on writing & starting over
currently: wondering if anything i have to write is worth reading
In my last post (which was also my first post), I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if I’d keep writing here. I didn’t really mean it; I was simply giving myself an out just in case I lost momentum and never posted on here again, which is something I’ve done more than once. As soon as I hit ‘publish’ on that first post, I knew I wanted to keep going, even if it was hard, even if it took me another 5 months to write something new again.
I just knew it was inside me and had to come out. I knew that I felt better after I had written each day. That’s all I knew. What you need to be true to, what you need to abide, is what you hear inside you, what wants to come out.
Listen to that. It has a story to tell.
Lily King, “Worms, Eggs, Sperm, and Other Thoughts on Writing”
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t tell you why; it simply happened that way. When I was little—5 or 6 years old, maybe?—my parents gifted me my first diary. What would become an inherent need to write didn’t happen right away, but soon enough I was writing in that diary every night. I filled its pages with silly things that happened at school (such as hiding a pencil that belonged to a boy I didn’t like in the closet as petty revenge), fun facts about my friends, my crush of the month, my dreams, anything that came to mind, really. And the habit stuck over the years. I must’ve filled at least a dozen journals before I graduated from high school and I didn’t stop there.
When I went away to college, I kept writing. Most of it was contained to my journals but for a short time, I had a blog where I ranted about the cost of fruit cups and the state of healthcare in the US. I started another blog in 2016, one that a few of you may be familiar with. It was born out of necessity while I was in a transitional period of my life; I was 22 years old, a year and a half out of college, working two jobs to pay off my student loans, and feeling completely lost and unsure of where to go next. Writing (and photography, which was also a component of that particular blog) was what carried me through that era and helped me stay connected with myself when I moved from New York to Oregon later that year. After a couple more years with the blog, life happened, the pandemic happened, and writing fell to the wayside. I’ve been trying to get back to it ever since.
Writing makes me happy. But it goes beyond that. Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away.
Mieko Kawakami, “Breasts and Eggs”
As cliché as it sounds, writing truly does feel like my life’s work. It comes as naturally to me as breathing, to the point where it feels inevitable. Just as the sun will set tonight and rise again tomorrow morning, I am going to be writing, in some way or another, for the rest of my life. So, here I am. Trying again. Truthfully, starting over feels embarrassing to me, especially doing so publicly. Even though it’s objectively untrue, it makes me feel like I’ve failed in some way. Where writing is concerned, starting over tends to lead to me questioning my self-worth, my writing abilities, and whether I have anything to say that’s even worth reading. (After all, I’m a navel gazer. I know this. I’ve known this. But I live most of my life inside my head and my thoughts are tangled threads that need unraveling unless I want them to take up permanent residence there.)
Starting over also triggers my fear of failure. What if I put myself out there and then abandon it like I’ve done with so many other projects I’ve started? What if I put myself out there and nobody cares? What if I put myself out there and it ends up being painfully cringe? (The horror!) Whether I actually believe it or not remains to be seen, but on an intellectual level, I know that the only thing worse than failing at something is feeling knowing that I have more left to do and deliberately choosing not to try again. I know that I’m not done writing. I know in my bones that I have so much more to say. So much more life to experience. So many unexplored ideas to weave into something tangible.
Whether any of it is worth reading? Well, that isn’t for me to decide.
I’ll leave that up to you.
Until next time,
Hannah