Why did I write graff? After tagging on and off for nearly 4 years I still don’t have a definitive answer. Sure, I like to sketch, doodle, draw, but graffiti, outright vandalism, is a whole different game. I’m not a “bad kid,” don’t get me wrong; I do well in school, have a healthy family relationship, very close friends and am generally happy. So why did I willingly choose to become engulfed in such a high-risk lifestyle? To put it concisely: to know that I exist. Perhaps I was too normal before I began tagging. In my eyes, I blended in. I didn’t have an edge to differentiate myself from the masses. I needed a way to tell myself: You did something, you made a change somehow. And with that goal in mind, to literally and figuratively make my mark, I began to write.
Every writer remembers his first tag. It sucks, it’s sloppy, hardly legible, but the damage is done. The wall is marked and the addiction has begun. Must write more. Now it’s a matter of practice; how can I write my tag efficiently while maintaining its style? Before I knew it, like a singer, I was practicing in the shower. Rather than working on my melisma I was scribing my name with soap suds on the wall. Next, I began to lose the back pages of all my school journals to mountains of tags. Weekends in D.C. became quests to find, “the perfect spot.”
So did I accomplish my goal? Was my existence validated through these acts of seemingly meaningless instances of vandalism? In a way, yes.
Over the years tagging became a form of therapy, a way to escape the increasing stresses of everyday life. In those short moments where my marker ran smoothly against its target, my hand moving in a pattern that had become all too familiar, I was able to forget about everything. I would let the blood rush through my body as I completed the tag and then would promptly walk away as if nothing had happened. But the best part was the return; Like a fine wine, the longer I waited to return to a spot and see my name as bold as the day it was written, the greater I felt. I would see a tag I did years ago and reminisce on what was going on in my life at that time. And in that sense I would then know that I did exist.
To this day I regularly visit the spot where I did my first tag. Red wall, black ink. Back then, the summer before high school, my tag was alone on the wall, but as the years have gone by I have noticed other tags pop up beside it. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I originally wrote graffiti with the intention of proving my own existence. And as a result, my tag is now nestled besides the names of other individuals who responded to my initial call, “Do I exist?” so many years ago.
Scribo ergo sum. I write, therefore I am.