Be A Writer, Date A Writer by Gabrielle Kassel
During a impassioned and desperate conversation with a close teammate about why we’re twenty and single, I clumsily babbled off my favorite quote by Jaime Gil de Biedma, “I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I just wanted to be a poem”; meaning, I wanted someone to find significance through me. She retorted something sassy and bitter, but ridden with what she sees as truth, “it’s impossible to date a writer”.
I write this article in defense of all writers (included in such category, myself) and as advertisement for the ‘writing community’.
During my third year of high school, my father spent two and a half months in the Intensive Care Unit, I discovered my sexuality in the lips of a girl on the hockey team, and faced my first trial of unrequited love. The events threw a wrench of un-expectancy and growth in my life as Student Government Secretary, soccer/track/swim varsity athlete, and as the good girl clad in hair bows and Lily Pulitzer. Unable to justify my friend’s absence from my life with their lack of maturity I detached myself from the high school drama of beer pong, Dubra-drunk kissing, and skipping class for cigarette smokes. Self-isolated, and real-friendless, I found great therapy in writing.
Sometimes the writing takes the form of prose, sometimes poetry, sometimes a jumble of keyboard symbols and letters, but, it remains a constant therapeutic release in my life. Now, the desire to write is a large as ever: figuring out what I want to do with my life, who I want to be throughout my life, and who I want to ‘do’ for the ‘rest of my life’.
My friends all know to find me on Sunday mornings: Northampton Coffee or Starbucks, staring simultaneously and intensely at my computer screen and a book of poetry, pounding away at the keyboard, crazy-eyed and coffee-hungry. After weekdays of constructing articles such as this one, crafting paragraph in Spanish, and analyzing indie-films for my women studies course, a Sunday morning of writing as form of self-love is always the self indulgent medicine I need.
This isn’t an OKCupid biography or match.com self-promotion. Instead, an honest description of the release writing has provided me.
Writing articulates what’s swirling inside my head and heart, and by articulating it, I can release it into the keyboard, and therefore compartmentalize it or make sense of it. Writing as served as a way to document first (and last) dates, to document feel of the rugby ball when I make a try, to journal the break up’s and break down’s, and as a constant (free) therapeutic daily task.
Writers are busy remembering the important things, the smell of your hair on the first date, your crooked smile in the childhood photo in your mother’s bathroom, the number of Splenda’s you like in your coffee, the exact texture of your thigh flexing against their hand.
Writers notice the details, psychologically process their inner-thoughts, and take the self-love crucial time to reflect and process.
Writers will romance you with words, write poems about your knees, think through their feelings while still allowing themselves to feel them fully, communicate clearly and with regularity. However, the best sexiest writers will also romance themselves, write post-it notes to their smiles, and fragments to the vegan breakfast they cooked themselves.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past year, it’s that you can’t love someone into loving themselves. So fall in love with a writer: fall in love with someone who is in the process of loving themselves, who is busy at a coffee shop articulating all that there is to love. Writers are sexy because the ability to communicate is sexy. Become a writer, find yourself in the words you write.
