I write because I am terrified of forgetting. Not the mundane forgetting of where I placed my keys or what I ate for breakfast, but something more profound — the forgetting of who I was at a particular moment, what mattered to me then. Memory betrays us. It smoothes out the rough edges, turns the chaotic texture of lived experience into a neat narrative. The fear of forgetting, however, lives at the heart of what it means to be human — to be aware of our own impermanence and desperate to leave some trace. We write to resist the erosion of time. Yet writing is far more than an archive of what was. 

Forgetting is as fundamental to human existence as breathing, as inevitable as death itself. Every moment lived immediately begins its dissolution into nothingness. What feels vivid and essential now will fade to impression, then vapor, then nothing at all. People we love die and over time, even they become stories we tell ourselves, simplified until the person themselves is lost beneath our telling of them, until we’re only repeating the myth we made from their bones.

Even our own past selves vanish. I can scarcely conjure who I was at ten — not just what I did but how I inhabited the world, what it felt like to be that particular configuration of hope and fear and wonder. At ten, I believed that if I closed my eyes tight enough during thunderstorms, I could make the lightning stop. I believed this with absolute certainty, the kind of magical thinking that feels like power when you’re small and the world is large and incomprehensible. That child is gone. Without deliberate preservation, she might as well never have existed. 

This is the abyss that haunts us. If everything we are and everyone we love ultimately dissolves into forgetting, what was the point? If no trace endures, did any of it matter? The fear of forgetting is finally a fear about meaning itself. What is completely forgotten cannot signify to anyone.

At first glance, writing appears to be preservation in its purest form. There are experiences from my adolescence that survive only because I wrote about them when they were fresh. Reading old journals, I encounter a stranger who is nevertheless undeniably me — not just what I did but how I thought, what seemed earth-shatteringly important then but would have vanished entirely without the written trace. Whole years of my life would be reduced to three or four disconnected images, the rich fabric of daily existence completely lost, if not for those pages.

Yet preservation alone cannot explain why we continue to write. When I sit down to write about an experience, I do not yet understand that experience fully. The page teaches me what I think.

There is a painting that haunts me when I think about forgetting: Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring.” A young woman turns to look over her shoulder, her lips slightly parted as if about to speak, a pearl hanging from her ear. The painting captures a moment so fleeting it barely qualifies as a moment, just the instant before speech, a turning, a glance. Everyone who ever knew this girl is dead. We do not even know her name. The room in which she posed no longer exists. Yet here she is, alive in paint, her gaze meeting ours across four centuries.

What moves me is not the fact that Vermeer preserved her but how he transformed her. The painting is not documentation. It is interpretation, emphasis, a way of seeing. The dramatic lighting, the mysterious darkness behind her, the intimacy of her direct gaze — these are choices that create meaning. The girl’s expression suggests she’s just been called, just turned, is just about to respond – she’s caught in that split second of connection before self-consciousness sets in. The darkness behind her isolates her, makes her the only thing that matters in the world. Vermeer looked at an unknown girl and saw something worth preserving — perhaps the way it felt to be seen by her, to have that particular consciousness acknowledge his — then created something that allows us, centuries later, to feel the presence of another consciousness, to sense what it might have been like to be seen by those eyes.

This is what writing does. We do not simply record experience; we discover within it patterns and meanings that were invisible in the living of it. Joan Didion writes, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” — the narratives we construct about our experience are not luxuries but necessities.

All of this is true, and yet none of it quite captures why I write.

I write because I must. Not in some romantic, tortured-artist sense, but in the simple sense that not writing makes me feel half-alive. When I go too long without writing, experience begins to pile up unprocessed. For better or worse, it has become how I metabolize life.

I write because I am afraid of living in a blur. So much of life passes in a semi-conscious state — we go through motions, we let days dissolve into each other.

I write because I am lonely in the way all humans are lonely — trapped inside a single consciousness, unable to fully convey what it is like to be me. Writing is my way of reaching across the void to say: this is what I see, does anyone else see it too?

I write because there is beauty in the act itself. Not just in beautiful subjects but in the work of finding the right word, shaping a sentence until it has rhythm and force. There is deep pleasure in this, a satisfaction that has nothing to do with whether anyone else reads what I have written.

But mostly, I write because I am mortal, and writing is how I resist — not death itself, but the passivity of simply letting life happen to me. This is not about achieving immortality through great literature. It is about the simple human desire to imprint some evidence that I existed and that my existence meant something, even if only to myself. We make our marks knowing they will fade. We write anyway. Not because we believe in permanence but because the act of witnessing our own lives, of transforming experience into language, is how we inhabit time rather than simply endure it.