After Being Told That Saying “Writing Saved My Life” Is A Cliché

I have been told and have read that it is a cliché to say that writing saved your life. I have also read and heard multiple times that as a writer, you choose to write for others, or to write for yourself. Why share anything that’s written for yourself alone? It is, as I’ve heard, merely ‘masturbation’. 

Well, this will offend the Puritan impulse of such statements, but people can certainly derive a lot of pleasure out of watching other people masturbate, if that’s really what it is. And how can any writing be only that, when it takes place in the shared space of language? Can I not write for both myself and others? Can writing for others not be writing for myself? By writing to myself, can I not help others? 

For many years of my life, I did not share my work with anyone. Not because I was indulging in some sort of masturbatory act, but because I had internalized the idea that no one would be interested in what I wrote. No one I knew read poetry. In fact, most people I knew scorned the idea of poetry. Yet I kept writing. Why? 

Because writing gave me something to live for when I did not want to live. It allowed me to find beauty in acts of trauma that had occurred to me. It was a way to explore the world, not just my own experience. Malign such writing as self-therapy, if you must. But don’t negate all writing that doesn’t serve a utilitarian purpose. 

If a poem seems puzzling, if the language is strange, if the structure of the lines is challenging, do not presume the writer is writing for themselves alone. They may think in a different way than you do; they may have far different experiences than you do; they may have a different linguistic inheritance; they may be desperately trying to communicate to others something that others have never heard expressed before.