on writing, the new year, and the rest of my life

it was a scorching fall in 2015 when i made the decision to give up writing forever.

i was naive and new in college and the hills north of berkeley were literally flaming as i dipped my toes into hot water, took a knife to my gut, and painted my messy steaming insides into tumblr blog posts, thinking every word i wrote was precious and precocious and deep and lovely. i got a couple of appreciative notes online from anonymous admirers, bolstering my shaky self-esteem. it made me think that writing was something i could keep doing.

full of childlike pride, i presented these gory portraits of my visceral teenage angst to a recent acquaintance from a dance team i’d joined on a whim that semester. he received the first two poems with praise, and the subsequent ones with sharp reprimand: it was selfish to expect that much of him, he didn’t have the time to read everything, he felt inundated - reduced to an unwilling audience in our burgeoning friendship.

i stopped sending him my poetry. instead, we spent the time discussing his own self-image issues and struggles with perfectionism. i continued posting online, but i’d already internalized the message. no one wants to read my writing. or worse, maybe my writing was bad, so irreparably terrible that it wasn’t worth anyone’s time, not even my own.

eventually, like my friendship with the unfortunate fellow who hated himself, my interest in the craft faded away. i’d successfully browbeaten myself into giving up another thing i loved.

༄༄༄

like all of my writing, this piece faces the danger of becoming purely the story of my life. it’s only recently that i’ve reconsidered whether that’s actually a bad thing. i’m addicted to narrative, and without the structure of a story, my years flow by like fish in the river. i only have the faintest recollection of the years after i stopped writing: the blush of young love, the anxiety of a new job, the pandemic years that were so achingly different for everyone, and then more recently, the worst two years of my life. i blinked and i can no longer tell myself convincingly that i’m in my mid-twenties.

where did all the time go? i’ve been measuring my life by the things that i did and didn’t do: the friends i met, the trips i didn’t take, the decisions i didn’t make until they were made for me. it works, but it doesn’t capture the fine print or the emotional nuance. i want to look back in thirty years and feel what it was like to be twenty-three, glowing with potential and flush with relief at the thought of never having to live at home again. or remember what it was like to be twenty-five, tired to my very bones, holding fast onto life with an iron grip as it dragged me along. or hear the sudden silence in my head as my mom told me over the phone: it’s cancer. realize things will never be the same again (and they weren’t). not all of it was pleasant, but i was there. i existed. i survived.

somehow, despite everything, that matters.

༄༄༄

now it’s a new year, and i’m as dumb as i’ve ever been. the words had stopped coming when i started believing that no one cared what i had to say; i didn’t have anything to say anyway, so what would i write? and if i had something to say, what if someone read it and disagreed? what if they shout from the rooftops that i’m wrong, that the way i write is ugly and unoriginal? what if i’m saying nothing new? what if i’m actually incapable of thought, reduced to regurgitating a soup of words that i’ve processed from other people’s conversations, like chatGPT 3.0 given human form, completely unaware of just how uninspired i am?

suffice to say: i’ve been plagued by doubts about making this post public. but after everything i’ve been through lately, maybe i’m past the point of caring what most strangers think about me. one of the nice things about getting older is that you start to realize how unspecial you are: an unremarkable monkey in sweatpants, the same amount of lost as anyone else. in the bay area, i can vanish comfortably in a crowd, just another short asian girl with freckles and round glasses, swallowed by an oversized camel coat. you can’t always see from a distance how motherless a daughter is.

it isn’t any different on the internet, except the crowd is incomprehensibly larger. except maybe your future manager or coworkers will read this and secretly know way too much about the thoughts in your head, without ever telling you to your face how cringey and stunningly personal they find it all. or maybe one of the ex-friends you still think about every couple of years (feeling a mixture of regret, relief, and bittersweet fondness) will find this piece in a moment of guilty googling, and feel a warm tingle of schadenfreude as they learn what became of you. don’t kid yourself, the most likely scenario is that nobody reads this at all, and then you’re home free, baby!

maybe i should just post this anonymously after all.

but even with my tendency to overthink a scenario until i’m wracked with anxiety about unlikely consequences, i can’t deny that a small, egoistic part of me still wants to be seen as who i am. wants my voice and experiences to be heard. hopes that maybe someone will relate to part of this. it’s scary to be vulnerable, but the alternative is that this lives in darkness forever.

is this any good (what does good even mean)? who cares? who’s judging? i’m doing something, aren’t i? it’s better than doing nothing. there’s no time to stand around being afraid!