some people, it becomes clear that their actions are shaped by deeper currents. I could feel the weight of their pasts, their hurt, their hope. But let’s be clear: some of them inflicted harm, real harm. Sometimes deliberately, with intent, sometimes with the casual recklessness of the oblivious or indifferent self-absorption. And yes, some of them deserve a direct and unambiguous “fuck you.” They do. But the thing about fuck you’s is that they don’t carry much weight beyond being an act of private reckoning. They’re personal exorcisms, not prose. Writing, when it matters, is something else entirely. Writing takes the raw, unfiltered mess of experience and transmutes it into meaning.
And so, these past days, I’ve been sitting with myself, thinking. This year has been heavy with events, weighted by the actions of others. These events, these choices, carry weight, but they remain raw, unresolved. There’s meaning in it somewhere, I know, but meaning requires shape, and shape requires writing. I suppose that’s what the next year will be for.
