Why Do I Write Like I'm Running Out of Time?

By Jen Eve Taylor

On the day the dental specialist told me I had cancer, I started a blog. It was the only response that made any sense to me – to put down words, to document it all. It was the easiest way to keep everyone updated, but more importantly, it felt like the only way I could take control of my own narrative. It was my opportunity to show people how to approach my illness: with honesty, compassion, and humour.

I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve been asked if writing was therapy. I have a therapist for that, and I wouldn’t use my friends, family, or the Internet for that purpose. But writing does help me make sense of the world. The act of getting thoughts out of our heads creates both a closeness and a distance that allows us space to heal. 

Cancer has a way of finding whatever is closest to your identity and taking it away from you. It keeps taking chunks of my face – my jaw, my bones, my teeth, and now my eye. I’m losing parts I’ve relied on my whole life. It’s also taken away my ability to sing, something that is part of my very essence. Perhaps one day I will be able to sing again; after reconstruction, after temporary measures are made more permanent. But for now, my written word is how I cling to the identity that keeps being taken away. 

My oldest friend lives on the other side of the world. Through Covid, we started a new tradition – assigning each other a song every Monday and by Sunday we’d send back a short story inspired by it. Each week, we felt safe to explore new things that we’d never have the courage to do were it not with an old, trusted friend. It helped her through the struggles of navigating a new life with a small human expecting her constant attention. It helped me through the days of recovering from surgery, alone in my flat during a pandemic. Through sharing our words, we held each other close. Everyone has around 25,000 genes, but our genetic code only differs by about 1 percent from that of the person next to us. I think we get closer to realising this through writing.

I write in cafes and pubs, on trains and buses. Sometimes people ask me what I’m writing. Others tell me they’re writers too, or that they want to be. I write in the bath with my purple fountain pen with purple ink that has occasionally fallen in. I’ve written in gigs, reviewing the band with my little black notebook clutched in my hands in the dark. I’ve interviewed my musical heroes and written up their words. I’ve used far too many adverbs, adjectives and superlatives. But I absolutely have learned to write better now (mostly). I’ve had men come and write their numbers in my notebook. I’d draw a cloud or a tree or some sort of shape with jagged edges around them and never call. 

I write like I’m running out of time. 

Because it feels like I am. 

It’s a cliché to say that our written words are a legacy, but they are part of me that I can leave behind. If I don’t leave some trace of myself in this world, how could anyone know I was even here at all? Long after the last person remembers how I made them feel, long after my parent’s tears dry up if their only daughter dies before they do, long after my friends stop going to message me only to realise I’m no longer there. 

I haven’t stopped trying to write messages to my best mate who died earlier this year. When my phone died and I lost all my messages, I lost the last tangible connection I had with her. I could no longer flick back and look at the things she’d written to me – the time she said we’d be living together in our 80s, with a penchant for young men and old whisky. The time she told me to find a way to get back from where I was stranded in Australia because she was dying. I know she exists in my memories, but I wish I had something more: the recording of her voice on old voicenotes, the ability to read back over what she wrote.

I recently found the cassette tapes my parents had made of my Pop talking about his time on mining ships in the war. He died many years ago at an impressive 90 years-old, but his words are still there to be written down and shared. I am slowly making my way through them. I had almost forgotten his accent – a strange mix of New Zealand and Geordie, which can be attributed to a 6-week, one way boat trip from England to New Zealand when my father was 5. By deciding to leave England, my grandparents never saw their parents again. They existed only in letters; words scrawled on a piece of blue paper that folded up neatly into an envelope and made its way back across the sea that they couldn’t.

In my Pop’s words are lessons that the world should learn from. We need to write about the past to learn for the future. So that we don’t make the same mistakes again, so that as a society we can move forward and progress. 

I write like I’m running out of time because there are still so many words I need to get down, so many thoughts to document, so many more things I want to say. I don’t think I’ll ever be finished, but that’s the beauty of it all – we never reach the end. It never dries up, we never run out of things to write. This is our gift: to each other, to ourselves, to the world. To let out the words that swirl inside us, and never, ever, stop.

Jen is originally from Sydney, Australia, but now lives in London - the city she considers her life's one great love story. When not writing articles or working on her novel, she can be found tackling the ups and downs of life on her website www.thecancerchronicles.blog.