It’s once we get to the airport food court that things get devastating. My mum buys too much for me to eat so my Dad has to finish it. I buy a peach iced tea knowing that I won’t be able to take it with me through the gates. Somehow, my Dad, who is one of the most sensitive people I know doesn’t shed a single tear. Why? Because he needs to be there for my mum. She can’t even look at me. She looks behind me, searching for a stranger to observe because if she sees me sitting right in front of her, she knows it can’t be stopped, me leaving.

Then, past the border security, taking off and putting on my shoes, settles in the guilt. Utterly unbearable. It’s been described a million times before, and you exactly what I mean when I refer to that weight in my chest. Here I am, leaving the two people who love me most in the world, who will have always given me the most anyone will ever give to me, acting as though leaving wasn’t a choice I made, and instead, something I had to do. As I march on forward, feigning all the indifference I possibly can, I fiddle with my boarding pass wedged in between the pages of my passport. Memories from the previous week’s race pass my eyes like a film reel. I should have been kinder, I should have asked more questions, I should have bothered them more. I should have I should have I should have. Regret suffocates my pores. I want to rip my skin off and just bleed and bleed. Being in tangible pain would be much easier than sinking into myself. Then, at least someone could help me.

I’m thinking back to the first time I left home, the first time I said bye to my parents, not knowing when I’d see them again, because recently I’ve struggled to distinguish guilt from love, the sensation of feeling guilty and missing someone. I’ve been here before. I just didn’t think it could show up again like this. And we are back. The death of my childhood best friend. Losing her is honestly the catalyst for why I write, and I don’t wish for this declaration to cheapen her life by dedicating it to my self-indulgent hobby, but it is true. I was not a good friend to her. I don’t think I ever really was. I only showed up in ways I thought were right, not even giving her a moment to tell me what she needed. She died remembering a version of myself that I wholly despise. That version of myself has been immortalised by her death. The irony! So grief. I expected to mourn her. She was gone now. I expected to miss her. Instead, I became obsessed with everything I’d ever done wrong. Riddled with guilt, and I’ve never been very good at solving riddles, might I add, I wrote and wrote and wrote, because I needed to tell myself I wasn’t a bad person. I reconstructed our friendship over and over again in creative writing class, pretending like what we had was far more magical than it actually was. I added sparkles to my memories of her. She was outlined by a sweet, gentle, tender, adoration that was closer to fiction than it ever was to reality. I was obsessed with her, I wanted her to be my friend, my friend, and I hated it to be any other way. It offended me that other people recognised what I saw in her, when other people loved her for the same reasons. She wasn’t their’s to love. She was mine. My relationship with her continues to be this window through which I view everything in my life.

When I miss someone, I struggle to distinguish whether I am missing them because I love them, or I am missing them because I’m desperate to set things right again, because I’m seeking the reassurance that I am not a bad person. This is a reassurance I’ll never get with her. So I search and search for it in every relationship I have in my life.

My latest encounter with grief seems to be taking a very similar shape. Without him as the lawyer for my case, the jury member who is secretly my friend, I begin to believe the prosecutor’s claim that I am, in fact, guilty. Do I miss my parents, or do I just want to be nothing less than a good daughter? Do I miss her, or do I just want to prove to her that I’m a good person? Do I miss him, or do I just want to fix the last impression I left of myself, a better impression?

The truth is, missing every one of them is as real as the fact that my name is Hannah and my birthday is on the third of March.

If I’ve learned anything from my relationships with people this past year, it’s that who I believe myself to be is a stranger to those who know me. I have all these preconceptions of myself. It is almost as though to myself, I am the new girl at school, someone to be preyed upon and ripped to shreds by my own hands. My flatmate Ava was telling me about her struggles to be romantic; she said it felt like a performance rather than some primal instinct. I nodded and said I felt exactly the same way, that I believe, inherently, I’m not a romantic person.

Then she gave me a look.

“Uhhh, Hannah.”

That’s all I had to hear to realise how silly I sounded.

Hannah, who burns mixtapes for her favourite people and believes in soulmates, Hannah, whose favourite films and bookstores are all love stories, Hannah who still dreams of falling in love to help her sleep.

Most of the time, I don’t know myself at all, it seems.

At the start of this year, before we ended things, I remember telling him that my identity feels severed from my parents as individuals, that I don’t talk or think about them in the same way that other people do, as he does. He called me out immediately.

“You talk about them all the time. You’re literally talking about how you don’t talk about them right now, which by the way is completely untrue”.

And he’s right. I’ve even started this entry with a spiel about my parents.

I’m not actually trying to argue anything here. Of course, guilt and love coexist. Of course, they can converge and just as much diverge. I guess I’m just attempting to comfort myself here. I’m not a bad person. I’m allowed to miss someone; it doesn’t always have to be more than wishing they were here. And even when it does mean more, that’s okay too. Where would I even be without it all? I’d have nothing to write about!

