Is writing a Call

Or Is It a Place to Stand?

Sometimes I wonder whether writing is a form of calling out.

Not in the sense of wanting attention or reassurance or validation.
But in the quieter sense. Like sending a signal and not knowing if it will ever be received.

There is a difference between speaking and calling.
Speaking assumes someone is already there.
Calling accepts the possibility that no one is.

That uncertainty is what unsettles me.

When I write, I don’t feel like I’m asking to be saved.
I feel like I’m checking whether my inner voice can exist outside my body without dissolving.
Whether it can take shape, hold its form and remain intact even if no one answers.

This is where the question becomes philosophical rather than psychological.

Psychology asks whether the act is healthy, regulating, meaningful.
Philosophy asks something more uncomfortable:
What does it mean to speak if there may be no response?

There is a temptation to interpret silence as absence.
As proof that nothing landed, nothing mattered, nothing reached anyone.

But silence can also mean something else.
It can mean the words did not open a conversation but closed a loop.

Some texts are not bridges.
They are places.

A place to stand.
A place where something internal finally arrives in form and no longer needs to circulate endlessly.

When I think of the song Tous les cris les S.O.S., I don’t hear a demand for rescue.
I hear a human voice testing whether it still echoes.
Whether sound still exists once it leaves the body.

That question is older than psychology.
It belongs to anyone who has ever wondered whether meaning requires a witness.

I don’t think writing answers that question.

What it does is quieter.

It allows me to speak without immediately turning toward the door to see who heard.
It lets the words exist without needing to be picked up, mirrored or completed by someone else.

Maybe that is the difference between an SOS and a statement of being.

An SOS waits.
A statement stands.

I don’t write to be answered.
I write to know that what I experience can take form, remain stable and rest somewhere outside of me.

If someone finds it, reads it, recognizes something of themselves in it that is connection.

If no one does, the writing has still done what it needed to do.

It has made a place where my voice exists without having to ask permission.

Related: Asking Myself