The Anxiety of Writing

You think writing is a "fun" hobby. I think writing is the bane of my existence. We are not the same.

It’s time to write! You open your laptop, look onto a blank page, and prepare to illustrate your ADHDReliefMusic:DeepFocusMusicforStudyingandConcentration,StudyMusic.mp3 policed thoughts into a catchy stream of words that can make you sound edgy and also eloquent enough to a number of strangers who follow you on whatever social media website you have the most virtual friends on. You want to stay on topic, make it organized and not overflow it with pathos, and definitely use correct grammar!

But then you freeze. You don’t know what to talk about first. How do I start? Did I read enough books in my life to make me capable of writing a personalized essay? What can qualify me to write? How do I tell my readers without telling my readers that I’ve been writing stories ever since I was 9, and the only passion that drove me through four years of Comparative Literature was the naive urge to become a writer after publishing my very first fanfiction on Wattpad at the very obvious age of 12. 

After college, you undergo a brief moment of realization that your dream belonged to a child version of you who is no longer alive. She’s been knocked down and put back together by several successive reality checks that shattered all naivete and gullibility. Now I have the misfortune of possessing knowledge, aware of the world’s impending doom due to neo-capitalism and climate change, (including the “There’s No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism” and Margaret Atwood’s “You are your own voyeur“ quotes that kind of ruined my life). Now, all of my goals are confined within the limits of profitability and attainability in relation to my race, gender, geographical location, passport, political affiliation, and apparently how many views and followers I get on my online content. Sounds like too much work and eagerness and feigned confidence I don’t have the energy to muster. It quickly depresses me and makes me want to lie down.

In one of my 45-minute sessions with one of my multiple university counselors, I opened up about my chance of having imposter syndrome. Keeping in mind that there’s probably a policy of no diagnosis, my therapist told me that whatever I felt is valid and real. It’s a fairly repetitive phrase, one that you even see in those pseudo-positive slapstick jokes, yet somehow it felt like a relief hearing it from someone who holds a degree in psychology. But why can’t I keep this relief around when I want to express my opinion and fulfill my desire to write creatively under the guise of fiction? I refused to keep any of my adolescent writings published because I knew I did not hold a degree in literature, and thus this very unreal world I’m writing about could never be valid. 

I graduated. (kinda). I obtain a degree in literature and have exercised writing within multiple researched academic essays and even a thesis paper that received good validation. Several times I have expressed a semblance of creative freedom within my academic work and received good responses for it. I wrote a short film. I privately wrote a collection of short stories. I co-wrote a chapbook. I wrote, filmed, and published a spoken poetry video. I put up a personal blog for my prose pieces in 2019. I engaged in an online zine. I have even collected enough spontaneous and impulsive fiction-worthy life experiences that can fill up a 200-paged novel of the “deranged women” genre. I heard of every book and read enough of the classics and the literary canon. I know of literary movements and their histories and can point them out in films and books. (I still can’t quote Shakespeare or anyone else at the top of my head, but I will get there one day.) 

In other words, I. Have. Done. Shit. Some that I even forgot about due to my lack of personal documentation. This is what makes a writer. You have the words and you have the thoughts and you have enough knowledge to fill up a page with some meaning. And yet… I find it difficult to go around as a self-proclaimed writer. I don’t know what I write. I just do, sometimes, barely. I’m no longer pursuing my 12-year-old self’s dream of writing a novel. I’m not eager on sharing my personal poetry. I write tweets, and I hope to God Almighty it counts.

The anxiety is what makes you backspace and reread your sentence more than you should, stopping you from getting to the next line. It is the idea of being perceived by invisible eyes that is chilling, those invisible critics and professionals who obsessively cruise your page every day as their morning paper. It’s an irrational fear, still one real enough to not make you write. Unfortunately, you do not get degrees in professional and profitable writing for corporations and companies that will shower you with their big bucks for your precious niche and dead words. It doesn’t matter that I got countless A’s on my essays, but I still can’t write a press release. 

