Why I Started Writing

I have to wake up in four hours, which is probably why I’ve decided to write this behemoth of a post. Maybe I should rename my blog to “Chronicles of a Chronic Insomniac.” Anyway, I haven’t written a really personal post in…a week, so I’m gonna jam one down your throats to help you get to know me better, because 120 posts later there are obviously still so, so many things you don’t know about Yours Truly.

Writing started as an escape from a reality I hated. It was right after I moved to New Zealand. I was nine years old and spoke no English. I understood a little bit of it, but I hated my accent so much that I never spoke. And I mean quite literally never spoke a word for almost the entire year (I had my fellow Chinese classmate translate everything for me). The thing that hurt me most, however, was my hairdo. I had this weird ass mullet thing that didn’t quite reach my shoulders, and the moronic shitheads in my year all thought I was a fucking boy. Like, I’d go to the little girl’s room and they’d say, “Wait, that’s the girl’s room. You can’t go in there!!!” Honestly, I was not this mad until I looked at my old school photos a couple of months ago. I was fucking adorable, okay? An adorable fucking tomboy. Oh my god I wanna do some awful, awful things to those twats. Moving on. I was such an unconfident kid. Everything around me freaked me out. One time this girl laughed at me after I fell off my chair. Okay, whoever dumb enough to fall off a freaking chair probably deserves a lot worse than that, but it just got me so bad, you know? Questions bombarded me all day. Did she tell anyone? Are they all laughing at me right now? Is that why that guy is staring at me like that?

Insecurity followed me like a plague. The paranoia climaxed (lol) during speech week. I hid behind a bookshelf. Okay I’m gonna stop here because I’m starting to sound like a bully victim and I’ve never been one. Not compared to the really bad cases, anyway. But anyhow, I’ve hated public speaking and socializing ever since. To this day. So I turned to writing. Diaries entries. Notebooks. Dozens and dozens of them. I don’t know where they are anymore but I do remember I never sounded bitter or upset. I sounded indifferent, mechanically recording down every detail of my miserable, though at times joyful, early years. Somehow those emotionless entries were incredibly therapeutic. The more I wrote about my nerves the easier they became to handle, and slowly I began to talk and open up. The more I wrote about the kids around me the less foreign and less intimidating they seemed, and slowly I began to make friends. I think that’s when I discovered the magic of writing: not only does it offer an escape from the complications of reality, it also offers you solutions to those problems.

The rest is pretty much history. I’d fall hopelessly in love with writing, even though I wouldn’t become particularly good at it until my early teens (which, in light of my twentieth birthday yesterday, seems like a century ago). I’d fall in love with essay writing, journalistic writing, erotica writing, fiction writing, and now blogging. I’ve crossed the whole spectrum, from the bizarre to the embarrassing and occasionally the sublime. I haven’t written a diary entry in a decade, but I won’t ever forget that’s how I got into this messy, beautiful, glorious love affair. And I won’t forget that I writing began as a necessity, not a hobby, and certainly not an obsession. I suppose you can say it’s almost an accident that I became a writer at all. But then again, very often the best things in life do begin as accidents.