It occurs to me only now that it was kind of inevitable that I would take up writing when I spent all my time reading as a kid, from the very first moment I was able to do it. I don't remember what it was like to not be able to read, but I'm sure that when I figured it out, the whole entire world opened up to me, and for a long time I sprinted around in it gleefully. I'd read a whole book in the bookstore without even buying it, or on the car ride home from the bookstore (why my parents didn't just take me to the fucking library remains a mystery). Books were something I was allowed to covet and want endlessly. My parents would, and did, buy me any book I wanted. In retrospect, again, a healthy relationship with a library card would probably have been a better habit to foster, but there are worse things to encourage in a child. I've learned the library card love now as an adult.
I've told the same story on here for years. To everyone in my life. I used to write- I would write prolifically. I'd write on the edges of my school notes and on the backs of scrap paper. Notebooks would all be filled with various stories, so many left uncompleted, which never bothered me. I still have endless, endless word documents of stories that fizzled out, that I would sometimes return to and add a few more sentences. This is my third blog, and I have a fourth. I mean, fuck, in elementary school I wrote a series of stories about the same female protagonist and they were legitimately so popular that I'd eagerly read them aloud to a captive audience of my classmates, who gasped and laughed and loved every word. Some people even copied my plot ideas for their own protagonists. Through high school, until the 12th grade, I still wrote prolifically, until November of 2012. I had a lot going on and when I cried to my parents about how stressed I was, they encouraged me to focus on school and piano lessons and put writing aside for now.
I still don't feel like I've ever really picked it back up. It's not like I was discouraged, but I was told, and I believed, that writing would never net me a good career, that it wasn't something to focus on, and I felt that my interest in it was silly and frivolous and after so much assault on it, being told to just give it up for now felt like the logical solution. Except it wasn't just for now. It's been a decade now. Over a decade.
It's not even that nobody ever told me I couldn't have hobbies that clashed with what I studied or pursued professionally or academically. But I still picked that up somewhere. I didn't even question it until 2015- so short a time from when I gave up what I loved- when my now-husband asked what I liked to do for fun. Shit I thought, somehow unaware that I wanted to impress him, wanted him to like me. What the fuck DO I do for fun? I didn't know how to answer the question. I can't even remember what I told him, and I can't ask him at the moment- he's out doing his hobby, the one he has protected and upheld and fought for every step of the way. I think I met him shortly after he had what he calls a "watershed moment" with that hobby, when he realized just how far he wanted to take it and all that was open to him. He was able to answer the question. I was not.
What did I do for fun, back then? Well, I was online (you thought this was going to be a break from the social media thoughts, didn't you? Sorry). I read things. I liked to read books, when I had the time. That habit had been falling out of favour ever since I got a facebook account in the 11th grade. Back then, facebook was the after-school hangout spot for my nerdy friends and I. We'd have comment chains that went forever that always had me laughing uproariously. I was happy to be included after I'd been left out for so long, both from my parents forbidding me to have an account until I was sufficiently old enough and from my disinterest in it until I realized all my friends were talking about the fun they had on there the next day at school. After high school, it became incredibly boring, and the corporate takeover began. Most of what I see when I scroll now is from pages, communities, memes and short videos from people I don't know. This is despite my best efforts to only look at shit from actual people I know. Actual life updates I enjoy getting and hearing about. But since facebook wasn't where we connected anymore, I turned to other sites. I think that was around the time I made a tumblr account.
In retrospect, I'm sure I would have enjoyed tumblr enormously had I been on it sooner. I finally found a plethora of content I enjoyed engaging with, and I had some control over it. I was on instagram too, at this time, but that was literally when it was just pictures of people I knew. I had snapchat, but again, that was just to send pictures to people I knew. Tumblr was anonymous. I was anonymous, to a degree- I followed real-life friends on there for a long time. Many have since deleted their blogs. It was a space for being young and stupid, not a space for serious grownups (of course I know this isn't the case now, but in general I've found that the people I know who are more busy cultivating adult lives are less active online). It was also a space to engage in social activism, primarily feminism. When I took a women's studies course a year later, much of the terminology was already familiar to me. The method of analysis, of reading, was not. It's taken me fucking forever to grasp that as a student of the sciences.
