Maybe this blog has always been my grounding space. Maybe I was far less anxious when I was a regular writer of solipsistic observations over here. What I failed to see for so long—I didn’t know myself that well—was that this was never meant to impress anyone. I was never meant to make it as an author. I fancied myself a great writer when I was a kid, and when I eventually came to the realization that I wasn’t, I mistakenly believed there was no use keeping at it.
There’s also that part of the story where someone weaponizes my own writings against me and I become paranoid about my privacy. Fortunately, nowadays my online social life is in a post-Roman situation where everyone’s retreated to their remote villas and I have nothing to worry about anymore. I step out of my mental cottage on a crisp morning to gaze at the vast valley of silence before me, and I feel contented.
As I type this, I’m realizing my period of not writing is not unlike the time I spent away from drawing because I became convinced that it was somehow required to receive formal training in order to make something worth sharing. My boyfriend back then, who was not exactly gifted when it came to putting pencil on paper, gave a passing glance to one of my sketches one day and declared: “you need to learn to draw.” And I believed him. God, what a waste of time. And it’s not even his fault. It’s my fault for taking it the wrong way and falling from my pedestal of perfectionism and shattering to pieces, over and over again. Of course everyone needs to learn, whether to draw or to write or to sing or to bake or whatever. We can learn by doing, and that’s where the joy of it all resides.
Oof. It’s only the second week of the year and the ground under my feet’s already shaking.