Why I Write

It’s Blue Monday.

So naturally, I decided to launch my website as a writer today.

Not because the timing is perfect.

But because writing was never about perfect timing.

It’s about paying attention. Being there. Saying things that want to be said.

My site gathers what I write and what I’m working on:

stories, articles, essays, fragments, departures, arrivals.

Words as places you can linger in.

If Blue Monday is about heaviness,

this is me choosing to put something into the world anyway.

How I write, usually

The thought of building and publishing my own website had never occurred to me until I started publishing texts on various mediums. I have always written, as the many scribbled-on pages and half-forgotten notebooks that I unearthed when I cleaned out my parents’ apartment bear testament to. I remember a time in high school, when I was even known for my scribbling: I would work on my ideas in the afternoon, and the following day would bring the text to school, to be passed around in class. One after another, my classmates would read the serialised story I was producing; they would comment, sometimes even wish for certain developments (“Wouldn’t it be great if she would meet this boy again on the bus tomorrow?”)

The writing cannot have been good. It was more or less pulp fiction, without any depth or character development. But what it shows me is that I enjoyed getting the attention but actually not being directly in the limelight, since my text was what everybody focused on, and I would only enjoy its reflecting radiation, just like the moon is casting back the sunlight. I don’t think it ever occurred to me that the weird stories that I brought to school would have any effect on how my friends were seeing me, I was truly hiding behind my own words. And “weird” is still a friendly adjective in connection with my writing: there was one story in particular where the (female) protagonist rescues one of the Pet Shop Boys - yes, this was the late 80s - from a certain death due to his alcoholism.

Weird is still a word I would use to describe my fiction. The topics of identity and genders and all the uncertainties that are connected to them for me, the question of “what is home”, and how places shape the stories of the people in them, feature heavily. In parallel, I write non-fiction as well, mostly about concepts connected to my work as an HR professional, on leadership, labor law, and the development of the Human Resource function. These two genres exist next to each other on the page, just like my life is divided up between the antipodes of a 50-hour work week, heavy travel, and sitting quietly in a corner of a coffee house and typing away.

As will become obvious very soon, I am writing in both English and German, and sometimes even in other languages that I might not fully comprehend, but that fit the location my story takes place in. Just like I’m switching between the languages in my daily life, so do my characters adapt to their surroundings, and verbally respond to their environment.

The previous will serve mostly as an answer to the question of “what I write”. But why do I do it? Because because there is no better way for me to express myself, to connect to people, to record their - and my - stories. But most of all because I have found my reader (you!), and this is the person I want to touch more than anything else in the world.

Enjoy. Follow. Leave a message. I am not hiding anymore.