Art Saves Lives: I Write by Steve Watson

Confiding to the impartial, sympathetic page paved the way for me to accept myself and finally reveal to my friends and family who I really am and begin to live my best honest life.

I write. I write because I want to write; I write because I need to write. I write even if no one will ever read my words. My friend Ben is a veteran. He did tours in Afghanistan and Kuwait. He says writing saved his life. I love Ben, but we’ve lived different lives and his truth is different than mine. I’ve had long and short periods without writing, and I’ve survived, unsharing and unlistened to. I always return to writing.

When not writing, I had no conversations with myself on the page, no dialogue between me and the feelings that confronted me from my written words. After I write a piece, I read my own writing, and react to it as if it is not mine. I get into conversations – reader to writer, questioning or critiquing the words so carefully placed on that paper. I might strategically or impulsively change my mind – alter a verb choice, vary the location of a scene, or put one of my characters in peril because they pissed me off. I enjoy that poetic license, exercising the control that I lack in other areas of my life.

Writing is confession, the easiest way for me to tell someone something important or unburden my soul. My first acknowledgements about being different, not following the prescribed script, were to the blank page, which filled up quickly with Oh my God, I’m gay – now what? questions and fears. Confiding to the impartial, sympathetic page paved the way for me to accept myself and finally reveal to my friends and family who I really am and begin to live my best honest life.

I write out of a sense of urgency. If it’s important to me, I write it down. Writing gives my words substance and legitimacy, they are visible in black and white, tangible and carnal. It is chaos for me to write dishonestly, I cannot lie to myself. My writing group facilitator/mentor sends us off to write every Friday afternoon with the directive to be true to ourselves, write in our own voice, be specific, and write freely to allow ourselves to wander and wonder on the page. I employ her generous advice whenever I lay fingers on my keyboard. I wonder and I wander – I write.

Veiled in my memories are my true loves, my failed loves, and the skeletons of rejected loves and friendships that haunt me to this day. I still have a few bones to pick.

I write about me often because it is the topic I know the best; I am in my wheelhouse. I write about me because I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear my trousers rolled.* I’m not getting any younger, and at 75, to revisit my youth is a long voyage for me. It’s fine, mine has been a life well lived, an interesting journey. But now, with a thorny memory, I need reminders of my own history: I worked and played, loved and lost and won. I used to think I craved privacy, but I discovered I have a desire to share. Call it a fable flaw.

Sometimes, deep in recollection, I remember a scene but cannot find myself in it, and I have to actively recall you, remind myself you were there too. That means you, David, Bridget, Philip, Alan, Hugh, and others I’ve loved. I refuse to let myself forget those memories. My doctor says forgetting is a natural part of aging; memory passageways sometimes dry up or wander off – to isolated parts of our brain. That is not comforting. I write about me because in my writings you are always with me, a part of me as sure as my cowlick or my sarcasm. Veiled in my memories are my true loves, my failed loves, and the skeletons of rejected loves and friendships that haunt me to this day. I still have a few bones to pick.

Now and then I write as if I were somewhere else, someone else – not sitting in my office, tapping away on my laptop. I saw a fortune teller at the Tremont Tea Room in Boston decades ago. He read my tea leaves and told me you often travel in your mind, never leaving the ground. He gave me the words to understand the phenomenon. So I travel.

If I write it, it is real.

July, 1962, I’m 13 years old. I re-experience my first kiss, with Jackie Olson, under a fingernail moon after skinny dipping in his cousin’s pool; shivering naked as the cool night breezes wrapped us in the mystery.

Manhattan in the early 70’s. That magic night at Studio 54 when, standing next to Andy Warhol by chance at the bar, I curled my finger at a guy I spied across the dance floor. He walked over, wrapped me in his arms and slow-danced me into a fantasy under the twirling disco ball.

I’m in a theater watching Waiting for Godot and Samuel Beckett himself sits in the seat beside me.

I’m coasting down Route 6 in Hugh’s Subaru Forester. We’re on our way to Provincetown with the family: 3 dogs and 2 cats in the back seat. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex marriage 3 weeks before. Nerves firing all over my brain and body, I ask, “Hey, Hugh . . . you wanna get married?” He tried to answer but could only smile. That was 20 years ago.

I have made the journey back to my past, and written it down; I write it and read it and live it all over again. If I write it, it is real.

*(T. S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

Artwork (As seen on homepage card for this post): Untitled 1, René Vincit, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 16″ x 20″.