the words i eat

I love to read. When I was a child I consumed books. I ate their words and they became a part of me, of my: personality, language, expressions, feelings, experience of the world. From the moment I could read on my own, I was picking the largest books I could find. The shapes and lines that form letters and words were something that made sense to me, that felt true to me. My whole world always felt distorted and out of balance, unless I was sheltered between the pages of a book.

When I graduated high school I stopped reading quite as much, and eventually I went years without picking up a book and finishing it cover to cover. I thought, quite pretentiously, that a true bibliophile is only considered such when they spend their time on “real” literature. I was so ignorant! Oh, all the things I did not yet know then.

I’ve realized in recent years that I never stopped reading. I never stopped consuming words and stories, I just found new mediums to consume them through. I read the news, I read essays and articles. I read comics and web-toons. I read fan fiction. I listened to podcasts and eventually audiobooks. I found new genres to love, including what many consider to be “trashy”, filled with lazily constructed characters, plot holes, and too much erotica. But all the same I would consume the words, because they’ve always made me feel full in a way no food, drink, or good company ever could.

Because of that truth, I had to open myself up to all of the possibilities to read. I had to, because I was ravenous. The better the words felt the hungrier I was for more. And if the writing was less than brilliant, it was easier to eat.

Opening myself up to all of these new mediums and genres, I learned how to sense good writing like a tingle on the back of my neck. When I finish something truly good, I suddenly want to write again myself, like a burning in my chest and on the tips of my fingers. The sentences begin constructing themselves inside my head.

Reading more erotic stories and trashy romances hasn’t been the only development in my consumption of stories though. I learned my love of reading from a woman who’s tastes are so narrow and bland you’d think she was eating communion wafers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Her favorite author is Clive Cussler. She inhales suspense and crime thrillers like breath, and reads them almost exclusively.

And of course, you know from my previous confessions of some of my reading proclivities—I’m not one to judge what someone likes. I am however, still a judgmental asshole. So I will judge a person based on the breadth and depth of their taste and their willingness to try things outside of the comfortable boxes they construct for themselves to live in.

I grew up in a world that praised me for my writing almost as much as it praised me for my penchants for reading. A world that lauded the words of old, long dead white men, for whom this society was built by and for. You may have guessed the direction I’ve been leading you towards, the development in my reading habits that led me towards my juiciest, choicest, most delicious meals yet.

It was in abandoning the work of the European classics and mediocre modern white writers that I found the richest and fullest works to satiate my hunger and fill me up. It all started with Colson Whitehead. A professor had recommended his books rather highly, praising his newest release—The Underground Railroad.

It was a year after I had flunked out of that professors class (and out of college) before I picked up The Underground Railroad, but once I did I couldn’t put it down. I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but I had been starving myself of the words, and I was so hungry that I had my mouth lined up at the edge of the plate, scraping in every bite as quickly as I could tunnel them in.

From there it was a slow ascent into the wider world; up into a perception that was so much larger that the one handed to me. A worldview I could construct for myself started to click into place after that, and eventually I learned to choose authors whose intersections of life were more varied, more similar to mine. I chose authors who are queer, who are mentally ill, who are black or brown, who are autistic, who are trans, who grew up in poverty, who grew up in religious cults. I chose authors from all walks of life, but rarely ever who were heteronormative and white.

Anyways, I digress. There are two things I wanted to write about tonight. The first was the book that I read that made me feel that fiery tingle in my fingers, that made my inner writer come alive for the first time in a year. The second was writing itself, and my feelings towards it.

The book is called Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi. And of it, I have to say, it is brilliant. There are several standards I judge writing by. The first is how the voice pulls you in and compels you to stay in the story. Another is what the voice wants to tell you—if it is new and yet old, universal and yet singular, deep and wide in the way it hits your chest and makes your mind reel. There are many other standards but I’d say these are the two that I most consistently stand by when I’m deciding if I would recommend the reading to someone else, or to myself to read again later.

The voices in Freshwater were unlike any I’ve heard before, yet so familiar it was almost uncomfortable. I was immediately compelled to stay in the book to figure out what was happening, and it took me quite a few chapters. The story was relatable, yet completely out of my reach. I felt some of the characters experiences so deeply, yet was also being shown into worlds I’ve never seen and could otherwise have never imagined for myself.

The way that Emezi writes left me with no emotions towards the characters/ voices narrating the story, because I felt transported as if I was one with them throughout the entire tale. When the book was over I cried. I cried not because of the ending, not because it was happy or sad, simply because it was over. Words have not filled me in this way since I first discovered them.

And that leads me to how I feel about writing. I gave up writing at some point, though I don’t think I could pinpoint the moment I gave it up. The moments leading up to that point, I do remember.

Writing is the only thing I ever consistently wanted to do. No matter what dreams or ideas I had for my future it was always something I held simultaneously to those other dreams. The other dreams only existed in the first place because everyone and everything in my life played on a loop that writing could never sustain me, and I believed them.

As a child I wrote in a dozen different ways. Letters, poems, essays, stories. Entire worlds I would create in my mind for my stories to take place in. As I got older and continued only to become more and more pretentious with age, I stopped creating stories and worlds, because I felt they would never be good enough or interesting enough. Any time in my life that I haven’t found myself to be immediately good at something, I tend to give up on it.

And so I gave up on writing fiction for a long time. I didn’t completely erase it from my mind, I just told myself it was something I would do later. Instead, I turned to essay as a compelling, short form of writing. I was even so bold as to self publish some of the things I wrote on the internet, in the form of a blog. In the end that was a bad experience I had, opening myself up too much, in the wrong ways.

When I was writing on my blog, finding purpose in my writing, at least I was getting some practice. As we all know, all good writing comes from practicing and drafting and re-writing. My purpose, I thought, in my writing, was to help others to be morally or ethically better by sharing how I myself was attempting to be morally or ethically better. Again, with age I only became more and more pretentious.

Eventually with the death of my faith in the christian god, that form of writing lost its allure and sense of purpose. I turned next to poetry. And I wrote a lot of poetry. I don’t think any of it was ever good. I convinced myself it was good for a time, until I read poetry that was raw and deep and lyrical and that burned me when I ate it. Then I gave up the poetry too.

And in all this time of seeking to be a “good” writer, and giving up what I was writing because it wasn’t good enough or purposeful enough or interesting or compelling or whatever nonsense—in all of that time I lost something that had once been precious to me. That had once been just for me. When I was a child I wrote the stories I wanted to create because I couldn’t find stories like that. As a teenager, I wrote out of a place of pain and fear, to release things that otherwise would have hollowed me out and melted me down until there was nothing left.

I let go of the thing that had truly saved me over and over. I thought that the things that saved me were the things I was writing about; love, joy, family, friends, community, morality, a gospel of salvation. But what saved me was the writing itself. The words that filled me my whole life also emptied me. They emptied me of all the things that would’ve destroyed me. And so, it’s words I’ve come back to. Words that I consume each day, words that I empty out here. And maybe this time, I won’t give it up. Maybe this time, the writing will save me again.