will you forgive me?

a note asking for your forgiveness and my return as a writer

i've left this substack in a dark corner of the attic to collect memories covered in dust. in my substack folder, there are more posts saved in draft than published, most of which contained half-baked feelings that I fully trusted I would remember exactly how I felt and return to finish the writing at an unknown time in the future.

that never happened. when I returned to read some of these posts in draft, I could not recall my feelings. i failed myself and I failed you as a subscriber. i’m sorry.

truth is, writing and I have a toxic relationship. I love writing, and I am also deeply suspicious of it, especially when it comes to published stories. why do I want to put my feelings on public view and immortalize my stories through the internet? do people even care about my words? is this purely performative? if so, am I even good enough to perform? doubts boiled whenever I start typing. the heat from being gaslit by myself steamed off whatever good idea I had in the moment.

when i was a kid, I thought I was going to be a writer because books saved me from the chaotic cacophony at home. I kept this dream until I was in college. pressured by the expectation to “get a job”, I eventually deemed writing as impractical and volatile. every now and then, I would encounter a great piece of writing, and my fantasy of becoming a writer would light up and burn off in about the time it takes for fireworks to become smoke.

if i were to be completely honest with you, judging writing as an unreliable trade is actually an excuse for me to not deal with the the heaviness of the insecurity I feel as a creative and a writer. I haven’t been writing because I believe that i’m an awful writer. i am convinced that my experiences and the internalization of them are so trivial that they’d offend readers. the scariest thing to admit here is that maybe i don’t love myself as much as I thought I did.

i started this substack at the height of my self-love era. I was intentionally jobless, frolicking in the jungles of kauai. i chatted with the moon every night and bathed in the river. words flowed out of me with ease and full acceptance. i loved myself so damn much then that i’m slightly jealous about that now.

but i refuse to believe that i can’t love myself like that anymore just because i no longer shake my booty at the waterfall.

i recently re-read a quote by Jame Baldwin:

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can't, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world... The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way... people look at reality, then you can change it.

there is a slim likelihood of this substack to change the world. however, i am going to post here regularly* because writing changes the way i see the world. and if you and i are truly interconnected, by changing the way i see the world, maybe it would change the way you see yours, too.

so, will you join me?

*regularly means maybe weekly, but maybe more or less, depending on how this body feels. but I promise myself this time I won’t leave drafts unfinished.