And that was what I did, for the most part. I'd come home from campus, and I'd put off doing homework until dinner, and in that time I'd be online. Some of that was here, blogging, some of that was on tumblr, blogging and re-blogging, and some was on other apps. I'd switch between the same few constantly. I had my brief thing with twitter. I mean, I was involved in a satellite club (with dwindling interest as I realized I knew nothing about, nor had any interest in, computer science, coding, physics, astrophysics, etc. I dropped that club the same semester I attended exactly one lecture of astrophysics before dropping it). But I didn't really do much else.
I was surprised at the amount of shame I felt, and I feel like I've been trying to answer that question for years. My now-husband wasn't intending to shame me. He was interested in me, and wanted to get to know me better, and what better a question? He got to know me anyway. To this day he maintains he finds it sad (in a pity sort of way) when someone can't answer that question. You don't know what you do for fun? How can a person live a happy life with that lack of self awareness? To be fair to myself, and to others, I think adolescence and its themes of self-discovery really extend until age 25 or so (if not our entire lives- but it's most difficult when we start out our entire adult lives), and we were 19 when we had this conversation. Still teenagers. I don't hate myself for not having an answer. But I wanted to have one.
Over the years I've approached this many different ways. Some of it was by insisting that I had to try new things and find the ones I liked. For a long while I was into swing dancing, which I picked up very quickly thanks to a dance background. That led to friends and community (all lost to me now, of course). I started a creative writing club on campus. I was surprised one didn't already exist. It still exists now. They've published anthologies. But I felt like a fraud the entire time, standing there as a final year genetics major, not even in any humanities classes at all. It was easy for me to feel like a fraud back then, though, because I was the most depressed I've ever been, and I wasn't even writing creatively. Perhaps it was because some of our meetings had only two members show up. We barely met the qualifications to be a club. Starting something is always hard. But still I tried other things. They never stuck.
Then I lost three friends in one fell swoop. Canada day weekend, 2021. A thoughtless drunken conversation, initiated by me, which spiralled into something much larger and uglier. Betrayal. Dogpiling. Bullying. Gaslighting. Trauma. Thinking about it still makes my heart ache and beat fast in a fearful, anxiety ridden sort of way. I won't pretend I didn't have my hand in that crisis or that I didn't behave distastefully, but I wasn't the only one, though of course nobody would say that except for me. Nobody would admit it.
In the aftermath of all that, I lost a group chat. That sounds so fucking... modern. Pathetic. A group chat? Jesus christ. But they all lived in the same city, and I didn't, and that chat was my only connection with them save for our annual girls' weekends. I put a lot of time and energy into that chat. So did they. It was good. It was a sounding board. It was a place of community and connection. It consumed a lot more of my time than I realized. And its absence consumed a lot more of my energy than I liked. I needed a distraction, but social media was not cutting it. I didn't want to talk about what happened with my other friends, convinced they wouldn't really take my side or want to hear me rant about sordid details. I was so afraid of losing them, too. So I picked up a book. And another. And another. Suddenly my goal of reading 20 books that year blew past, and I ended up reading 34. Books were an escape, a comfort, a coping mechanism. It felt like coming home to something. A year and a half later, and I've read more books in 2021 and 2022 than I think I read in the entire previous 8 years combined. A habit. A hobby. Something I do for fun.
Right before this rift happened, I had also taken up crochet on impulse. I was in the yarn aisle. I saw a pattern on a ball of yarn that I liked. My sister convinced me I should just go for it. I bought a hook and all the required yarn in one trip, and then got home and realized I had better fucking figure out how to make that blanket. Two months later, it was done. I still use it to cuddle up with when I read on the couch. But making it was therapeutic. I felt like I was working through my pain with every stitch. Then I thought, wait. I want this blanket to be a source of comfort. I shouldn't think about this while I'm stitching it. I didn't want to stitch the trauma into it, making it a cursed object of pain. Now I think of it as a beacon of strength. I kept going. I finished something. I comforted myself. I held myself for months before I really asked for help. That blanket is stitched with healing. A new hobby. Something I do for fun.
