There are days - or worse, nights - when there's not a drop of hope left in you. Whatever it is you wish for yourself, the idea of ever having it just feels delusional. A fantasy.

On days and nights like this, I like to remember the days I have lived where I was absolutely drunk with hope. Where I had so much faith in the universe conspiring to give me the best future possible that I couldn't help giggling with excitement and gratitude. Because there have been days like this. When I had no doubt that there really is someone out there waiting to meet me, that there would absolutely come a time when I'd be able to make a living doing what my soul desires, and when I would finally understand why the painful things that happened to me were necessary and had a purpose.

Your dark thoughts dictate nothing. Not your worth, not your future, not your fate. They're nothing more than thoughts. They don't get to boss you around. You are the boss, always.

I can’t shake this feeling off. The easiest name for it would be ‘loneliness’, but it’s so much more than that. It’s hunger and thirst; it’s feeling hot and feeling cold; it’s a strange, indecisive need that will let me live even if it’s not satisfied, but it’ll never leave me in peace. I’ll go to sleep fantasizing about being loved, being wanted, and I’ll dream about it, too. As I go about my day, it’ll be the only thing I won’t be able to give to myself, and its absence will always—always—be felt. I’ll miss another’s hand in my hand the way I’d miss my own if I suddenly lost it. I’ll crave the touch of another’s skin on mine as if one layer weren’t enough for me. Intimacy will feel like a distant memory that’s starting to fade, but that I nevertheless still desperately need, the way a child starts to forget their dead mother but still misses her.

So, I guess loneliness is the easiest name for it.

The Beginning

In the end, I do want to be a writer. I've tried other things; I wasn't as good at doing them nor was I as happy doing them.

I’m happy when I write. Tense, nervous, sometimes deeply sad, but happy nonetheless. All negativity aside, all self-doubt, criticism, and second thoughts aside, writing makes me feel like I belong. “It’s your calling,” mum used to say to me some ten years ago when I had the audacity to worry about never becoming a professional writer while actually writing every day for hours. Something I haven’t done with that frequency or determination for years.

When I’m not too busy crying over the fact that I have no story to tell or agonizing about not being a good enough writer, I write. I get out of my way and let the words spill as if they have been waiting for this opportunity for decades. What was that quote that gets attributed to Hemingway mistakenly? “Write drunk, edit sober”? I’ll consider it a success if I have something to edit.

I compare myself to others. People write touching, stirring essays or memoirs after suffering a loss of a loved one or recovering from a life-altering event of no laughing matter. I take a look at my life and decide the reason I have no story to tell is that the loss I have suffered is not enough, and the hardships I have survived are not sufficient, and come to think of it, there just haven’t been that many life-altering events for me to recover from. Sure, I’ve felt at times like I couldn’t go on, but apparently the feeling wasn’t strong enough to be translated into a valuable story. 

Then I look at fiction authors (I was supposed to be among them by the age of twenty-one, by the way, according to my very own plan from about a decade ago). If they’re not blessed with their genius at birth, then it’s engraved on them by, again, loss and pain and hardships. Some led unfulfilled, miserable lives and were only recognized for their writing long after they had died. I myself got a tattoo at seventeen that says, “Art never comes from happiness.” But I’ve already decided I don’t want to sacrifice my happiness to this craft. I’ll carve my own writer’s path or I will have none at all. I don’t need to be the second Plath, or Fitzgerald, or Woolf — we’ve already had them. I would just like to find out what I am like as a writer. 

While journaling is my main tool for self-reflection and processing life, the need for sharing my stories is getting stronger. I want more. I don’t know what stories I’m going to tell exactly, or how. I can see pieces of a vision that’s unclear and, frankly, frightening, but I can’t ignore this nagging, ever-growing gut feeling that I have to do this. I need to do this. My very soul is screaming, demanding it.

I’ve made up my mind. If I can have this one outlet where I get to do what I love doing the most…

It’s as good a start as any.