
The Act of Writing: Redux
I wish I knew how to quit you.
Author’s note: I wrote this while inebriated with feelings, because I am no longer allowed alcohol.
Here’s a dirty little secret: I hate writing.
I hate how it makes me feel several sizes too small. I hate how it doesn’t come to me as easily as, say, algebra or self-loathing. I hate that an empty MS Word file never stops giving me the shakes. I hate that it is probably the one act that has made me cry multiple times, aside from those two times I stubbed my little toe on heavy chairs. I hate that I can’t help but put in all this work, fully knowing only six people read my stuff. If I’m lucky.
But I can’t quit it. The easy metaphor is beer, but writing doesn’t even afford you the luxury of momentarily feeling good about yourself. You go from the malaise of feeling something you can’t sum up in a tweet, to the Rubicon moment of opening your word processor of choice and deciding to write, to the agonizing tedium of writing and editing (and editing, and editing), to the despair of realizing everything you’ve put down is unsalvageable trash, and finally, to the resignation of throwing it out there anyway, ripe for judgment and indifference. There are no easy moments on this trip, Dora the Explorer. Only the Traveling Wilburys of pain(*).
(*) A cookie to whoever catches this reference.
I wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I thought writing was easy. I remember telling my high school sophomore science teacher that writing was really as simple as rephrasing the same thought again and again, with all the smugness you can imagine from a fourteen-year-old who’s always been a little full of himself. She warned me that it wouldn’t be so easy in college, but for the most part, it kind of was. I took a business course, and found my niche churning out vaguely convincing corpo-linguistic papers for my various majors, like water out of a faucet. It wasn’t Ibsen — hell, it wasn’t even Sandler — but it was good enough to pass.
The truth is, writing is easy, but only when you don’t give a crap.

When you start caring — idiot! — that’s when the proverbial shit hits the fan. In freshman year, I remember having a total meltdown at 3AM on the day my English memoir was due, because I realized it was utter drivel. I’d finished it a week ago, and gloated about it to my classmates who were only starting on theirs two days before. They were sleeping soundly in their beds by then, because two days is honestly a lot of time to finish a more-than-good paper, while I was chugging coffee and desperately trying to salvage something from the mess I’d made.
The smart move would’ve been to stick to things that didn’t elicit so much emotion in me — embrace my inner Fiyero, the night-cheese-eating slacker id I really am. Of course, I went the opposite direction. I signed up for the school paper, writing about the very thing I cared so inordinately about: pop culture. I took a creative writing class, where my professor told me (quite accurately) that I was hiding in my writing, like some kind of closed-off anti-Joni Mitchell(**). I started blog after blog after blog, before eventually shuttering them because I never felt good enough to deserve that kind of platform.
(**) Of course, real fans call her Joni, but I’m trying to be more accessible here.
When I graduated, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to officially hang up the pen. Of course, that didn’t mean I’d stop writing altogether. It only meant I’d stop writing about the things I cared about — movies, albums, animated shows about anthropomorphic horses. For then on, I told myself I’d stick to the plan, and only write when I needed to elaborate on a chart, and always only in bullet form. You get hurt less in bullet form, you know.
Over the two months of #funemployment that followed, I realized that writing, like cigarettes and college crushes, wasn’t something you could quit cold turkey. It began with Twitter games where I’d end up getting a bit more flowery than the “alam mo ba” meme would demand, and soon spilled over into long, meandering tweet threads about art’s place in society. I distracted myself with TV, but then just ended up wanting to write about the shows I binged(***). Soon, I found myself opening Microsoft Word at 1AM just to stare at the blank page and feel something, like the lying junkie I am.
(***) In retrospect, maybe programs like Community and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt weren’t the best shows to turn to if I wanted to avoid writing prompts.
Just like that, it was done. Just when I thought I was out, it pulled me back in.

Like all things, this can be explained best by TV. In 30 Rock’s series finale, Liz Lemon corners Tracy Jordan in the strip club they visited in the pilot, where he’s been hiding out to avoid saying goodbye to everybody. After stumbling through one of those cookie-cutter farewell speeches you say to dull the inevitable, Liz gets real, and — well, I’ll let Tina Fey do the talking now.
See, that’s the way I hate/love writing. It frustrates me, especially on those nights when even my punctuation marks look out of place. It wears me out, even when I’m supposed to be writing for my own pleasure, like that’s an actual thing people do. Because the human heart isn’t properly connected to the human brain, I can’t bring myself to quit this most maddening of obsessions, this insane craving to put letters and spaces in a row, in some doomed attempt to find Yahweh or human connection or whatever deity we’re supposed to worship in this godforsaken 2017.
The truth is, I don’t think anyone really loves writing the way they love dog GIFs or Beyoncé. Writing is that friend you want to slap around sometimes because they keep coming back to you with the same weak-tit yuppie angst every other week, or that relative who always gets drunk and talks politics over Christmas. You allow yourself to hate it because, deep down, it’s one of the few things that’s ever felt real to you in this polyester world, and you care about it. Writing isn’t easy, and that’s why we fall for it. Or at least, I guess that’s why I did.
This whole spiel is essentially here because I like marking beginnings. It makes life seem less random. So here it is — my latest doomed venture into writing about film, music, and other realms of pop culture I might find myself fascinated by.
Or I’ll just mostly write about Thrones. We’ll see. That last episode was crazy, right?