In wandering around and reading some other people’s blogs this morning over a crisp tasting apple macchiato this morning, the common thread seemed to be about why people write, or blog, and/or what they hope comes from it.

Yeah, I know, an apple macchiato? Did I mention the oat milk? I wondered myself and found it to be like caffeinated apple oatmeal.

See, right there I conveyed something to you and, without having had it, you have an idea of how I experienced it. What may surprise many people is that it’s not how I actually experienced it, but it’s the best way I could think of to convey it to you. We’re on, as they say, the same page.

Now you may not have fond memories of oatmeal, which is where we may diverge. I did. So when I tasted this apple macchiato, I did not think of how to explain it to you or the people around me.

I simply experienced it. It made me think of happy days of my childhood in Wisconsin and Ohio, when it was cold outside and hot cocoa and oatmeal were staples of happy warmth. It reminded me of the smile in the kitchen of my mother who, for either, simply had to boil water and mix it in to give her son something that would keep him quiet for a while and that he wouldn’t fuss over eating.

It made me smile.

Now, from an apple macchiato, I have now shared a part of myself, soft and exposed until it becomes calloused from imaginary wear. I have not told you what you should expect of an apple macchiato with oat milk, but instead what it meant to me, a character in your mind who you only know through what he shares.

It also made me sad, because those fleeting moments of childhood are long gone, never to be had again. In fact, they were lost not long after they were made for reasons I chased down and interrogated with devices that would make the CIA ask with a blush about where I got them.

All of this flashed through my mind in milliseconds. Maybe even microseconds. I flash through life like that at times, time traveling through memories that are about as dependable as a witness in court – and yet, the feelings, the emotions, those do not lie, they do not misrepresent even though what I may have experienced was not what actually was. It was just a perception of it.

This is why I write. I have fought with language for decades to share what my inner thoughts are and they are independent of language, they weave, they feel, they are visualized, but most of the concepts out there we share as words and experiences are just ways for us to convey to the outer world what is going on in our inner world.

When you cannot do that, the world drowns your inner world. When you do not master language to a degree, language masters you and you become the voice of the outer world, a voice of what the outer world demands even if it costs all of your inner world.

I write to save myself in that regard because I have found strength in the inner world, of how I experience the world, of experiencing through observation and inquiry about how this world around us works, from the flower to computing systems to the copyright licensing of code to artificial intelligences.

I write so I do not drown in the world others created.