Reordering chaos

I’m looking at a quote from Sylvia Plath’s journals:

I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing and love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.

This is one of those quotes that can be easily taken out of context. It starts in the past tense and shows a transition, a deeper understanding.

“Writing, then, was a substitute…” This is where we start. We feel unloved and want to prove our worth. If you only quote the first two sentences, it loses most of its meaning.

What I think is left out of the quote are the many pages of writing that transformed Plath’s view of writing into something more valuable to herself. Having written, she now knows writing has more to offer. The more we write, the more we weave logic and significance into the chaos of life.