Warning: Personal Post Ahead.

So, I realise that this post is pretty significantly late. And there’s a reason for that: to be honest, I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to publish this at all. A lot has been said about the issue of people oversharing on the internet: as a medium it tends to be unedited, unregulated, and undefended from all the bile and savagery online anonymity engenders. This post also felt a tiny bit too self-indulgent for my tastes: a little too “poor me, boo hoo hoo.”

At the same time, many amateur bloggers (like myself, natch) consider their writings to be a window into their brains, at least on some level. Whether those windows open onto anything worth seeing, or the internet equivalent of a urine-soaked brick wall covered in misspelled graffiti, is irrelevant: blogging, almost by definition, tends towards the intimate.

With that in mind, I decided to share what I’d written, but with the following warning.

Hold onto your butts, people – shit’s about to get all personal up in here.

Now, with all that hype, you’re probably wondering what I’m about to be going on about. “Is it a sex thing?” I hear you thinking, reading the minds of imaginary readers kind of being my thing. “I bet it’s a sex thing.”

In which case, I’m sorry to disappoint, ‘cause what I’m about to talk about is nearly as far away from sex as you can get: writing.

Long and hard, but still nothing to do with sex.

Specifically, the rationale behind it. See, I got this book a while ago called How To Be A Writer. It’s all about the industry – you know, how a book deal works, what agents do, the pros and cons of writing online, that kind of stuff. It’s pretty neat, if kind of British. But right in the beginning it asks a very simple question: why do you want to write?

Easy enough, yeah? There could be a bunch of answers: to tell a story; to change the world; because I can. Even the laughably-misguided “to be rich and famous” is a valid, if stupid, answer. The first time I read it, it took me a bit by surprise. So I had a bit of a think and came up with an answer: because screw you, that’s why. Think you’re so tough, eh, book? Let’s see how tough you are moved to the bottom of my reading pile!

Bam!

And there it languished for a while until I picked it up again a week ago, partly motivated by my starting of a new project (Out Of Reach, never to reach a bookshelf near you!). And then, again, right in the beginning, it asked me The Question: why do I want to be a writer?

I’d like to say it’s some high and noble goal, like spreading a message or changing the world. On the other hand, I have a forum for message-spreading and attempted-world-changing right here, and the most I’ve used it to say is that sometimes people are jerks in parent rooms.

So maybe it’s to tell a story? Certainly I like telling stories –anyone who’s had any kind of passing conversation with me can tell you that – but that’s not really what you’d call an answer. Saying you want to write to tell a story is like saying you want to cook to make a meal, or paint to make a picture: it just changes the wording of the question slightly.

So I thought, and I thought, and I thought. To be honest, for someone who’s always prided himself on knowing his own mind, it took an embarrassingly long time to come up with an answer. And when I did, it came from a rather unexpected place: high school.

Woo

Now, I don’t want to go on about it, but no one really understood me in high school. And I don’t mean that in a broody “Nobody understands me; my life is a black abyss :’(“ kind of way, nor do it mean it in a chirpy “I aM sOoO rAnDoM, nO oNe CaN kEeP uP wItH mE, LoLoLoLoLoL! ;PPP” sense. There was nothing particularly good about it: I just didn’t fit in. I was also that bit too loud, too sharp, too hard to get along with. If school was the round hole, I was the tesseract-shaped peg: as alien to it as it was to me.

Even as I grew older and learned enough about normalcy to paint a façade of it, I never really became normal. I‘m never part of a group, even when I'm with it; never “one of the guys.” I talk too differently, act too differently, think too differently. No matter the people, the setting, or the situation I do not fit in: I never belong. My strangeness never faded – and neither did the contempt such strangeness brings.

People generally don’t like things that don’t belong. It’s not their fault: most don’t even realise they’re doing it. It’s just some savage little remnant of our monkey days, and it tells us to shun those who don’t step into line socially. Even some of those with whom I’m closest frequently insult and belittle me: in a friendly way, yes, but always with an edge, a jagged little tone or look that says I don’t think you’re real.

And, to be perfectly blunt, it sucks.

It only took me till I was old enough to realise I was being excluded to start longing for acceptance: to want to be someone people instinctively like, rather than avoid. But at the same time, I knew I couldn’t just change myself. If I changed to fit in, then I wasn’t being accepted: some stranger wearing my face was, stealing what I’d always wanted and tricking what was left of me into thinking it had handed it over.

But one day, I found I had a talent for writing, as well as just a love of it. And somewhere, somehow – at a level so deeply sunk into my subconscious it took me nearly a decade to figure out what I’d done – I turned to this for my salvation.

So why do I write? I write to be understood. To show people what I see inside my head; to get them thinking my thoughts. I write to let people in, to show what it’s like to be me so that finally, finally, they’ll let me in too.

And it was this realisation that showed me why, after so long, I had really thrown myself into writing again. Why, when I had more on my plate than ever before, there mere act of putting words to paper had become so important to me.

Why I started a new project so different to anything I’d conceived before.

Heck, even why I started blogging again.

It’s because now – now I have a son.

And if I can get good enough at writing that strangers can get inside my head; that the same people who glare in disbelief when I slip up and let some of my true self leak through can start to smile instead; that even people who hate me can at least start to understand me; if, in fact, I can get other people to accept me.

Then maybe, one day, Oscar will too.