I’m not on an academic calendar anymore, but I’m thinking of all the students graduating in the coming days. I had the privilege of working with journalism students at my alma mater this year. On my last visit, a lot of things bubbled up in my thoughts. There were the classroom moments of my own that stood out in my memory, the admiration I felt for these young people (oh, the energy! the effort!), and the gratitude that was washing over me—so much had happened since I sat where they did.

The seniors in the mix were down to their final weeks of K-12 education. What do I want them to know about writing? What does my life have to say about writing?

Why do I write? Because it’s done so much for me. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop at this point.

Writing and revising are superpowers. When I tell students to just “get it to the page,” it’s not because I’m rushing them. I know the power of getting your thoughts out of your brain and in front of you. Once it’s on the page, I can do something with it. Whether it’s a problem, a memory, or a plan, I have a chance to look at things differently. I have a shot at making sense of things—or at least exploring their meaning. (And there’s scientific evidence that doing so in writing has the potential to boost immune functioning and reduce stress.) Revision is where the potential really comes alive.

There’s this magical, calm place that lives between a trigger and our response. Some call it “the gap” or “the pause,” and revision forces us into that place. Modern communication means that a lot of writing arrives almost instantly, sometimes with a ding or a flash, and draws our attention.

But not everything that’s important is urgent, and not everything that seems urgent actually is. If urgency is a habit you’ve developed, revision is a great one to replace it with.

Revision has saved my tuchus so many times. I don’t have to send every text or email that I draft. I can feel it in my body when it’s not ready: my heart races, I accidentally hold my breath, and my shoulders get tight.

Usually, when I come back to a message, I’m cooler and calmer. It’s easier to identify and remove anything that’s beside the point. I have some distance to shape the tone in a more useful and intentional way. (I’ll just come out and say it: I’m a way more generous person in revision than I am in first-draft mode. Refer to the item above about how drafting is just about getting things to the page.)

Just like a dough that needs to prove, the meaning will rise and let me know when it’s ready, if only I can let the message rest.

Exercise pays off. The act of composing has come back to help me in unexpected ways, and progress doesn’t always look like a straight line. Let me give you just one important example from my life.

In college speech, I competed in an event called “program oral interpretation” (POI): in a program event, students have to weave together multiple texts to build one cohesive argument or tell a story. The sources have to come from multiple genres (poetry, prose, and drama, things like interviews, scripts, or short stories), and performing the program and all its characters cannot exceed 10 minutes.

To assemble a program, my teammates and I would often gather our sources, print them off, and use scissors to cut them into meaningful sections. Kneeling on the floor of our team classroom, we quilted pieces together. We taped ideas together into little units that “spoke” well to each other and created dramatic transitions. We could drag the pieces around on the floor, rearranging them until things seemed to make their own kind of sense. We wrote introductions to help present the argument that the pieces illustrated.

On the one hand, you could say that this experience was so unique as to be impractical: when in life would I ever need to put together a program speech again? Well—never.

But I’ve used those composition skills nearly every day of my life since I put that first program together. The time limits in competitive speech made us practice cutting things for space and efficiency. The use of multiple genres helped us learn how to pull relevant information and benefit from all the different perspectives and tones available. And character-building helped us play with point-of-view, literally!

Boundaries may sound constricting, but they’re how you build yourself a playground. It’s good to run around, do some reps, and see what you can do. It’s a joy to discover how that exercise will serve you down the road.

Writing is time-travel and record-keeping. Sometimes an idea will occur to me and I don’t have a chance to write it down. It used to bother me when I’d “lose” those ideas. I’m going to forget this! It was so good, and now it’s gone. But now I have more faith and more trust that if it’s meant for me, the idea will come back.

Why do I choose to believe this? I’ve been in the habit of writing things down and exploring them for years, so I have years of evidence to remind me that the big stuff will keep coming back. I might come across what I think is a new poem or quotation that moves me, only to find it later, maybe mentioned in a note I left myself in the pages of an old journal. I can trace patterns and seasons of my thoughts and feelings across months and years this way.

Usually what I come away with is, “Wow, I’ve been thinking about that for way longer than I thought I’d been.”

So I write things down because I know I won’t remember them, but I also write things down so I don’t have to remember them. They’ll be there when I’m ready. They’ll come back if they’re important.

Sometimes the writing takes me back, and sometimes it shows me how far I’ve come. When I come across essays I wrote in high school or college, I remember how much some of those topics mattered to me. I chose research ideas that were fun and fascinating to me. I once chose a book to analyze because it had a strange, modernist structure that infuriated me. I wanted to figure out why I was angry and what the book was trying to do. I’m proud of that choice. And the memory of that writing process reminds me to stay curious in my ilfe today.

My writing marks other milestones in my life, too. In some of my journals, there are gaps in the entries. The dates jump from the start of a holiday break to its end. I don’t mind the silence: I imagine I was either busy with family or travel or maybe just resting.

In other places, I find my words where I expected silence.

I had forgotten that I wrote in my journal the day my mother died. It’s a short entry, addressed to her. I wrote about what I’d been doing that morning, how I wanted her to know, right away, that I already missed her so much. I noted for her how slowly the words were coming to me.

I’m proud I showed up for myself on the page that day. And now, it’s something I’m able revisit.

So where does all this leave me? Am I glad for all this? Why do I still do it?

The benefits of writing like the ones I’ve talked about here keep compounding the older I get. By now, so many pieces of my writing life are habits: journaling, note-taking as I listen in workshops or meetings, connecting with others in letters and emails and cards. I also keep my “exercise” routine going, writing for my blog and social media or submitting creative writing pieces for publication.

I don’t expect other people to practice the same writing life that I do (even those students who love their English classes have to figure it out for themselves, ha!).

But I do hope that as another graduation season approaches, students remember that writing isn’t just another tool or a means to an end. The process itself can feel like work sometimes. But I’d challenge anyone reading to try to pick up writing for its own sake.

Start somewhere. Play. Find what works for you. Be gentle with yourself.

Just write. I’m glad I do.