Bell hooks said; “No black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’... No woman has ever written enough.”
And I really believed her when she said that. I wholeheartedly believe we should write as much as we can and about anything we want. I have been writing since I was a child. It started with dear diaries, then songs scribbled in notebooks, then fanfictions on Wattpad like every fourteen-year-old girl convinced she had discovered some secret about the world that adults could never understand. The inspiration has never left me. Even now, ideas arrive faster than I can write them down, entire essays forming while I am desperately trying to sleep, the desire to express myself still bubbling beneath my skin as insistently as it did when I was ten years old.
All of those experiences somehow brought me here, to Substack, to a community that continues to fuel my passion and remind me why writing matters.
But lately I do not want to write anymore.
I have not run out of things to say, if anything, I have too many of them. They sit inside me demanding to be written, demanding to be turned into essays and stories and poems. The problem is that I am tired. I am tired of creating imaginary worlds and imaginary characters and pretending I did not pull them directly from reality. I am tired of making suffering fictional so it becomes easier to consume. Tired of disguising real tears behind invented names. Tired of writing a character going through something terrible while knowing exactly whose watery eyes I am envisioning as I write them.
I am tired of researching death as if I am preparing a presentation.
Tired of opening fifteen tabs and finding fifteen different ways a child can die.
Tired of reading reports, statistics, testimonies, witness accounts, and then compressing them into something digestible, something that’s sharable and quotable for a 15 second instagram story. Something capable of competing with an attention span trained by algorithms.
Sometimes I feel less like a writer and more like a translator. I take grief and translate it into paragraphs. I take blood and translate it into metaphors. I take somebody’s worst day and fold it into language gentle enough that strangers might read it with their morning coffee.
What prose should I use to make you care?
What rhyme scheme should I use to make you realize that we are living in a society actively destroying its own humanity? What beautiful sentence should I craft to make you put down that Coca-Cola and ask yourself why every aspect of your existence is being packaged, marketed, and sold back to you? What lovely metaphor should I invent to make something inside of you come alive?
I used to think the problem was ignorance, that people simply did not know and that I was there to tell them. But people know.
They know about Sudan.
They know about Congo.
They know about Afghanistan.
They know about climate change.
They know about exploitation.
They know.
The French philosopher Guy Debord argued that modern life transforms us into spectators. People sitting in the audience of their own lives watching reality unfold through images rather than engaging with it directly. Every time I open my phone I think about him because what else are we doing?
A woman is raped and I learn about it through a rectangle.
A child starves and I learn about it through a rectangle.
A village floods and I learn about it through a rectangle.
Everything arrives through the same 9:16 ratio that haunts me. A genocide occupies the same amount of space as a skincare advertisement. A famine competes with a dance trend. A woman describing the worst day of her life competes with a video of somebody making iced coffee.
Then we wonder why nobody reacts.
How could they?
The horrifying thing about constant exposure to suffering is not that it necessarily makes monsters of us. It makes spectators of us. Audiences. Consumers at best. We scroll through other people’s pain the same way we scroll through recipes, vacation photos, and celebrity gossip. We are witnessing more suffering than any generation before us and somehow feeling less and less capable of responding to it.
And I have to say, writers are not immune to this either. As Nina Simone said, an artists duty is to reflect their time. However, how do we reflect our times if everyone has lost their ability to be shocked or to even care?
As a woman and as a writer, tell me honestly, what would make you revolt?
What would make you stand up in the face of thousands of women being raped in Sudan and Congo? What would make you react to women being erased from public life in Afghanistan? What words would allow you to feel the anger I pour onto these pages every single time I write? As a Black woman, I am acutely aware of the privilege involved in even being able to write this and send it across the world to strangers. I know there are women whose stories will never be told because nobody gave them the chance to tell them.
But are you hearing me? Or are you merely consuming me?
Are you moved by pain or simply entertained by it? Does it make you feel better to know that someone somewhere is suffering more than you are? Have tragedies become another genre of content for us to consume between advertisements?
As a Black person, genuinely, what would make you revolutionize? What would the paragraph that finally makes people organize look like? What would the essay that finally convinces someone to help their community look like?
If you let me know, I will write it. I swear I will.
But what is the point if I keep writing and writing and writing, shaping thoughts in a colonial language that is not my own, trying to reach as many people as possible, only to watch those words disappear into feeds, timelines, and archives where they will sit beside a thousand other cries for help?
I want my writing to be heard.
I want writing that makes people stand up from their chairs. I want writing that interrupts. Writing that demands something of the reader beyond applause. Because I am tired of writing solely for entertainment when there is nothing entertaining about any of this.
I’m looking back at this same article, wondering if it is even worthy of getting out there, wondering of it’s imapct. But the question haunting me is no longer what I should write. It’s what could possibly be written that would make us stand up from our chairs.
I wish I knew how to answer this. I do not. I wish I had some wise answer that would make sense and make us nod our heads in understanding. What I do know is that I felt every bit of what you wrote, and I feel like there has to be some thread or undercurrent of anger that will eventually interrupt our program enough for us to be more proactive in our own revolution. We come back to that question you asked: What words will it take?
And for me, as a black woman and a writer, right now, all I have are my stories. My essays. I think what does help, even when you cannot see the impact, that your work gives voice to those victims. This work never stops. It will never stop. What I think you and so many of us are trying to figure out, what else must be done to make a person sit up and pay attention.
I think the answer might be, "Keep going."
You always write exactly how i felt thank you for that