I Couldnt Remember Falling In Love With Him, But I Could Remember Looking Into His Eyes And Realizing

“I couldn’t remember falling in love with him, but I could remember looking into his eyes and realizing that they were going to haunt me forever.”

— Unknown

Do you ever cry so hard, so much that you exhaust yourself? You drift off into sleep, unbeknownst to yourself and when you wake, the sadness lingers, it's blue shadow on all things. You were able to empty your tear ducts, but no matter how much sadness you pour, it still haunts your existence, your every step; you can never run out of it.

the only reason why i would ever wanna write a royalty/fantasy core is to make the mc carry one of these pretty daggers

An Individual Analysis on the Meaning of Writing

What does writing mean to you?

Teen years:

Writing was a vehicle for rampant emotions. Daily, I felt too much, too deeply. I found myself swinging from one end of an emotional spectrum to the opposite end in a matter of seconds. The emotions were foreign to me, at that time; they bore no names, and I had yet to predictably profile their faces, therefore, I found it a difficult ordeal to speak about them with peers or adult advisors.

Instead, I withdrew into myself, and spent hours lying on the ground of my bedroom, acting as an audience to the voices in my head. At first, it was indiscernible white noise; a kind of debilitating, numbing white noise, which as with a migraine, forces you to slow down and rest to recover.

Eventually, however, the voices began to differentiate. Like tugging fabric strings from a sheet, the voices introduced themselves individually and the white noise dwindled into comprehension. Compelled by the clarity of their meaning, I would quickly and hungrily jot down what they spoke. It amassed to a near dozen journals nestled into different nooks of my bedroom, and the yellow-bound one I carried with me everywhere I went.

You see, during my teen years, writing was like breathing, when I otherwise felt as though I was drowning for the majority of my days. Writing was like coughing up all the water that had infiltrated my lungs, finally making enough space to gasp for breath.

I didn't care much whether people read or understood what I wrote. I wrote because I had this painful need to understand myself. To understand these potent emotions sweeping me off my feet with little reason. To dissect them and personalize them. These emotions took the form of characters in stories and drabbles, and fictional scenes that bobbed around my mind.

2022 onward:

Writing has since become less of a necessity, and more of a luxury. I no longer swing as dramatically as I used to; my emotions still flip violently for no rhyme or reason, but I am better at responding with neutrality or indifference. I guess I could say I've found a way to ground myself, like a deeply rooted palm tree amidst a raging storm. I am shaken, beaten, tussled, but I still stand.

I no longer run to writing as the sole provider of my breath, which means I write less hungrily, less desperately. I miss the days when writing used to encompass me entirely; when words poured out of me so naturally. They were pure and condensed, accurate embodiments of emotions.

Nowadays, I write in short spurts, the emotions diluted down. Within those spurts, I guess I could say I write with more intention and direction. I've developed a better sense of story outlines in that I no longer dread making them. The unintentional consequence of that is that I now enjoy outlining far more than the actual writing part; it seems that spoiling the ending for myself deprives me of the enjoyment when writing it. I fall into pits wondering "Why am I writing this again? What's the point? What lesson are you trying to communicate, and to who?" I can easily fast-forward scenes in my mental imagery, and spend hours daydreaming around central themes. "Why are you subjecting yourself to the hassle of writing an entire novel when you already know the theme in your head through a brief reverie?"

All these questions are less attempts to discourage or constipate my writing, and more attempts at getting to the core of my motivation, my purpose. Writing coaches always ask you to identify your "Why?"

I find myself increasingly questioning everything, arriving at no single conclusion. Truthfully, I have no more clarity than when I started writing in my teenage years. I do not know why I write, more during some months, and barely anything during others. I do not have a rhyme, reason or pattern that I can explain; other writers may. I simply do not - not yet, perhaps.

One plausible motivator is this: having an audience validate my writing as an extension of my values and personality.

You know the saying "When you love a story, you love the writer's mind." I guess I seek a place to belong to in this world. Originally, I thought writing was my only ticket to finding it, but I have since opened my eyes and realized there are various mediums of expression. Perhaps I shouldn't limit myself to one. Moreover on that thought, if a creation is an expression of the authentic self, the more reason for you to create freely; do not limit yourself to the patterns of other popular creators of the same field; do not try to mimic or echo their successes out of greed and desperation for spotlight, rather, seek to express yourself more genuinely with every subsequent creation, even if no one gets it. But that's the issue, isn't it? To have something authentically emanate you, and have it rejected. It opens old wounds, hm? Guess that's why it is easier and preferable to conform and pop out the same graphic smut that garners statistics over something that communicates genuine human condition.

Leaving all those nuances aside and zooming out to envision the bigger picture, I suppose I write to escape. I write as a form of romanticizing an otherwise disillusioning life. As a child, I used to dream quite bravely. I guess bravery is naivete, and growing-up soils that naivete so that you shrivel into a coward. I no longer dream so valiantly. I mock my hopes and dreams as nothing more than pipe dreams. I tell myself that "I'll be rich" in another life, that "I'll fall in love" when I am someone else, in another life, that "I'll be kinder, softer, caring" in another life where I am born into a soft crib. Other dreams I resuscitate through stories and live vicariously there. I guess writing is a medium for transcending universes; a way to be all that you ever dreamed of without actually uprooting yourself from your current life.

(The meaning of writing is ever changing. I hope to keep updating this post through the years. I wonder how much it could change).

my heart's an ulcer, crusted over in rusted blood

“Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word.”

— George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

no one gets me, or will ever get me, like my pinterest algorithm