Why I Write

By Rain Sullivan

Published in Writerly Magazine, June 2022

I’ve always been a runner, an escapist looking for a way out. But both running and escaping are funny terms. They imply leaving, getting away from, abandoning, yet so often fail to disclose—but by their very nature entail—the result of the venture. There is no ‘running from’ without ‘arriving to,’ no ‘escaping the old’ without ‘discovering the new.’

I didn't know from a young age that I wanted to be a writer. In fact, in ninth grade a friend of mine told me she was writing a book and I balked at the idea. We, children, do not write books. We check them out from the library because we’re told to, we skim them for facts, we lug them around in our backpacks, then chuck them into our lockers when the stack grows too heavy. We don’t write books. We don’t have stories.

A year later, I picked up Harry Potter. Everyone was chatting about it and I hated knowing I’d only seen the movies. But I had actually picked up the book long before then, back in third grade. I took it to my teacher, was asked to read the first line, failed to do so, then was promptly told to return it to the shelf. I wasn’t ready to read books at that level yet. “Go pick something else.” I did. I read her the first line of an easy-peasy children’s book, walked away with it held close to my side, and never opened it again.

It’s hard to say for certain exactly when the running started, but I’m pretty sure that moment was at the very least a contributing factor. Reading was lame and I sucked at it, while numbers and theories made sense. Goodbye, Mrs. Whomever-the-fuck. Goodbye, forced Silent Reading Time. Long division’s got my back; mitosis will reliably never be meiosis.

Around the same time, I started taking gymnastics classes. Then private lessons. Then joined the team. Then competed state-wide, region-wide, and nation-wide. In the span of just a few years, I’d discovered that turning my back on books had no consequences. I’d be an athlete or a mathematician or a scientist or heck, maybe all three.

But by my sophomore year of high school, I was eager to know why everyone bowed their heads when Dobby was mentioned—the movies hadn’t caught up to the books yet, and I grew jealous of James Connaroy who’d read installments one through five three times already. So I went to the library.

I didn’t read the series, I consumed it. Slowly, meticulously, tasting the words and absorbing the story, inch by inch, cell by budding cell. This simple thing—binding and print and paper—whisked me further from reality than I’d ever experienced before. Higher than the balance beam, freer than flipping weightless through thin air, happier than when I received an A in statistics. At the time, I didn’t quite understand what a rare and powerful vice escapism could be, but I sure as hell leaned into the indulgence.

I read and read, and ran and ran, until new ideas, unseen scenes, and unspoken fragments of dialogue began to percolate through my mind. They didn’t mean much. I didn’t know where they had come from or where they were meant to go, but I stored them away for safekeeping on scraps of paper and in voice memos, not sure if they’d ever evolve into more. I secretly hoped they would.

I graduated high school the day the back of my mother’s neck was cut open and a walnut-sized brain tumor was carefully pried from her spinal cord. I continued to read. I continued to write. In the hospital, in my room, in the days after at a cafe when I should have been at practice. There was a certain safety that existed in a world that lived only on paper.

My mother survived. She recovered. She flourished. She and my father escorted me to university and helped me decorate my room and select classes. All was fine, all was well. But this was not the time for fantasy worlds and unwritten stories, this was the time for pragmatism. Gymnastics paid for school, school prepared you for life, and your major determined what sort of life that would be. This was the time for biology, chemistry, and calc.

They say fact is stranger than fiction. This concept once boggled me since dragons, demons, and dire wolves were far stranger than any bits of life I had ever known—but I can now attest to its truth. In April, the day before National Championships, the week before finals and the conclusion of my first year at university, my father collapsed in a fit of seizures while at work. Brain cancer. Again. Different this time. Inoperable and widespread.

The stories in my head ran wild. They were architects building new places, doctors patching up holes and, magicians rewriting wrongs. I ran dizzying spirals around should, want, and need. I was a caretaker, a pre-med student, a secret scribbler. I was a pillar of an ebbing support system, an athlete with a reticulation of injuries, an escapist clawing my way from page to page. I was a runner, leaving and arriving, leaving and arriving. Never still. Never calm. Never right where I needed to be.

My father passed away a year later.

I need a job. I’ve got a job. I hate this job but it’s good. I can't breathe. Find a new job. Start again. How’s mom? Will I have enough for rent?

Opa’s sick.

Opa’s sick?

Can you help?

I can help.

We need you here.

I’m on my way.

I worked in a physical therapy clinic alongside caring for my grandparents, taking on more roles that suited a goal that, in retrospect, had never been mine. My Opa’s health declined quickly. For years, his cancer had been shelved—“one of the lucky ones”—and only returned to him at the spry age of eighty-two. Better than fifty-seven, like my father. But in November the cancer grew malignant. It had waited for him to weaken, to tire, and bit by bit it killed him.

It took about a month for the realness of my grandfather’s death to sink in. It continues to take time and space and effort to tease his death apart from my father’s, to tease my father’s terminal brain cancer from my mother’s close call, and my mother’s close call from my grandmother’s memory loss. Oh, didn't I mention? Alzheimer's.

But that following Christmas something clicked. I went for a run to clear my head, and with it looked my desire to write square in the face:

One year, I told her, you’ve got one year to try your hand at writing, one year to tell this twisted little tale that won’t be put to rest, one year to write a book. If you fail, be done. If you don’t love it, be done.

It started with two two-hour writing sessions per week. That was the new year’s resolution I’d set for myself, figuring it was enough to get the ball rolling. I didn’t yet know how much time writing a book would cost, or how much planning needed to happen before ideas became words, words became paragraphs, and paragraphs became chapters. I didn’t know how much energy, grit, gumption, and space (creative and physical) making something out of nothing required.

January rounded into February and February slid into March. My sessions increased in length and frequency and soon a day without writing felt incomplete, unwhole. Without writing I felt incomplete, unwhole.

Day in and day out, I’d rush home from work to get lost on the page, tangled in the timeline and sticky-note storyboard I'd pinned to the wall. I bored my poor partner stiff with ramblings about my fictional friends, the plot holes I'd dug for myself, and how plot holes ought to be impossible considering I was both the fire and the fuel.

I continued to work and care for my grandmother, but my heart and my head were bound to the page. The deeper I dove into my world, the further away certain aspects of the real one became. I’d finally found the one place I wanted to run to, to escape into. The one place where I felt I was exactly where I needed to be.

The year wrapped up and I sat in the car outside the print shop with 416 warm pages in my lap. From the start, I'd told myself that that would be enough, that I did not need more, that a completed attempt would make me happy. But as the stack weighed down on my thighs, I knew that was total bullshit.

So, I write because in writing I don’t have to run. I don’t have to dodge bullets or fight to be something I’m not. I don’t have to hide or conform. In writing, I am at peace. In writing, I am still. I am complete. I am whole. And I am able to make better sense of the strange, strange world we live in.

Thank you for reading. <3 Rain