“People like you must create. If you don’t create, Bernadette, you will become a menace to society.” — Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I write and stop writing many times in my life.
My first attempt at writing was at 12. I worked on this fantasy piece called The Last Shuttle which featured three high-school-aged protagonists — two guys and one girl — fighting evil forces together. I wrote the novel in those ordinary B6-size notebooks, and they were pretty popular in my class back then — my classmates would borrow and read them during the break (and in class of course), discuss plots, find references to themselves in characters or ask me for spoilers, to a point that the teacher in charge of class overheard about this very popular novel of mine and asked me to hand it in for her to read. I was nervous — I didn’t know why she wanted to read what I wrote. Was she worried about there’s anything non-PC? Or was she trying to see my talent in writing? To my relief (and my disappointment), my B6-size notebooks were returned intact a few weeks later. She never said anything, as if she never asked for a read.
Looking back, I am not surprised at all if she found it as some boring, young kid gibberish. After all, I made two big mistakes, among others: for one, this “two-guys-and-one-girl adventure against evil forces in a fantasy world” is so Harry Potter-like that I didn’t even realize I was subconsciously borrowing plots and setups from, and secondly, the novel is named “The Last Shuttle” but my original plan was to not mention about the shuttle (which led protagonists to the final boss) until the very last few chapters of my novel. Unfortunately, after writing about 40 chapters (~32k words), I ended up not being able to finish my novel because of school workload, so the story just ended somewhere abruptly, with the shuttle never mentioned.
I didn’t pick up writing again until I was 17. I was a junior in a college in Hong Kong (yeah I started college a few years earlier than most people), and I went for a one-semester exchange program at Carnegie Mellon University. It was my first time traveling this far alone, also my first time in the United States. Everything was new and exciting to me — for example, people were speaking the language in a very different way than I learned from my English textbook, how people say “it’s 5 bucks” not “dollars”, how people say “Awesome” and “I am good” and “What’s up” way more often than “Great” or “No, thanks” or “How are you”. Another exciting thing was as an accounting major student, I decided to take an intro to computer science class at CMU, knowing how good the CS curriculum here is. That ended up being a life-changing decision (I am a software engineer now!), but back then, there were a lot of struggles and self-doubts and tears. I still remembered the night I sat in the Underground — I had a very vivid memory because that night I had my favorite thing and my least favorite thing at the same time: A large sundae with hot fudge on top and an assignment that I cannot make sense of. That was also the night that I started writing again, this time with a very different purpose. I was alone with no one to share all my feelings, so I decided to start a diary on Evernote. I set up two rules this time:
- Write only whenever I want. I am not setting any hard rules like I have to write X words per day to myself. Quite to the contrary, I tell myself it’s totally fine to write, say, 1 piece per month, and it is also fine if I stop anywhere without finishing it. At that time I believe any forced writing would just be bad writing. I should just write when I feel like it — when I have that strong urge to express myself, or when I have to use writing to clear my thoughts, otherwise I will be tired of writing and quit very fast.
- Be completely honest. This whole diary thing has no readers other than myself, so I should not pretend in any sense or in any way. I write about people and things I like and dislike, life lessons I learned, mistakes I have made, as well as my darkest thoughts, strongest feelings, my vulnerability, and the most unpresentable side of myself. This encrypted Evernote notebook is my safe place, that I get to be myself, without judgment.
These two rules reset my expectation of writing — my fantasy novel a few years ago was very outward-looking and audience-oriented, while this diary effort is purely inward-looking and self-reflective. I ended up writing 21 diaries in 2014, 102 pieces in 2015, 48 in 2016, and 20-ish in 2017 and 2018. I am accompanied by this habit in my transformative years, and these notebooks were evidence of different milestones in my life, from college to grad school to internship to work, documenting my path to maturity. I rarely went back to read what I wrote, because of the weight and strong sensations those words carry, but when I do refer back to them sometimes, I am instantly taken back to that day or night that I decided to type those words up. I guess that’s the magic of words.
The downside of writing only whenever I want is when I pass that turbulent, chaotic period of life, when I start working and life becomes more routine, I find myself writing less and less. I ended up only writing 5 articles in 2019 and 2020 in total. I didn’t know if it is a good thing (as a sign of me being mentally stable) or a bad thing (as a sign of me being lazy). I have also felt that when there were moments that I wanted to jot down something, I am having trouble expressing my feeling, as they became more subtle and delicate to be put out in words. So I opt for pondering. Sometimes mere thinking doesn’t work, then I will ask for help from others: I am glad that I have a few close friends that I can be open to and share things that have been on my mind a lot, and when friends couldn’t help, my therapist was to the rescue. I still create a new Evernote notebook every year, but the fact is I write to them much fewer than I used to.
Until recently. After 3 years living in the Bay Area, I had to relocate to London because of visa reasons. This sudden pull out of my comfort zone makes me want to write again, but this time also with a slightly different goal.
With so many things happening in my work, my life, and this world, I started to feel this “quarter-life crisis” thing. The realization and details warrant a separate post, but one thing it stems from is this feeling of imbalanced intake and output. When I was a student, I enjoyed learning. I had joy when I grasp a complex concept, understand how this world works better by doing internships or traveling, or appreciate all the greatest art pieces, movies, and books human beings have created. But now as I have graduated and worked for a few years, I have changed. Understanding how things work is no longer what excites me from the first principle, but being able to change things to how I think they should work sounds much more impactful. It is going from being a taker to being a giver; going from passively accepting to actively transforming; going from paying in exchange for value to producing value in exchange for money. It sounds wrong to me that after getting all those precious education resources and living such a unique life, I am not creating value on top of them. I want to change.
It’s the realization that learning to me is a means to an end that leads me to question what I have done to foster such change, and the answer for the past few years was: nothing. This is very scary to say out loud because it basically means I have been wasting my time watching TV series and movies, playing League, traveling, reading (yes, even reading is a waste of time if I am not producing at the end) without knowing it for at least a few years, in the golden time of my life.
One may argue that work is a good way to create value and make an impact, which I agree with, but there were also learnings from the past years that make me realize that a job has its own limitation and despite I really enjoy my work and like the company I work at, I simply can’t let it be the only way I create value.
That brings me back to writing. This time instead of writing purely recreationally (like my novel), or purely for myself (like my diaries), I want to write for a purpose. I want to write things that can provide value to people, be it a smile, some tears, or a takeaway. Also instead of writing only whenever I want, this time I want to write in a healthy, sustainable cadence, say weekly, so I have some promise to hold myself accountable. There is a range of things I want to write about, from software engineering to music to whiskey to life lessons. I am grateful for everything that I get to experience in my life, so it’s time for me to craft something for you based on those learnings and experiences, my dear readers.
Onwards :)
