Hi, My name is REDACTED and I used to be a writer.

I say used to, ex-writer seems a bit strange isn’t it? I never really stopped writing in the first place. I mean, all of us write, we do so continuously actually. Maybe we don’t think of it as writing but we do, texts, emails, the writing never really ends. We’re either writing or thinking about writing or reading. I know the written word is dying with podcasts and shorts and whatnot but you can’t deny that our world is still dominated by the written word, reading and writing remain cornerstones of our society… I suppose.. what I mean is when you ask someone what they’re reading, they usually think you’re asking about a book because that’s the only thing that counts as an answer to that question. But really, we’re reading all the time. Articles, tweets, ads, sure, it might not seem like reading-reading but we’re always digesting information.

Either way, I digress. I wrote a lot as a kid. I fell into the writing head first. I did also draw a lot. I liked drawing pretty pictures and the compliments people used to give me for them. The drawing was fun, but it never felt like I had to do that, not in the way I felt inclined, urged really, to write.

Maybe to put it better – I can live without drawing. I can’t live without writing.

I started a diary pretty early on – I threw those all out years ago.. I still do that actually, I kind of envy people who have these massive shelves lined with diaries. Or presidential libraries, personal archives. Abstractly I’d like that too, a kind of record of my existence, it would drive me insane though, if those things were actually kept and preserved. I know people think it’s a waste, but I mean I couldn’t keep a diary if I had to keep in mind that people would eventually read it… The writing wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t help me, it would be for others. Not to mention, my life isn’t that interesting. I do think I’d like for it to be, but that’s just idle dreams. We all have those.

In the end, well, maybe it didn’t matter much. Those diary entries, I remember them being rather emotionally stilted. Some of them, at least. They read like a medical log, they were very objective and completely removed from my lived experience. You have some days where nothing happens and you can barely think of a sentence and then there are those days where a three hundred page novel wouldn’t even be enough. Our days are simply not made equal, it would be nonsense to archive them in the same way. Still, as people we kind of want everything to be orderly and the same… That’s not just me right?

Either way, I also started writing fiction – the diary stuff, that’s interesting but not what I had in mind to talk about. Actually, I started writing fanfiction.

It sounds kind of shameful. I don’t think it is though. I wouldn’t let a kid ride on a bike without training wheels for the first time and a parent watching. Writing fanfiction is pretty much like that – writing fiction with training wheels. It’s just play pretend, or well, maybe playing with dolls is the beter analogy.

My fanfiction was definitely the training wheels kind. Generally things you’d call indulgent: working out alternative scenario’s, inserting my own characters. That kind of changed over time, I borrowed increasingly less, the stories became more expansive, I was considering things I wanted to write, topics and themes, all sorts of experiments like with style but also literal format… I did a lot experimentation with format, I still like to do that honestly. We’re so used to the idea of what a book should be, it’s fun to push those boundaries. At a certain point all I really did was copy names and appearances. I did whatever the hell I wanted, I just didn’t have to think about names or appearances or, occasionally, the setting. It was just laziness, in a way.

Sometimes, I still consider it a bit of a mystery, when I try to figure out what drove me to start writing fanfiction in the first place. It doesn’t help that I don’t remember what my first work was … I think it was from REDACTED I got an idea for some scenario, like a character that would drop by and REDACTED happened, I wanted to see how it might change the story. But I mean, the details of that particular story are not relevant to what I want to tell… Right, the particular stories aren’t interesting, but just reflecting on them in abstract… I keep asking, why did I have to write it? So many of us have ideas that we’re content to just explore, consider idly before returning to our daily life. So many dreams go unrealised. I used to think that’s bad… Now, I don’t know about that any more honestly. Sometimes daydreaming is a good thing and things should remain as dreams. But writing wasn’t like that or about that, I had to do it. There was no plan to be an author, if anything the job didn’t seem that appealing to me… All I know is I had to write. I was compelled to.

I think – now, looking back on it – that it was the first time I realised I could be in charge of the story. You might think that’s obvious but stories were something passive, they were told to me and I listened to them idly and suddenly they were something I could create! And when you realise you can write any story, well, it’s a small step to realise that you can write your own story too. Of course, I don’t really think I realised any of that as a kid… Now that would be a beautiful story, it’s the story I would like to tell you. In a way, I’m telling a part of it to you now, but with the honesty of adult reflection and hindsight.

I probably just wrote because I wanted to do it and I could do it, that’s what kids tend to be like… But you know… As a kid you spend so many years kind of at he mercy of other people. Realising you have autonomy, however limited, is a really powerful realisation. You don’t always get to choose, but you are the one telling the story. Even when you don’t get the make the choices, how you view things, your perspective is something you decide on… and that’s just storytelling, in the end.

So I started writing and I didn’t stop.

