Writer's Excersise - Try it out - Give a Try

After I had been writing for a short time, I came across this writing challenge posted by another poet on this one website I used to frequent. The challenge - Why I write. Now I had been writing a number of poems, essays and the like, but it had never occurred to me to even try this topic, so I thought, why not give it a try? After all, how hard could it be, right? Let me tell you, it wasn't any bed of roses, and I think the only reason I was able to get it done was the simple fact that I love writing just that much! Anyway, this was what I came up with. Maybe it will give you an idea for doing it yourself:
In those early days, in the days when the darkness first made itself known to me, I remember the change overtaking me. The emptiness, the hollow despair, the terrible, sudden inadequacy of being me...Of simply being me.
When only days, weeks before I had been so near to perfect, at least for me, as far as I was concerned. Another birthday had come and gone when suddenly my wife from cancer was taken away. Now 31, my youth seemed all spent, and alone was I now...Alone, facing this pain.
That was the hardest part, the aloneness of it all, the inability to verbalize to anyone just what was going on inside of me. So instead I said nothing and suffered in silence, letting them wonder - and I knew they were wondering - "What the bejeezes has got into that boy?! He cries at the drop of a hat, He doesn't talk to anyone anymore, Has he said anything to you?"
Eventually, I started to look for death, a way out - tho not by my own hands. I would cross the street when the light was green, not looking both ways. So if somebody running a red light wanted to hit me, well, it was on their head! I would jump into subway tracks for money, always making sure no trains were coming, and climb out when one did. My hope was that one day I might slip climbing out...But this did not happen.
It was after 4 years of this descent into hell when I started writing. It was also a time when I started hearing voices on top of everything else. Voices shouting from out of nowhere, voices calling out my name. Nothing else, just my name...
And then something, I don't know what, a message from God, for all I know, told me to write, just start writing. Now I hadn't written a thing since college. Even then I was terrible with poems and had only a so-so vocabulary. But I set out writing...And writing...And by God if I wasn't half-way through with this epic poem that came from I know not where when suddenly I looked up, listened and realized, the voices were gone! They would come back, yes, but while I wrote I could keep them from calling me.
And I also learned that the more I wrote the more I was able to lift myself from, or at least keep me from sinking deeper into the despair in which I had fallen so many years ago. I learned soon enough, tho, it was not a cure. For there were many days when I couldn't write, days when nothing came to me. Then there were the nights...Always there would come those long, lonely, dark and oppressive nights, each one seemingly setting me back 5 days worth of writing. Still though, it was something...A glimmer of light, of hope finally making its way into this life of mine where for years there had been only darkness.
That is the story behind what got me started writing. What keeps me writing now that I am no longer in the darkness and no longer hearing the voices, where writing as a therapeutic aid is no longer the necessity it once was, is the simple fact that it's fun. The challenge of finding new uses for old words and new stories using untried plot-lines is what writers live for - what they would die for, and what I constantly search for!
So then, what is your story?

- source exiarticles.com