“You have to live to be able to write,” said my friend.
I was 17 years old and confused over my dreams in life. I could not get the urge of feeling alive to go together with the urge of writing. For some reason, I though I had to live a slow life to be a writer. The friend of mine was 42 and could live on his words that constantly turned into theatre plays in Berlin.
Today I am 24 and I have lost the feeling of having one home. Instead I feel at home where ever I go. I have lived in Sweden, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Japan and I am currently living in Korea. I have a master in Peace and Conflict Studies and been working with everything from teaching skiing to refugees and anthropology. Here in Seoul, Korea, I am writing and teaching some English.
The more I live, the more the words of my friend are growing and are being filled with meaning. I need impulses to be able to write. I need to know how it feels like to cry, love, be afraid, dance, run, hide, and laugh to be able to write about it, even if it is another person’s feeling I want to describe.
I think it is about following the question that I want to write about, to be close to the people concerned, to try to understand how it is to live under certain circumstances. But also about being honest to myself and to others with the fact that what ever I write, it is never going to be independent from the context. I am always a part of the structures of society, even when I criticize them.
I can never write about the things I do not have a relation to. Sure, I can put words on a paper, but I can never really express it, never get those words to go straight into the heart of the person who reads.
To be able to write I need to live. I need to live so that the words I am putting into sentences are filled with exactly that life. Because I believe, that if we do not feel, we cannot reach a state of compassion, and without compassion we can not improve the worlds we are living in.
