I have often said to myself, “It’s 4:47 a.m. and your right eye is twitching. Why are you writing?”

By 4:48 a.m., I’ve moved on. I have more ideas to scribble down, more opinions to share with my paper before sleep snatches them from my mind. It’s a process, one that has a mind of its own. It even occurs at reasonable hours of the day. When thoughts start rushing through my brain, I have to record them somewhere, anywhere that they’ll fit.

I didn’t always have such an uncontrollable impulse to write. If my fifth-grade self could see me now, she would ask why I am willingly doing the thing that used to bring me so much suffering. Those elementary school writing assessments were quite possibly the most miserable assignments that plagued my childhood, as well as the childhoods of my less academically-inclined classmates. Unfortunate early experiences with writing led me to swear off recreational writing until the latter end of middle school.

In eighth grade, my English teacher allowed us to write about anything we wanted for one project. That was when I realized that writing doesn’t have to be just some tedious chore rife with grammar rules and overly extensive vocabulary. It has the potential to be about expressing feelings and thoughts that are difficult to communicate face-to-face.

Personally, I write to fulfill my desire to say everything that I would never say in real life and rant about subjects that I know no one will listen to. Even in fictional works, people write in order to articulate something in them that cannot be actualized anywhere else. Writing is done to achieve satisfaction in creating one’s fantasies, to convey everything that they can’t say.

That’s why people choose to write. It’s therapeutic. It’s something that allows us to release everything that we’re either incapable or afraid of vocalizing. This is how we put our thoughts into words, speak our minds without actually speaking.

So, I don’t mind waking up at obscene hours just to scrawl something on a piece of paper. I’m not annoyed by the fact that I have to scramble to find a pen at random times of the day.  Writing doesn’t have to be some infuriating task that must be completed. It can be anything our minds need it to be, and that is the beauty of it.