Writing is so important

Writing, really, is learning how to think.

I did not always believe that.

In school, I was “good at writing”. Teachers said so. I got points for it. High grades. Nice comments at the bottom of the paper. I learned how to structure an essay. Introduction. Three arguments. Conclusion. Stay within the frame. Stay within the frame and you will be rewarded.

But that is a very different thing from writing later in life.

There are no assignment topics, no word limits, no rubric. No one telling you what counts as a good answer. You sit alone with a blank page. You decide what matters. You decide what is true. And I mean you. Not AI either. It’s a different game.

I have had a conflicted relationship with writing. I have started a daily journaling practice many times, and abandoned it almost as many. For a long time, I’ve appreciated the art form, but perhaps never made it a core part of my identity.

Throughout this process, I’ve come to think that the dread of writing never fully goes away.

Call it the blank page syndrome or whatever you want. That subtle resistance before you begin. The strange heaviness that comes with deciding to focus on it. The sudden desire to do literally anything else. It is almost predictable.

I do not think that feeling is laziness.

I think it is genuine fear.

Because writing honestly means confronting your own thoughts, and that is often uncomfortable in a way that is hard to describe. When you write about something real, especially something you are unsure about, you are forced to look at your confusion directly. You see the gaps in your reasoning. You see where you are bluffing. You see where you do not know.

It is much easier to write an essay about Southeast Asian history for a university course. The boundaries are clear. The sources are there. You are assembling and interpreting. Even if it is hard work, it is contained.

Writing about your own beliefs, your ambitions, or your insecurities is different. There are no answers or easy wins. It is just you and the page. Do you trust your own mind to make sense of it?

And also, no one is telling you to do it.

And that is exactly why it matters.

Writing slows your thinking down to a pace where it can be examined. Thoughts that feel solid in your head often dissolve when you try to put them into words. Others become sharper. Stronger. More coherent. The act of forming a sentence forces you to choose. What do I really mean here? What is the claim? What is the assumption? Do I actually believe this to be true?

You cannot improve a thought you have not articulated.

You cannot fix a belief you have not defined.

In that sense, writing is not just communication. It is the rawest form of self-confrontation. It is a way of dragging vague intuitions out of the shadows and into something structured and observable. And once they are observable, they can be tested.

It seems to me that this challenge captures something essential about the human condition. We all carry things inside us that we would rather not look at. Doubts. Envy. Fear. Half-formed ideas about who we are and who we should be. Left unexamined, they grow quietly in the background.

You cannot fight what you refuse to see.

Put it on paper.

Look at it.

Name it.

Only then do you have a chance.

That is why I want to write more seriously now. Not because it looks good. Not because it is productive. But because learning how to write is learning how to think.

And I do not want to outsource that.