Of course, starting is easy. The more interesting question is why you keep doing what you do, when the novelty has worn off, when it may actually actively suck. I wrote with an industrious quality – weekly updates, four thousands words a week. This was long prose, perhaps telling too much but it was better than it had any right being.

I think what drove me was the idea that I did something that mattered. I was writing about topics that I wanted to read about: depression, anxiety, OCD, eating disorders, suicide. I wrote stories that provided comfort, the kind of stories that I was looking for and wanted to read. To see your favourite characters endure a struggle, perhaps not conquer but endure and show that, at the end of the day, things are okay. Perhaps not in the way you want them to be, or the way you expect, but everything is in flux.

At the same time I was quite gruesome in the way I wrote. At some point I was an adherent subscriber of some empirical masochism. That which hurts is true… Doesn’t that sound all teenage and angsty? The stories I wrote and read were painful, explicit. I can get queasy thinking about them now but I needed that back then, because it made me feel something.

I kept writing these stories as I got older, but I was writing less. My writing also changed, I think for the better. I’ll take my decreasing word count as a positive in that regard. Really though, the fiction dried up at some point.

I don’t really know what changed… Well, I can tell you what changed – I got older, enrolled in university, various part time jobs, I started to lose grasp on my time. Of course, I was still writing. Endless notes for my courses, endless practice problems, I also wrote in journals, planners. Endless piles of paper reorganised and resorted every once in a while, none of it ever felt like writing. It was compulsive, like writing things down would make them true… Of course that’s not how it works, but try telling that to an irrational brain. I tried to take control through writing, but it only reinforced my own fears. Not to mention, writing about it meant not writing about it, to be frank. See, writing also creates distance. Stories are how we warp reality, they’re not fake, but even facts aren’t really real either.

I already mentioned the diaries. When I wrote diaries and realised someone might read them someday, I suppose that was my drive to write in the way I did. I was pre-emptively writing the story that would be spun out of my life past my death, which meant everything had to make sense, everything had to fit some structure. I would enforce order into the randomness of life, or it would make for a poor tale. The ultimate control freak.

I’ve always been interested, obsessed might be a better word honestly, in journals and notebooks of others, what they used, how they used it, that sort of thing. Why? The same reason I write stories, because I’ve never been taught how to be myself. The only thing I know is how to tell stories, imitate life and fool enough people into thinking it is actually life. I always thought those notebooks would give me insight into life, how to live it, how to be, who to be, as if they would help me become someone.

Notebooks helped in that. Writing about my days became an obsession with capturing the days of my life, afraid that they would otherwise slip from my hands and vanish into nothing, a life that is doubly negative because I haven’t lived it and no one recognised that it has been lived… As if all our lives are not lost eventually, as if we don’t lose each moment the second it passes. Life is inherently lost, because it passes.

Of course, unexpectedly I’ve always been a bit jealous of my friends, people who to me seemed to just be themselves. People who didn’t feel like poor imitation of others, who could live serendipitously and go with the flow. They didn’t need it all to make sense, they didn’t try to restructure their entire life, their entire personality to fit a story. That’s just perception, we know that how we view others, how you view me right now, that’s not really me. We’re always limited in our understanding of others, but knowing that, it doesn’t really help on a daily basis. I know all of us want things in our life to make sense, to happen for a reason. The truth is that they don’t, and that for the longest time I couldn’t live with that. I still can’t really live with that…

I keep having that compulsion, that urge, to make everything into a neat consistent story. Every choice needs to fit into a grand narrative that I can tell myself, even though it doesn’t exist. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it into a story, even if that means denying myself the possibility of living my actual life… It’s a bit silly, bit stupid… I don’t know.

I want to believe in something, religion is not an option for me. So I’ve resorted to stories, and by extension, the story of myself.

In a way, the problem wasn’t so much trying to turn my life into a story. The problem was how I tried to do that. I, you see, stories you can write. A life isn’t something you can write, you have to get out there and live it. And well, we’re taught a very peculiar way of writing our life story. We buy, you can buy any identity these days. All you buy is the appearance of an identity of course. But when your entire life is imitation, buying an identity is really, just the natural thing to do. At the same time, things just got worse for me because of it. Every item in my life had to fit the narrative I had created for myself, every pen I used, my handwriting, my furniture, what I ate, what I said. I tried to live fiction, one can hardly call that actual living. Stopping that has been difficult, I expect it’ll always be a bit of a battle.

Also, I don’t want to give writing too bad a rep though. Writing has also been wonderful and I love seeing a story unfold before my eyes. I love reading critical essays engaging me. Stories transform lives and they shape the way we view the world and how we treat others, often for the better.

So, my name is REDACTED and I’m, I was a writer. I’m a writer again now. I write stories, essays, all kind of things. I write because I want to, need to. I use words to make sense of the world around me and I try very hard to write everything down expect my life. Stories are written after the fact and well, I’d rather live life and never get around to telling the story than to tell the story without living life. The story will happen, either way.