love letter to my love letters
alternatively: i'm a writer, and i'm only now realising what that means.
When I was 8 years old, I went with my mom to Superstore, and I bought myself a journal. It was thick, probably about 300 pages, and I decided I would use it as a diary. I got home, and the first thing I did was write about our shopping trip. I proceeded to use that diary for everything, I talked about my crushes, my friends, my school, my family, my dreams, my games. I was eight years old and I hadn’t had a best friend yet (and I wouldn’t still, not for a long time. Not for years) and I was being crushed with feelings someone in the third grade should never had to experience.
I was eight years old and learning how to add triple digit numbers, scared to go to the playground with the other kids for fear of them laughing at me and finding a new friend each year because they all ended up leaving, somehow.
So to combat all that, I wrote. My first short story was written on the back of a takeout napkin when I was 7, and my dad sat me in front of the family desktop and told me to type it up. I printed out a copy and he hung it on the wall in his office for years, afterwards. The story was about a girl who wanted porridge for breakfast, but didn’t have enough money to buy any. So she went and found a job, saved up for porridge and lived happily ever after. The End.
I wrote obsessively, even as a kid. My mind was constantly moving, thinking, seeing, imagining, and I channeled all of it into words that have never seen the light of day. Scribbles of a hot pink gel pen in a wire bound notebook, scenes from a novel I have never written, dialogue I want to see but never have, lines from poems I will never write.
Middle school came around and I was lonelier than ever. Angry, alone, ashamed of everything and terrified of everyone. Normal for a middle schooler, right? Practically a rite of passage, or something like that anyway. So I turned to writing.
If you ask me now, to recall anything I wrote in that period of my life, I won’t be able to list even one. I wrote all the time, in my diary, in notebooks I insisted on buying from Chapters, on sticky notes in class and even on the back of my hand. It became something of a saviour, for me, a way for me to distract myself from everything in my head and everything in my life.
I’m writing all this because I’ve been thinking a lot about who I am as a writer, and how that’s shaped my identity in a way I can barely understand. I don’t think I would be here today if it wasn’t for those diaries, those blank pages filled up and Word documents I never printed out.
When you fall in love with something so early on in life, it becomes impossible to differentiate between you and the thing itself. I don’t talk about it in my daily life, which comes as a surprise to quite a lot of people, but I’m a writer before anything else.
I was a reader first, the kid sitting on the edge of the sandbox with a book folded in his hand. I was a favorite at the local library, I brought books to social events and got scolded for it every time I was found in the corner reading instead of on the dance floor. I was a reader first, but it is the writing that saved me. It will always be the writing.
My parents, who never hear about me writing anything anymore, never mind that in the span of September till now, I’ve probably written about over 50 000 words, still think of me as their child who loves to write. Maybe, one day, if I find the courage, if I write something good enough, I’ll show them that the support they gave me all those years ago really did go somewhere. That I really did do something.
(I don’t think I’m ready for that, though. Not now.)
When you’re a writer, when you write, and you give that writing to someone else to read, in my opinion, that’s one of the bravest things you could do. My hands still shake when sending a newly written poem to my friends, and they know me better than I know myself. Submitting that piece of your heart to be examined, to be viewed by someone other than you is a feeling I will never get used to.
(This newsletter is exempt from all this, of course, because none of you are real people and you are just my friends who live inside my laptop.)
And of course, it’s possible to be a writer without anyone ever reading your work. That does not make you any less real. I have a dozen works in my Google Docs that I don’t think will ever see the light of day, even if I consider some of them my best writing yet. That doesn’t make it any less incredible, it just means it’s for me.
There is something uniquely special about this kind of work, these private words and sentences that might mean nothing to everyone else, but mean the most to you. If I were to pick any of my works that defined me, I’m sure it would be one of those.
Unfortunately, since I am nothing in my soul if not terribly dramatic, I’ve always viewed my writing as a sort of tragedy. I go through life wondering how I can turn it into something to be consumed, to be watched. I rewrite every second of my life into a scene from a short story, into a poem, into a script I will never actually create.
Maybe this the curse of being a writer, of being an artist, of being someone who creates. (I do believe, quite firmly, that everyone on this earth is someone who creates, even if they don’t title themselves as such, but I digress.). We are all destined to be consumed, because we put all of ourselves into our art, and what do we do with that art?
Most of the time, we give it to someone else.
Our still beating hearts are handed bloody to the next critical eye, our skin peeled back to reveal the skeleton below, or however the metaphor goes. Someone is always waiting to criticize, to investigate, to dig deeper and watch as we shrivel beneath their curious eye.
Maybe it’s just my anxiety, or maybe it’s just me as a whole, but I have always been incredibly aware of who I am around other people and how they could be viewing me, and I think my writing plays a huge part in that. Perhaps it’s how I analyze someone else’s behavior to see if they really do like me or not, or perhaps it’s how I feel like I have to know everything about someone, their innermost secrets and all, to even consider them a friend.
I am obsessive. I am over critical, not of others, but of myself. I have a tendency to spiral. These are traits I think I learned from writing, but I also think they show in the writing as well. So maybe it goes both ways. Maybe none of this even makes any sense, and I’m just speaking to a brick wall and hoping it goes somewhere.
Anyways.
You can discover a lot about yourself if you take the time to try, I realise. Journaling can help. It’s how I came across the idea for this particular issue, even if it took me 2 months to write.
I hope you enjoyed. I hope you’re creating. I think creating is what can save us.
I love you. It’s raining as I write this, and I’m avoiding studying by formatting and posting this, just to set a scene for you all. Hope you’re well.
god i love this corner of the internet--we're all just sending strangers silly postcards and letters containing snippets of our souls and it's just all so beautiful !! i'm glad i read yours x
JULIAN... yeah. yeah. - jack/cleo xo