To all the words I've written before
29th Apr, 2025
Writing for the sake of writing kinda sucks.
Every time I sit down to write just because I know I should or I said I would, I end up feeling a bit horrid about it. The results seem hollow and pointless. Tonight absolutely feels like one of those times, or else I'd probably be starting this in a much more interesting way.
Unlike a few other people I know, I haven't actually committed to writing something here every night. For me, the idea is that I have a space to write in when I want to. Whenever I think I can come up with something meaningful.
But of course, there's always the hidden second intention - I do in fact aspire to be the sort of person who is able to write meaningfully and entertainingly, on command and at a whim. And maybe this is another attempt at achieving that. After all, this is perhaps one of my few aspirations that I can say is genuinely mine, not a derivation of wanting to be like or impress my friends (not that there's actually anything wrong with that).
Sure, I've spent a lot of my life surrounded by people who either share the aspiration, or already are prolific writers... but that's not where it originated. Rather, that company has served as (mostly) friendly competition, a source of commiseration, and in the case of a couple quite special people in the past, germinated one of my dearest love languages of writing together.
But no, I've wanted to be A Writertm for as long as I can remember. It's one of the few dreams that has endured in spite of moving on so from many of the connections that once supported it.
This is hardly my first attempt to nurture that dream, make something of it.
I've been writing dubious poetry for the last few years, with the vague intention of one day being consistent enough to publish some of it - or even escape my own orbit for once and recite it publicly some time. Unfortunately most of what I have written is quite depressing, and I struggle to write anything worthwhile out of more positive emotions. Not that I think all writing has to be positively-biased, but... well, it'd be nice sometimes.
Before that, I briefly flirted with the idea of writing a novel, or at least some short stories. A lot of this era was also dominated by ideas for fanfiction, across about a dozen different pieces of source media. Some of that even got written, and I'm not... not proud of it, y'know?. But it's painful to revisit now - so much of that writing was wrapped up with another person who is now long gone from my life, and... with her, the one person I've ever felt truly took an interest in what I wrote.
She is one of the people who fostered my love of writing into a love of writing with someone else. When you live on opposite sides of the world, a lot of the time all you can do is write to each other. So, we did. One of our most common mediums for spending time together was roleplaying over text - usually whatever fandom she'd dragged me into at the time, but quite a few original worlds and characters as well.
I have such fond memories of spending hours doing this - idling away comfortably listening to music, or (ironically) on voicecall with her, or playing some other game while I wait for her to compose a component of whatever story we were currently telling together... and then swapping places, listening to her sing or carry out some task in the background of the call while I write my own response. And so it went, back and forth.
Sometimes I joke that I miss those characters almost as much as I miss her, but it's not far from the truth. So much of our relationship was wrapped up in those stories, vulnerabilities and fierce love and catharsis and hope, all mock-disguised and expressed under the veil of fiction.
While it's not the element of that relationship I miss most, it is perhaps the one I miss most often.
And then the relationship ended, and so much of what I had written over those few years became painfully bittersweet overnight. I haven't written a lot since then. Those feelings were too big even for poetry, more often than not.
But writing is still my aspiration. So here we are again 18 months later, no less an emotional wreck but building something out of it that we haven't tried before.
I'm still struggling to find my voice in this space, like so many others. Right now especially, I don't know who I am or who I want to be, and it's rather difficult to write with any personality when you barely feel like you have one.
It's harder still to do that and overcome the constant craving for validation at the same time - I oscillate between writing for the people who might be reading and writing in spite of them almost daily, when what I want to be doing is neither of those things. I am here to write for me, for my silly little dream, for the younger version of myself who lives curled up between my lungs and has so so much to say.
Maybe we get somewhere this time. Maybe the moon is made of pudding.
This post didn't go where I expected it to. But once again, I think that is rather the point.
I hope I write more stories soon.
(PS: Reading this entry back, it strikes me that it has more similarity to a couple of other people's writing styles than I'm QUITE comfortable with, for a complicated array of reasons.
Becoming like your friends is all fine and dandy and not a bad thing, as frequently mentioned. But it's a bit fucking ironic to have it occur in the entry about my own writing. Weh.
Oh well. We'll work on it.)