Starting Over… and over and over and over

I have to admit that I feel a little anxious writing this as writing another piece like this feels so tokenistic at this point that it doesn’t really matter if I write it or not. But of course, it doesn’t matter and it might matter only to me, but I’m writing it regardless.

There are so many things that I want to write but they always begin with a post that reads like this. I call it my writers block ink, the writing you get done to push the blocker out of the way so that the words that have struggled for so long to get out finally find an easier path to get into the page. I’ve done writing like this on many occasions and I usually find myself admonishing writers but also reminding myself the virtue of getting over the anxieties of writing and finally get to writing — often, it would get so preachy that the disconnect between the writing and who I actually am becomes a rift that cannot be reconciled no matter how I frame it. The truth is the only experience I have with writing is on this website, on Tumblr from nearly a decade ago, school papers, and the various journals and typewritten pages I have scattered around my room. I don’t have experience and I should stop pretending to have it — there is still so much to learn and I suppose that I don’t really have anything else to add to the plethora of posts about writing and ideas on writing and writing about writing that one can find on this site. I have nothing to add to it, so I’m just going to be honest about how I feel about writing.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve thought of myself as a writer. I imagined myself into this identity as teachers, friends, and people I admired when I was younger told me that I write well — doing something well became the currency of my self-identity and having a dearth of things I do well, I latched onto the one thing people have told me I was good at. Of course, they didn’t mean that what I was writing was of any consequence, they meant that the grammar was passable, that the words were where they should be. And in the education system of a third-world country that uses english as an adopted language from a former colonizer, it meant a lot — but it usually meant that the proper usage of the language of the colonizer would take the place of the native; I digress.

But I did think of myself as a writer even if to just write sentences in proper grammar and to string them into groups that became paragraphs and then into more groups that became pages. Soon, the imagined identity became a practiced identity and the search for aesthetic became a search for authenticity. I needed to act like a writer, I needed to write, I needed to search for a kind of validation that I suppose all writers look for. In the journey of this, the search for an aesthetic overtook the actual act of writing. I bought leather-bound notebooks, dusted off the old family typewriter, I collected fountain pens, and tried to live like the writerliest writers I knew. Soon enough, the journey to look like a writer overtook the duty of actually writing and eventually the writing stopped. The aesthetic took over the authentic and I was left with feeling like a fraud — finally looking and talking like one but without the work to show for it. There was a disconnect, a rift that I’m still trying to bridge now.

Some people call it imposter syndrome, this feeling of being a fraud, but the thing is — at least I think so — people with imposter syndrome get it by doing the work and feeling like a fraud. The work can be authentic, the person can be authentic; it is a crisis of identity by being what one has sought out to become, being and actualizing it, but the euphoria of becoming falling a little short of what it was thought to be — feeling like a fraud and an impostor because it doesn’t feel like it should. But it’s different when the work isn’t put in. Am I a writer when I don’t put in the writing? Am I a writer when I don’t write? If I don’t write, then aren’t I just putting on the airs of being a writer without actually being one? I don’t think that this is impostor syndrome, I think that it is just being a fraud. And so I looked like one, spoke like one, read like one, but no writing actually occurred — not even writing without consequence. Can I call myself a writer? I don’t think so.

But I latched on to the assumed identity — after all, it was all I thought I had. I wanted to write, I wanted so badly to write, but looking at all the posts and blogs and stories and the manifestos and the treatises and all the writing that came in and out of my orbit, I felt overwhelmed. There was nothing new I could say. I wasn’t clever enough, not learned enough, not angry enough, not catastrophist or alarmist enough — in my mind, my words weren’t enough for anything. In addition to this, there was so much pressure for words to mean something. To be meaningful to the society and community I existed in — in this, it still didn't feel like it was enough. But I kept trying. I imagined writing to be a test of the will and the want. How badly did I want this? How much of my will and determination was I willing to put into this?

I began writing seriously in 2015 and in the six years that I have been writing, I cannot understate the fact that I have had so many false starts. I endeavoured to write as truly as I can all the stories that I felt were inside of me — just waiting to burst out into the page and eventually the screen. I wrote and wrote and wrote and it was exhilarating. I began a publication when publications were new in Medium called Two Thousand Words. It was dedicated to short fiction and in its prime it hit 7,000 followers. Yet as I created, wrote in, and curated the publication, I failed to realize how much of a toll college would bring in my writing. In a year of a steady flow of content, from both myself and the contributors of the publication, it stagnated, and I stopped writing.

I was disappointed, of course, but I had received the validation I had always yearned for. I know that I’m supposed to sound cool and play it off, but the attention I received was exhilarating. This isn’t to brag, after all, the most I ever got for a story was a hundred or so claps — but comparing it to the three or four notes I got from Tumblr, it felt like making that first million. When I stopped, the high would take a long time for the high to wear off — I had been validated, I’m a writer now, aren’t I? It took me a while to notice that I hadn’t been writing. I was busy with university and I was learning and hearing of new things and ideas that I hoped I would be able to incorporate into my writing one day. I was becoming socially, politically, historically, and generally aware of the space and time I occupied and the writing I tried to undertake tried to incorporate all these new forms of praxis. It was when I tried to write again did I realize that I froze up and began to feel like a fraud.

