The Beginning

In the end, I do want to be a writer. I have tried other things; I wasn’t good at doing them nor was I happy doing them. I’m happy when I write. Tense, nervous, sometimes deeply sad, but happy nonetheless. All negativity aside, all self-doubt, criticism, and second thoughts aside, writing makes me feel like I belong. “It’s your calling,” mum used to say to me some ten years ago when I had the audacity to worry about never becoming a professional writer while actually writing every day for hours. Something I haven’t done with that frequency or determination for years.

When I’m not too busy crying over the fact that I have no story to tell or agonizing about not being a good enough writer, I write. I get out of my way and let the words spill as if they have been waiting for this opportunity for decades. What was that quote that gets attributed to Hemingway mistakenly? “Write drunk, edit sober”? I’ll consider it a success if I have something to edit.

I compare myself to others. People write touching, stirring essays or memoirs after suffering a loss of a loved one or recovering from a life-altering event of no laughing matter. I take a look at my life and decide the reason I have no story to tell is that the loss I have suffered is not enough, and the hardships I have survived are not sufficient, and come to think of it, there just haven’t been that many life-altering events for me to recover from. Sure, I’ve felt at times like I couldn’t go on, but apparently the feeling wasn’t strong enough to be translated into a valuable story. 

Then I look at fiction authors (I was supposed to be among them by the age of twenty-one, by the way, according to my very own plan from about a decade ago). If they’re not blessed with their genius at birth, then it’s engraved on them by, again, loss and pain and hardships. Some led unfulfilled, miserable lives and were only recognized for their writing long after they had died. I myself got a tattoo at seventeen that says, “Art never comes from happiness.” But I’ve already decided I don’t want to sacrifice my happiness to this craft. I’ll carve my own writer’s path or I will have none at all. I don’t need to be the second Plath, or Fitzgerald, or Woolf — we’ve already had them. I would just like to find out what I am like as a writer. 

While journaling is my main tool for self-reflection and processing life, the need for sharing my stories is getting stronger. I want more. I don’t know what stories I’m going to tell exactly, or how. I can see pieces of a vision that’s unclear and, frankly, frightening, but I can’t ignore this nagging, ever-growing gut feeling that I have to do this. I need to do this. My very soul is screaming, demanding it.

I’ve made up my mind. If I can have this one outlet where I get to do what I love doing the most…

It’s as good a start as any.