I have never hated writing as much as I do these days. I have also never written as much as I have, these days.

Since the end of August, I have started, sketched, completed, abandoned, more than 20 different essays. Most of them will never leave my drafts. Journal entries on Notion, there have been at least 50, without counting my research journal pages, which have been a surprisingly useful outlet these days. There are also over 50 notes on my phone’s Notes app, almost daily random thoughts I write on the Whatsapp group chat with myself, and, lastly, my extensive collection of paper journals, planners and notebooks, and the 9 new ones I purchased within this timeframe. Not to mention the things that never see the outsides of my brain; every single day, I sit in the dark and I write in my mind until everything gets blurry and I fall asleep.

My writings are the shape of my thoughts — according to the season, my most common literary genre will take over my cognitive networks. When I was younger, I saw the world in tales — of fairies, of magical worlds, of mystery and imagination. During my most-active seasons on the internet, I only thought in the shape of tweets; then, there was the phase of inspiring Instagram captions. One of the reasons I gave up poetry was because strophes and certain ways of speaking vaguely (and concisely) stopped making sense in my head. And now, or at least for a while, for a few years now, I have been thinking through essays and papers. I talk to myself by crafting hypothetical long-ass texts that I will never write down. And, even when it’s just me and my mind, my essayist voice is clear and well-positioned to speak to a general, speculative reader, causing me to employ words and construct trains of thought that never mention hard details by name and avoid the heart of the matter that I am at odds with.

It’s as if my consciousness can’t help but sounds ambiguous and act evasive, even when there’s no one there to judge what we have to say. And so, the conversations with myself have become unproductive, in the usual fashion of scientific writings that are full of intricate ways of not really stating something if it sounds like it’s too much. But it’s also worse than that — everything that I write seems terrible to me, by all standards. My academic papers look dull and uninteresting, regardless of what others say. Everything I’ve tried to write for my blogs has sucked, and what did end up getting posted did so under the guise of not missing out on the duty of keeping records of things. In the past, I’ve described writing as mapping out the land and following the lead towards the treasure of the good life (I was very young). At some point, I understood it more like “maze-running” through my mind. Nowadays, I feel like the struggle I’m trying to address with all of this writing is more akin to a labyrinth; no turn is really a dead-end, and reaching the centre is an inevitability, as much as eventually making all the way back, and starting over.

This account may sound positive and almost hopeful, but, right now, it feels tiresome and monotonous as hell. Perhaps this is the reason why I write journal entry after journal entry and I am completely bored of every single one of them — the truth is that having and handling my broken heart are the things I have done the most, as a writer. My fears, my anxieties, none of it is new to me, there is no fresh revelation to make me feel like there is anything worth finding inside when I sit down to write. Unsurprisingly, my brightest moments of clarity lately have come in the shape of confessional text messages I shared with my friends, in our silly little group chats, in between the dozens of things I am supposed to do throughout the day. Writing is, at the core, a very lonely job, and, as a writer, there are worse things you can do than getting out of your head once in a while, not just to go for a walk to stretch the legs and wander around, in typical flaneurian fashion, but to listen to someone else, and give yourself a bit less credit.

At the same time, I’m convinced this isn’t quite the right answer to my current crisis, but I must admit that the correct way out is something that I don’t feel ready to come to terms with. I realised recently that I am terrified of silence. Like an unsettling stranger, someone I don’t know well enough to be comfortable standing in its presence, and who I would never willingly choose to spend any amount of time with. This complicated relationship did not seem as bad as my description sounds now, not until very recently, because I could cut myself some slack by speculating that I would be ok with being silent, until I realised I could not recall the last time I had withstood it, by any measure. It sounds pathetic, which is exactly how I felt when it clocked that, even when I shut my mouth, my brain never shuts up. I have seldom experienced the joy of leaving myself alone.

I am not suggesting that the answer is stopping writing altogether, because, even if I could spend a week or a month without putting words together on paper, I highly doubt that it would be enough to make my brains calm down and leave me be. Like many other times in my life, I have to come to terms with having a problem that cannot be solved, easily or at all, and sitting with the discomfort, tossing and turning without leaving the bed before the dawn. I am restless and I have realised that there is no way of rationalising myself into being at ease, at least not for now, as I grapple with this dramatic identity crisis, and this unexpected, unplanned season, and all the things I am trying to reconcile. Right now, the air feels too cold, my fingers are freezing, my stomach is churning, everything tastes like nausea, my head hurts and time is dragging, moving very slowly, but also so fast, and there is not enough of it for me to do everything that I should do. I feel dizzy and confused and I want to go home, but I can’t, so I won’t. I will stay in, I will haul myself down the end of this day, finish my tasks a lot later than planned, and hope that tomorrow won’t feel this heavy.

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This text was meant to be a short entry, a personal challenge to post something that needn’t be a long, comprehensive exploration of all different aspects I have personally considered when thinking about a certain topic, presented in a way that highlights how everything is somehow interconnected, and the absolute historical contingency of facts is the only sure thing in the grand scheme of networks of happenings. I saw this little sentence that Matt Healy said on an interview with the Pitchfork, about The 1975’s 2022 album “Being Funny in a Foreign Language”:

Every record I’ve made, I convinced myself that I had so much to prove, so it had to be about everything that ever happened, everything that’s happening now, and everything that could ever happen,” […] “But on this record, I said, ‘Instead of a magnum opus, what about more like a polaroid?’”

I don’t think this is exactly the format I had in mind when I took this sentence very personally and decided that I, too, should stop trying to prove something to myself & other imaginary someones and just post anything, like I used to, in the past. I don’t think this text here is quite the polaroid yet; to be honest, I would have much preferred to start with an insightful exploration of what the metaphor could mean if we actually took the polaroid more seriously than Matty probably did when he said that. Nevertheless, this is what I had to say, I did it, and this is the best I can do about everything else today.

Additionally, I would like to share that I recently started a simple blog with my friend and labmate Dahyun Ryu, about our research thoughts and theoretical reflections. It’s called sappy sallows and you can access it here. I’ve also added it to the top menu so it’s pretty serious!

Photo by Izzy Gerosa on Unsplash