Ink-Stained Compulsions

 

Copyright: Sanjay Basu

Why I Write Like My Brain Depends on It

The Ghost That Whispers in Ink

There’s a peculiar voice that lives inside my head.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. But it’s always there. Whispering. Tapping at the inner glass. Not with urgency, but inevitability. Like an itch you don’t notice until it becomes a rash. Or a melody you hum without knowing the song.

And the only thing that calms it?

Writing.

Not tweeting. Not texting. Not even note-taking. I mean full-bodied, belly-of-the-beast writing. Paragraphs that make me pause, punch the air, or quietly hate myself for a week. That kind of writing.

I’ve been doing it since I was twelve. Back then it was scribbles in the margins of schoolbooks. Later, journals, stories, essays. Most of them are read by no one. Yet now, in my middle years, something shifted.

I hit “publish.”

Why now? Why not then? And more uncomfortably, am I simply another middle-aged knowledge worker falling headfirst into the quicksand of the attention economy?

Let’s take a walk through that mess.

Why Now? (Also, Why Not Then?)

Some people find writing later in life. I never lost it. What I lost, what I only recently reclaimed, was the need to share it.

For decades, my words were for me. Private logs of intellectual scavenger hunts. Crude blueprints for ideas I didn’t yet have the courage to build. Little notes to self written with the hopeful desperation of a castaway bottling messages to an unknown future.

But publishing them? That always felt… arrogant. Or worse, self-promotional.

There’s a cultural guilt that clings to people who “write out loud.” A suspicion that sharing your thoughts must mean you want something. Fame, praise, validation, followers.

So I waited.

I waited until the pressure built into something resembling necessity. Until the act of not publishing felt like stuffing my lungs into a shoebox. Until I realized, somewhat grimly, that most of the people whose ideas I admire don’t wait for permission, they declare it. Thoughtfully. Sometimes recklessly.

And let’s not pretend technology didn’t grease the wheels. Tools like Grammarly gave my inner editor a sabbatical. Platforms made it ridiculously easy to tap “Publish” and pretend you didn’t just hand your internal monologue to a thousand strangers.

But the real reason I started publishing?

Because I couldn’t not.

That’s not a typo.

Writing as Cognitive Homeostasis

Let’s get uncomfortable and precise.

Why do I write obsessively? Why do I craft, shape, and release these strange thought-children into the world?

There’s a psychological concept called cognitive offloading. It’s what your brain does when it outsources internal clutter, like setting a reminder instead of memorizing a date, or sketching a mind-map to make sense of chaos.

Writing is the ultimate offload.

For some of us, especially the neurodivergent among us, our minds aren’t neat filing cabinets. They’re spiraling archives of associations, contradictions, and sensory noise. Writing becomes a way to land the mental plane before it crashes into the tower of forgetfulness.

But that’s only half the story.

According to research in the Journal of Writing Research (yes, that exists), expressive writing doesn’t just clarify thought. It regulates emotion. Studies by Pennebaker and Smyth show that people who write about personal experiences develop better immune function, sleep more deeply, and even experience fewer visits to the doctor.

Why?

Because writing metabolizes emotion. It takes the raw, unchewed bits of experience and runs them through a digestive process. What comes out (hopefully) is something palatable—sometimes even nourishing.

For me, writing is how I understand the world. Or at least, how I make peace with not understanding it.

It’s a ritual. A reckoning. A neurological balancing act. And if that sounds dramatic—well, welcome to the inside of my head.

Neurodivergence and the Word-Hungry Mind

Let’s call a thing what it is.

I don’t write like this because I have free time.

I write like this because my brain is wired to need it.

And I’m not alone. Many people with neurodivergent wiring, autistic thinkers, ADHD minds, and highly sensitive souls experience the world with the emotional equivalent of the gain knob cranked up to 11. Sensory input hits harder. Thoughts loop tighter. Ambiguity needles more deeply.

Writing becomes a stabilizer. A sonar ping in the dark. A way to trace patterns in the fog of too muchness.