But as it is now, I haven't crocheted anything in several months. I crocheted more during my comprehensive exam, trying desperately to finish a baby blanket for a friend (which of course I stitched with only loving and kind and warm hearted thoughts, sealed off by a final hug of that blanket before I gifted it). And yet I would still say that's a hobby of mine. Something I do for fun. I'll go months without reading anything, then tear through three books in a weekend. And one day my husband says "I'm really impressed by your commitment to journaling." Which is, to me, an absurd statement. Commitment? That's for serious things that are hard to do, like working out or flossing my teeth before bed. I've never committed to journaling, and lord knows I haven't been consistent with it, either. But as I've written here before. I've still kept a journal of some kind since I was about 8 years old and knew how to write and had been introduced to the concept. Journaling is just something I do. It's like breathing. It's like appreciating the warmth of a summer day or enjoying a good thunderstorm or liking to wear sweaters in the winter. I don't commit to any of those. I committed to my husband, to flossing my teeth, to my values and beliefs, to therapy and all the work that came with it. Those things were sometimes easier than others, but they still took work and compromise. Journaling isn't work for me. Ergo, I can't commit to it.
The way he said it has really shaken me, once again (I think this is why I keep him around. He broadens the world for me). In a good way. In a thoughtful way. What does it mean to commit to something? What does it mean to commit to something enough that you can say you do it for fun? Does it mean doing it all the time? It can't, because I'm clearly committed to journaling on some level, but I've never once been consistent with it, and every time I try to be, I fail. It's just a coping mechanism, a thing I do sometimes, a thing I like to do. But then doesn't that mean reading has always been something I do for fun? What about crochet? Or cross stitch? Do I need to do them forever to have them be something I do for fun? Maybe not. Maybe sometimes I'm too busy or doing too much pipetting to engage in that kind of arm work on my down time. Maybe sometimes they just aren't what I want to do. But they can still be things I do for fun.
What about writing?
I've felt so hesitant to claim that identity because I really feel like I gave it up ten years ago. I quit. I didn't write anymore. I had other things to do and no time. But that's never been true. I've always had time for things. And it isn't true that I haven't written at all in that time. I've done it creatively at least once a year, because I've been having a crisis about it the entire time. In doing so, I've given more space to other things that feel far less vital to who I am as a person and who I have been the entire time. I let those things be part of my identity. Crochet-er. Cross stitch-er. Journal-er. Reader. But never writer. It's like it's too important to take lightly, but those other things are more trivial (even though one of them literally IS writing). The standards I hold for myself to be a writer are that I have to go back to how I was before November 2012. Nobody else is holding me to this. Nobody else is holding themselves to this; plenty of people call themselves writers who probably write less than I do. Maybe part of it is that it's an actual profession I don't belong to, just like I've wondered whether I can call myself a scientist.
As I write this now and reflect on it, I think it's just perfectionism again. Anything that is important to me has standards attached that are truly terrifying. All set by me, for myself, for no one else. Writing is something that is more important to me than anything else. While other things might tower high on precipitous cliffs I've constructed of what I need to do to measure up, "Being a writer" is higher than anything else. Higher maybe than everything else, combined. I'm not sure, ironically, that I can even express in words how important this feels to me. It's like a limb. It's like a child. It's like so many things. A piece of my soul. Some indelible piece of me, as a person who has an identity. But jesus FUCKING christ, do I really deserve that?
Does any of this matter THAT much? Is it really THAT serious? And furthermore, if this is really that important to me, if it IS really that serious, how the fuck is this helping? Wouldn't it be better to be a bad writer, a lazy writer, a writer with a decades long case of writer's block, a writer who isn't as prolific as she used to be, than not a writer? Someone who writes? What the fuck do I think I am doing right this very goddamn second?
I'm writing. I'm a writer. The words have always been there.
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