What inspires me to write

The other day, while reading “Ephemera forever” in Le Petit 3 , I felt something quietly rearrange inside me.

The article explored what inspires someone, specifically a woman, to keep a diary. Not to publish. Not to perform. Just to write. To record. To preserve the seemingly small and passing things that would otherwise dissolve into air.

And as I read it, I realised: I have been answering that question my entire life.

I have kept diaries since I was a teenager. Not consistently. Not always beautifully. But faithfully enough that there is now a small archive of myself stacked in drawers and boxes, cheap notebooks, floral covers, half-filled journals, margins crowded with ink. Versions of me who thought their feelings were catastrophic. Versions of me who believed they had discovered love for the first time. Versions of me who were wrong. And right.

I did not start writing because I thought I had something important to say.

I started writing because I was afraid of losing things.

The texture of a Tuesday afternoon.

The way the light looked in my bedroom at 17.

The exact sentence someone said that made my heart tilt.

Ephemera forever. That phrase has been echoing in me since I read the article. Because that is what a diary is, isn’t it? A rebellion against disappearance. A soft insistence that this moment, however small, mattered because I was here to feel it.

I have always been drawn to women who kept diaries as if their lives depended on it. I’ve read the journals of Sylvia Plath and felt electrified by her ambition, her hunger, her relentless self-examination. There is something profoundly intimate about witnessing a mind in the act of becoming.

And I am keen, almost yearning, to read the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin. Women who also took their inner lives seriously. Women who understood that recording a day is, in its own way, an act of defiance.

When I was younger, my diary was a confidante. It held my embarrassments, my longing, my melodrama. It absorbed my intensity without judgment. There was something deeply comforting about knowing I could be as excessive as I wanted on paper. No one would interrupt me. No one would tell me I was too much. As I’ve grown older, writing has become less about survival and more about preservation.

I write because I want to remember who I was. I write because I want to see the pattern of my own becoming. When I reread old entries, I don’t just revisit events, I revisit consciousness. I see how I used to think, what I used to fear, what I used to believe love would look like.

It is humbling. It is tender. It is sometimes excruciating.

But it is real.

The article in Le Petit 3 spoke about the private courage of keeping a diary, the act of taking your inner life seriously. That phrase struck me. Taking your inner life seriously. How often are women taught to minimize their feelings, to smooth them out, to be practical instead of poetic?

A diary resists that. A diary says: this inner weather matters.

I think that is what inspires me to write, the desire to honour the invisible currents of a day. The small tremors of joy. The quiet disappointments. The fleeting thoughts that would otherwise evaporate by morning.

I am someone who makes lists, who presses flowers between pages, who saves ticket stubs and receipts. Writing feels like an extension of that instinct. It is my way of stitching together a life that would otherwise fray at the edges.

When I write, I am not trying to be profound. I am trying to be attentive. And maybe that is the truest form of devotion: attention.

So what inspires me to write?

The fear of forgetting.

The romance of memory.

The belief that even an ordinary Thursday deserves to be witnessed.