This current piece was easy to write because it involves no personal anecdotes, no fact-checking from viewers who want to be privy to the author’s life, demanding the real truth and nothing but the truth. Maybe it’s my physical inability to lie, as though everything has to be recorded in precision. The only way to be able to write lie-proof is to keep a journal like Joan Didion and document my life like I’m my own princess Diana. The reason why this method cannot work for me is that I simply forget. I can’t write because I’m a forgetful woman, apparently with untreated ADHD. I try to journal but the habit escapes me, and I just simply forget. Besides, write about what? No, that’s not the right question. What can I not write about? I could write about anything, and the potentialities suffocate me. When I grab at a tail, I’m again struck with the fear of sounding repetitive, uninteresting, mundane, overly descriptive, judgmental, rude, ignorant, unaware, whiny, spoiled, and stuck-up.

The anxiety of writing is about when to start, where to start, and how to start. It’s not even about starting the first line, but the second line, the third, and the next paragraph. It’s about going on, pressing enter, and writing more. What is a real writer, anyway? What makes a writer any more real than someone who writes lyrical texts to their lovers or is a chronic tweeter? The label seems to have a lot of fuzzy requirements, and one main requirement, actually, is to write, which happens to be the hardest one of all. 

Writing, to me, is laying yourself down and letting others examine you very closely. They even look you in the eyes and ask you questions. Sometimes they have feedback. Sometimes you use too much passive voice. Worst case scenario is being an earshot of a disappointed “Oh” when you unsheath a fact behind your piece. I get puzzled when people say they enjoy writing. That it is their favorite hobby. I need to order those rose-colored lenses but I don’t know the website. It’s tricky when you attribute it to creative means. Unless it’s deeply personal and never seeing the light of day, I don’t see any form of writing to be anxiety-proof. It’s a terrifying process, just like any creative project. Unless you’re blinded by your ego, in which case… good for you? At least it gets you somewhere. 

I read the writing memoirs of Stephen King and Haruki Murakami, two successful male authors who have different writing careers. Murakami first started writing at 29 after getting inspired during a baseball game, having written absolutely nothing before that. King definitely went through a more traditional route, where he started writing at 12 in a self-published newspaper called “Dave’s Rag” with his elder brother David. Both these authors share a common routine, in which they actively write every day. They just write anything, committing to their craft that now has shaped their lives. To them, writing is an unskippable meal, an activity that is done so many times it becomes almost automatic. 

But what if I forget? Even worse, I’d hate to make writing a chore, something that requires a mental effort that becomes a strain over time rather than a mindless task. What if it is stripped of all meaning, eloquence, and talent? Despite my affinity to the fine profession, I’d only lose my touch through writing when I use up my cool words through an activity only meant to strengthen the ability to write. I do not always have peace and quiet and appropriate thoughts. This is not to make myself sound pessimistic or the opposite, this is the real thought process behind every writing session.

Seeing myself as an acclaimed author seems so vain a dream, but why should I be humble regarding my personal goals? I’m yet to rationalize my anxieties of exposing myself through writing, to have people see me and know me through my 4-am typed words in a tongue I’ve mastered better than my mother’s. I simply do not think the anxiety of writing can ever be beaten, a belief I’ve gained from the number of times I’ve panicked about an essay at the big age of 22. But like every single time, I manage to surprise myself and ever so simply do it. At the end of the day, writing is not meant to be perfect. Yes, every single thought and story exists under the sun, but there are always a million and one ways to word it.

I will conclude this with an excerpt of Jacques the Fatalist I read in Elena Ferrante’s In the Margins which captures this best:

“Tell the thing as it is,” the master orders Jacques the fatalist. And he answers: “That’s not easy. Hasn’t a man his own character, his own interests, his own tastes and passions according to which he either exaggerates or understates? Tell the thing as it is, you say! . . . That might not even happen twice in one day in a whole city. And is the person who listens any better qualified to listen than the person who speaks? No. Which is why in a big city it can hardly happen twice in one day that someone’s words are understood in the same way as they are spoken.” The master replies: “What the devil, Jacques, those principles are enough to outlaw speaking and listening altogether. Say nothing, hear nothing, believe nothing! Just tell the thing as you will, I will listen as I can and believe as I am able.” 

Books mentioned in this essay.