Temple Grandin, in her seminal memoir Thinking in Pictures, describes how language often lagged behind her visual imagination. But once she found the rhythm of writing, it was like finding a key to translate internal cinema into language others could understand.

I relate to that more than I can express in a single paragraph.

Words give structure to otherwise formless mental weather. They allow me to narrate the inner noise in a way that feels like making something, not just surviving it.

There’s beauty in that. But also, let’s not pretend it isn’t exhausting.

Attention or Actualization?

So we’ve established I write compulsively.

But publishing?

That’s different.

Publishing is public. It’s social. It has consequences.

It can stroke the ego or shatter it.

And yes, it feeds the dopamine loop. Every like, comment, or share? That’s a little hit of “someone saw me.” Which, if you’re honest, is a drug we all carry the receptors for.

But here’s the contrarian view. 

Maybe publishing isn’t just about attention. Maybe it’s about closure.

A thought unfinished is a splinter. A story unread is a limbo. Publishing provides finality. This is done. It’s yours now. I’m free to move on.

Publishing, then, isn’t always ego. Sometimes it’s exorcism.

Sometimes, we don’t write to be heard. We publish to let go.

And maybe, just maybe, our desire to be read isn’t vanity.

Maybe it’s connection in its most distilled form.

Urgency, Legacy, and Mortality Math

Let me confess something uncomfortably true.

I’ve started counting backwards.

Not birthdays. Not steps to the fridge. I’m talking about the number of “active years” left to do something meaningful before entropy catches up and I start misplacing nouns.

When you’re young, time feels infinite. You can afford drafts, delays, detours. But somewhere in your fifties, if you’re paying attention, you begin to feel the grip of impermanence. Not morbidly. Just mathematically.

You realize that most books you admire were written in their author’s 40s or 50s.

You realize that Vonnegut, Didion, and Baldwin didn’t just appear on bookshelves. They wrote their way onto them because they stopped hiding their sentences in desk drawers.

So you start hitting “publish” not because the world demanded it, but because time did.

And yes, maybe age brings confidence. Or impatience. Or both. Maybe there’s a growing intolerance for keeping your ideas stuck in your head where they can’t help anyone, not even you.

Writing Isn’t Always Noble

Let’s get brutally honest.

Writing is not always noble.

Sometimes it’s neurotic.

Sometimes it’s an avoidance technique. A way to procrastinate doing the harder thing, like making a phone call, reconciling a relationship, or figuring out your taxes.

Sometimes, writing is how I avoid being a real human in the real world.

It lets me pretend I’ve dealt with things when I’ve only described them.

This isn’t a full indictment, it’s a caution. The pen is powerful, but it can also be a hiding place.

It’s important to ask. Am I writing to understand something? Or to avoid confronting it?

Because there’s a difference between exploration and evasion. And writing can wear both costumes.

Also, not all writing should be published.

There are pieces I’ve written that deserve to stay locked away. Not because they’re bad, but because they were for me, not the world. Some writing is therapy. Some is scaffolding. Some is sacred.

Knowing which is which is part of the craft. And the ethics.

The Curse of the Unwritten

Let me tell you what hurts more than rejection.

Unwritten thoughts.

Unlived ideas.

Essays you almost wrote but didn’t.

Those are the ones that haunt me.

Not the published ones that flopped. Not the ones that got misread. I can handle misunderstanding. I cannot handle regret.

So I write.

I write to outrun the ghost of the unwritten.

I write because otherwise, the thoughts start rotting in my head. They congeal. They sour. They start whispering that maybe I have nothing to say after all.

But once I write, even if it’s messy, I reclaim that territory. I take ownership of that little acre of mind-space. And if I publish? Well, that’s just letting the light hit it.

Even weeds look less menacing in sunlight.

The Restless Quill

So, why do I write incessantly?

Because silence, for me, is not peace. It’s a pressure cooker. A build-up of unsaid things.

I write because I need to hear myself think. And I publish because maybe, just maybe, someone else needed to think that thought too.

There’s no moral ending here. No neatly tied bow.

Just this!

In a world screaming for attention, writing isn’t my way of shouting louder.

It’s how I remember who I am.

Even if no one listens.