I haven’t written in more than a year. The post from February is a revision of a piece of writing I wrote years back, when I was still doing high school in Taiwan, having no clue where life would take me five years from then.
I do have a lot of ideas. I wanted to write about living alone in the bay for three months for my summer internship at the start of this school year. I wanted to write about purchasing envelopes at the USPS store in Ackerman to send in my tax documents (non-resident aliens can’t file taxes online) last week. I wanted to write about the awesome day I had yesterday, about running into Sylvia and convincing her to take Japan 130B with me next quarter, about attending math office hours and feeling that rush of excitement that is learning, about how I opened my mouth to silently squeal at how cute the squirrel by the lamp post outside of MS 4000A was when a dark-green honda with its window slightly rolled down strolled by, and the guy in the passenger seat also peeked down in wonder at the same little squirrel.
I tried, but I didn’t.
Some of my old pieces of writing are, I’d like to believe, objectively beautiful. If not beautiful, human. Meaningful. Things I’m genuinely proud of. I reread them whenever I want to write something now, as if my present had become so barren that I needed to reach into my past to find something new to say.
When I wrote “There’s this tattered bag I have tied around my waist that I drag as I trudge forward” almost two years ago, I saw a silhouette alone against a dusty plain, a tattered bag dragged over a trail of blurring footsteps and lost names, and a straight path leading into the horizon. I think that was how I imagined myself back then, a bit alone, a bit lost, but also a bit hopeful for what I’d find at the end of the road.
I’ve ended up right back behind her. To be precise, maybe I never really moved forward. The scenes along the road have changed, as in I’ve grown older and made new friends and learned more about computers and languages and math and what I love and don’t love, but maybe I’ve always really remained there, moving my legs in thin air that I mistook for solid ground, thinking I was the one moving when it really was the world.
Does that matter? Not really, since for all practical purposes, what really matters is that two years have passed, and I’ve become a “better” person—more confident, more knowledgeable, more employable. The dusty road is a metaphor, it’s weightless words, it’s something I saw in the back of my head when I was sleepy and cold and dying to write something.
I haven’t written in more than a year because I was scared. Nothing I wrote met my expectations. I was happy, I was sad, I was frustrated, I was content, but I wasn’t anything deeper than that. It was as if before the end of the road was even in sight, I had lost my own special way of interacting with the world. And whenever I looked back, I’d see her, reading aloud her essays, essays I could no longer write.
But maybe it’s too egotistical to think that I’ve moved against the world. To think that I’ve changed so much that I’m now at a point where I can’t write as I used to anymore. To lament about reaching up into the past and reaching and reaching and still not being able to touch whatever it was that made me start to write, when my past might as well be my present.
I don’t know, does it matter? Writing frees yet writing shackles. But what’s there to lose to try to write more again, even if all I can write are boring pieces of garbage? What am I scared of?