Why I Write

One escape that brought healing and developed me as a writer came from the weekly routine of going to church – without my parents. Of course, in those days,  I was unable to know the impact of Sunday School. But now, as an adult, I know my love for the poetry and music of words was honed from reading the King James Bible. The questions of why do we exist and how do we exist kept me searching and questioning for the best way to live. The metaphors, paradoxes, parables that explained these questions formed my analytical skills. The Bible’s story about the origin of sin, its symbolism of darkness and light, its insistence that there was a God that both loved me and would kill me if I misbehaved, provided the foundations of the narrative I strive to complete now. Although I was at once terrified, confused and intrigued by this  book, I gleaned from those early Sunday school classes that life has a larger meaning than what I could see in my immediate existence. It gave me hope. I began to breathe in a philosophy that life was to be lived out as truthfully and as honestly as possible. I concluded that truth comes through seeking, reflecting, and chasing it.

With that said, my personal search brings me to the realization that my narratives must explore the journey to truth, whether it be the truth about the African-American woman’s fight to selfhood or whether it be the truth about breaking generational curses.  Perhaps it is the truth that it is our own limits that destroy God’s plan that this earth’s bounty should benefit all, and  our common spiritual inheritance is that each one of us is created to share dominion over the earth.  I want to write how we all are part of a larger narrative where one decade – or fifty decades – cannot crush the human capacity to live fully and truthfully. Of course, as I explore these positions and possibilities through writing, I expand my own boundaries and lift the psychological limitations that were placed upon me. This journey, this narrative, is my experiment to prove that Jeremiah 1:1 is gospel. God told Jeremiah, who doubted his own purpose and authority over Judah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”