Let’s get personal

Shaking off the proverbial dust to pen some thoughts about the pen itself

It’s a canon event the way I come back to writing like an insecure lover to a toxic ex. For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to journal or blog in a sustainable way where I don’t spend hours mulling over every word I choose, only for me to come back a year later and cringe at everything before attempting to delete my entire digital footprint…

My writing journey started at the ripe age of 7 or 8 years old. There I was, a little girl still obsessed with mermaids and the elite color combo of pink and yellow, sitting in front of a box and typing two spaces between each word and none after each period. Then, in sixth grade, I wrote a hundred pages of the most boring, emo story a 10 year old could think of and shared it with all the girls in my class to marvel at. In subsequent years, I tried to write a couple more “novels” until my author fantasies were crushed by the mandatory readings of high school literature classes. I stopped reading for fun and wrote solely for the purpose of impressing my teachers enough to get an A. It was during this time that my handwriting also went from being the one requested on group project posters to the one receiving notes on in-class essays that say “please write legibly.”

Since then, my life has felt like running on a constant treadmill trying to keep up with nomadic benchmarks. Whatever skill or piece of knowledge that did not translate to money in one way or another was one that I eventually forgot. Nowadays when I find myself handwriting a birthday card, I sometimes try to reproduce the movements and cadence of my old, neat handwriting. Every time, my right hand fumbles the current letter before moving onto the next, and in one stroke blends the entire word into a captcha exercise. It’s a scary reminder that even if my mind wanted to slow down, my body couldn’t. It forgot how to love certain things without feeling stress or guilt for wasting time on them.

That said, I definitely do not spend every waking minute of my day maximizing my wealth and potential. I am only human and require refills of serotonin to survive. Sometimes, I do stumble upon a juicy blog post or a witty op-ed article and am filled with inspiration to read or write again. Unfortunately, 9 times out of 10, my mind prefers moving pictures to static ones. I simply do not possess the attention span to pick up a book and not immediately put it down. Between coding sprints at work, I constantly oscillate between Twitter (not X, sorry), Pinterest, Tiktok, and Facebook (just to clear the red bubble, I promise, and maybe to look at secondhand cameras for sale). Many of my friends still spend their free time reading, while I have become fully enslaved to the social media attention sinkholes. I wonder if my brain has regressed because of these habits, or if I am actually adjusting to a new learning method that is perhaps shallow but undeniably faster.

Although I will defend platforms like Tiktok to the grave (of U.S. Congress), I do believe that there are critical parts of my brain that are turned off when I absorb short media content. Moreover, even though I have learned an inordinate amount of important life lessons and skills from Tiktok, the app can often become an echo chamber of the same thoughts regurgitated through the mouths of different influencers. Not to mention that, in the end, your #fyp is merely an algorithm learning to be a mirror for you, the user. Hence, I do try to build my opinions and synthesize my purpose in life outside of these platforms. I also try to acquire new skills, both out of joy and curiosity as well as a crippling fear of early onset dementia.

I could spend a whole separate post talking about these skills that I have been working on in the past several years, but I wanted to reserve this one just for reminiscing about my path as a writer. As someone who craves control and freedom of expression, I love writing because it empowers me to convey myself without any restriction but the language itself. It feels calming and peaceful to be alone with my thoughts and to write them into the void. My eyes may be the only pair of eyes to read this, but I hope that they will not cringe too much when they do in the future (don’t delete me).

See you soon in hopefully less than two years this time!