If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing.  Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking.  Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing.   It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability.  I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.

To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating.  It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.   

When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for  many reasons, some quite innocent.  Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”  

The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”.  It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt.  It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.

The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and other challenges.  Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically.   We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.

For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless.  I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.  

That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose.  If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.