On Writing

    Uh, hi. It's been a while, hasn't it? I started this blog in May, which feels like a year ago. Remember when celebrities thought this would all blow over by August and told us to hang in there? Ha! They're so cute.

    I was hoping this blog would provide me the impetus and space to capture my raw emotions in the midst of UNPRECEDENTED times. But turns out I couldn't find any words to make sense of such tremendous losses in the fight against COVID, systematic oppression, and everything else going on in the world right now.

   I am wildly unqualified to tackle any of these topics in a mere blog post and if I were to write about my personal life, it would come off as insignificant and insensitive to these very real, massive issues. At least to me it would. I had a number of ideas for future blog posts and had started writing a few of them. But the more I watched the news, the less I cared about anything I planned on writing. 

   The thought of writing a more creative piece instead crossed my mind. Unfortunately, I could not—for the life of me—find the inspiration and time to write a poem or story while also taking care of my younger sisters.

    Even when I don't have that responsibility, however, I still struggle with writing in general. Unless it's for a school assignment, I usually won't have the drive to work on a creative project for myself. As much as numerical grades and deadlines stress me out, they do pressure me into writing something—and sometimes, it'll be something I'm really proud of. I touched upon that in my last blog post, but the fact that I wrote that essay for a college application is important to note. There are varying degrees of inauthenticity I can detect in the works I write for applications and school. At the end of the day, I'm trying to impress someone and make myself sound better than I think I am.

    When the person you're trying to impress is yourself... it's significantly harder. I spend far too much time looking for the perfect words that I end up saying nothing at all. When friends ask me for writing advice and want me to look over their creative works, I question my right to help them. What do I know when I barely have writing of my own that I deem worthy enough to share?

     With that being said, I know I am my worst critic. I need to give myself a lot more room to fail and learn from mistakes. And this whole blog thing is like a trial run. At first, I was questioning how professional I want this blog to be. Considering how cocky I came off in my introductory post though, I think this blog will be pretty informal. I'm still figuring all this out so thank you to anyone reading for being patient and sticking with me. I hope this blog post finds you well, whatever that means.

Someone please tell me because I seriously do not know.

P.S. How many times do I say the word writing on here? My gosh.