On Writing Your Cause–Effect Chain
I didn’t choose this life.
I didn’t choose the chain of events that made me who I am.
One thing happened, and because of that, something else happened, and then something else after that… until here I am, sitting down, writing this.
And that’s the thing about writing—
it’s not just words on a page.
It’s the visible effect of every cause that came before it.
The fights I had, the nights I stayed awake staring at the ceiling,
the people I loved, the people I lost, the mistakes I made,
the moments I swore I wouldn’t survive.
All of it… every single part…
built the person who sits here now,
choosing these words, this tone, this rhythm.
But even that—the choosing—
feels like it was chosen for me.
Because how else could it go?
Given everything that’s led me here,
how else could I write this but exactly like this?
There’s a kind of relief in that.
In knowing that this poem… this story…
isn’t some performance.
I’m not only crafting it for others.
I’m just following the thread back through every cause and effect,
letting it pull the words out of me like gravity.
Sometimes it hurts.
Sometimes I sit there for hours,
wondering if there’s a better word,
a cleaner line, a softer truth.
But in the end, it always feels the same:
I write it down, I read it back,
and for one breathless second I know:
This is the truth of me, right now, in this moment.
Not forever—
I might feel different tomorrow,
a month from now, ten years from now.
But that doesn’t make it less real.
This is today’s truth,
written by the long, messy, beautiful, brutal chain
that I never asked for…
but that shaped me all the same.
And if you steal these words I cultivated—
if you strip my name,
if you take them and call them your own—
that’s me too.
And it’s you.
A person who stepped into my life
and set a new chain into motion,
one more cause leading to one more effect,
folded back into my story.
You had no choice.
No matter what the reason,
no matter what the cause,
you were born to immortalize my words,
because your own words weren’t good enough,
not special enough,
not sufficient.
Just a copy of Hermes’ whispers.
There was no other poem or story for you to tell that was good enough to use your own.
Because when you read my words written on your page, stripped of my name,
you said to yourself:
“These words… this is the truth about me… in this moment. No other words will do.”
And that’s part of the story too.
Was the moment as sufficient for me as it was for you?
Released under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0 1.0).
No rights reserved.
— Charles Voltaire