When I stopped writing regularly in 2016, I had an idea in my mind that I could simply pick it up again and begin. No one forgets how to write, I thought. But after four years of university and all the things I learned, all the joys and agonies and ecstasies and heartbreaks and disillusionment — I felt myself paralyzed in front of the blinking cursor. There was so much to write but more fear and apprehension in its writing. Honest writing no longer flowed, honesty was the blocker that stopped me from writing — the things that I wanted to write required too much honesty and the identity and fraud I had cultivated over the years stopped me from doing anything about it.

I tried to do so again in 2020, following the banal and annoying deluge of posts preaching that the pandemic is giving us time to finally do what we’ve putting off and all that privileged bullshit. I published what remained of my drafts and whatever writing I had done in four years, I began to write again, and with every post I felt more and more like a fraud. I turned to writing stories I knew, stories that used to give me so much claps, attention, and validation. But the world had moved on from that. I wrote about the pandemic, about the societal horrors that it exposed; I tried to write about humanity and all the things that I was discovering by how the pandemic exposed the soft underbelly of society, the true extent of government ineptitude, and the harrowing realities of how we built society into a corner. But it was a soft voice in the wilderness. All my words had been drowned out by manifestos, long treatises of words and concepts I could only pretend to understand, it did not give way to rage and I know now that rage sells so much better than sex. It hit no nails, it gave no course of action, it gave nothing for people to be angry about. But of course it might just be bad writing and bad marketing — but I know for a fact that the things I wrote sounded nothing like the other things that I read. It was too soft and the softness I took for airiness — lacking substance and attributing this as to why nobody was reading it.

Whatever will I had left in continuing writing was wracked with the realities and circumstances I had to face. First, I felt like a fraud; second, I was a fresh graduate that was unemployed in the middle of a pandemic; third, I wanted the feeling of being validated more than I wanted to write, so I wrote stories I thought would sell, not the stories which resonated in me; fourth, I felt uneducated and unrefined in what was going on around the world, but the more I tried to educate myself on it, the more I let myself give in to the rage that catastrophists make money off of; fifth, I felt unskilled and unequipped in the art and craft of writing, taking online lessons and going through books became a form of procrastination and it became learning without acting, theory without practice; sixth, there was a death in the family — with that, all pretence melted away. Grief was too heavy to write with but I was returned to the nucleus of why I began writing in the first place: writing was a struggle against silence, a means to comfort, a way to understand.

I began writing in 2008, I was in the third grade and I had been introduced to the concept of the ‘end times’. I wrote a story, a terrible story, on how it might happen in the world I knew. Inspired by Narnia and the Lord of the Rings, the ‘Final Battle’ took place in the abandoned airport near where I lived. At thirteen, fresh from reading Pilgrim’s Progress, the Left Behind series, and discovering girls, I wrote stories with loose analogies based on the people I knew. At 2015 and graduating high school, I wrote the class prophecy, assuaging the anxieties I felt going into college and reassuring my classmates and I that all will be well even if we were afraid for the time. In 2016, I was falling in love and getting my heart broken and falling in love all over again and I needed to understand what was happening and what I hoped would and wouldn’t happen. This was the purpose of my writing for the longest time. It was the purpose before I got caught up in likes, views, political correctness, syntax, semantics, social awareness, identity politics, and all that jazz. I’m not saying that none of these are important — all of these are important, but I became so focused on them that the soul of writing eventually began to wither away.

Grief and death brings things into focus. When my grandmother died in October 2020, I didn’t want to be read, I didn’t want to be heard, I just wanted a harbor away from the darkness and hollowness that the wake of her death brought me. For a while none of it mattered and all I wanted was to understand the world as it collapsed in on itself, the world had become small and dark but I realized that the world had become manageable again. Among the things that I realized in all my grief, I found that I didn’t need all the doohickies and doodads and thingamajigs to call myself a writer, the truth is I didn’t have to do any of it, I didn’t even need to call myself a writer — I just needed to be honest. Honesty was all I had.

And so I will write. I will write regardless of whether or not I can be called a writer, regardless of views, of readership, of money, or of all the industry of writers writing about writing. I understand that this is coming from a place of privilege, but I will try to write as truthfully as I can, as meaningfully as I can, without sacrificing the things I believe to be true. I can live and write in society without catastrophizing it, without adding to the cacophony of outrage, but not submitting to systemic apathy, ignorance, and meaningless, banal writing. I want to make sense of the world through writing, but give a little meaning to it as well. After all, no man is an island.

My relationship with writing hasn’t been steady. I’ll admit that even as I write this now it won’t be steady. I might never be one of those ultra-productive writers who get to write an article everyday or even every week, but it doesn’t change the conscious decision to keep writing and keep trying. I guess all we can do is try. I guess the only thing I have left to say is,

Press On.