I’ve been feeling a lot lately. More than I think. My journal entries begin with “I feel” rather than “I think”, and I’m here writing because I think my thoughts have finally begun to catch up to my feelings. It feels too awful to do nothing about it, too much too soon. If anything can hold me up, I know it’s these words, and that is why I’m here frantically typing at three in the morning instead of getting the sleep that I’ve delayed for years now.

Winter has been incredibly mean to me this year. It’s dried my skin so violently that a red rash has appeared around my mouth. I feel like a kid with a ring of spaghetti around my mouth. It’s seriously embarrassing. But beyond the damage it’s done to my appearance, when I give in to picking at my lips late at night, I’m left with what feels like the first layer of my skin. That’s how I’ve been feeling generally. It’s like these previous weeks have corroded all the layers I’ve grown and tended to ever so carefully. Now I’m left all vulnerable in the biting wind of February with just the first layer of myself, not interesting enough to maintain a conversation with a new person, but not yet insecure enough to resort to isolation. Just this strange in between. Oh, how I am so sick of the word between and everything it implies.

I’m tired now. Sleep calls to me like a hungry child demanding a bowl of sweets, reckless and determined.

What then has remained interesting? Again those moments of being.

— Virgina Woolf, Sketch of the Past (1939)

I’m sitting on the bus, headed home. Everything I’ve done throughout the day has been completed with the purpose of getting to this moment. Going home to write. But now I’m dreading it. All I ever want is the space and time to write. Yet, when all I’ve ever wanted is plopped right into my hands, I let it slip through my fingers, fearing I’ll ruin it with my amateur touch. Thinking about writing is so much easier than actually writing. I guess that’s the way with most things.

Sitting on the bus, headed home. This moment is far less significant than the other moments that comprise my week. So why is it at the front of the line in my queue of thoughts, waiting to be birthed onto a piece of paper, or as of now, a screen?

As I’ve mentioned before, writing for me is not a creative act, but rather, an articulation of my interior life. It’s how I externalise whatever goes on inside my mind, translate whatever physical experience I encounter through something that is comprehensible and not just felt. Even my attempts to write fiction become semi-autobiographical. I’ve always said that writing is the only time I’m wholly conscious of my being. I am entirely present while writing. This solitariness enables me to give myself to only me. Then and there is when I’m really living. Or at least that’s how I like to think.

When I sit down to write, what comes to mind is never those moments I thought I was living my life to the fullest. This is probably why I struggle to create stories. I’m not interested in happenings, when things occur. They are loud enough to be heard without my voice. I am obsessed with scenes reduced to a snapshot in a time-skip montage.

I’ve been thinking about my moments in the context of my being since reading A Sketch of the Past by Virginia Woolf from her essay collection titled, you guessed it, Moments of Being. Written towards the end of her life, Woolf explores the impact of her mother’s death, her troubled relationship with her father, and her early experiences of sexual abuse. Between all of this, she introduces and revisits the concept of being and non-being, as well as their coexistence.

Because the things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important. If I could remember one whole day I should be able to describe, superficially at least, what life was like as a child. Unfortunately, one only remembers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not. Why have I forgotten so many things that must have been, one would have thought, more memorable than what I do remember? Why remember the hum of bees in the garden going down to the beach, and forget completely being thrown naked by father into the sea?

— Virgina Woolf, Sketch of the Past (1939

Woolf defines moments of being as a rare, intense experience of heightened awareness, insight, or revelation, while moments of non-being as living mechanically through daily routine, leaving no lasting impression. However, the moments of being Woolf recounts possess the qualities of what one may deem uninteresting and unimportant, unworthy of immortalising in their journal. When recalling a memory about her mother, she doesn’t dwell on her mother’s personality or appearance. Instead, she describes an early childhood memory of seeing a floral pattern on her mother’s dress which gave her a sudden, vivid sense of existence. Another moment of being is when she witnesses a puddle in a path, one that suspends her and the life she’d lived up until that point, stripping her world of any realness.

There’s this one moment of mine, so potent I can’t remember ever having existed without it, even though I did. A pony named Cleo wearing a pink bridle with fly fringe of the same colour. I’m supposedly standing in front of her but I don’t see myself, only zoomed-in view of her right eye while a fly lingers around, planning its attack. I’m not sure if it’s me who sees this memory, who saw this memory, or if it’s even real. Cleo blinks in three-second intervals and looks past me and into the distance towards the red rope that feebly barricades the entrance or exit depending on where you’re standing. Any feeling or memory ends there. I don’t have more to say.

So often we pretend like we have control over what memories are worth keeping. We measure our memories in binaries, good and bad, happy and sad. Depending on what you value you pick one or the other. If you wish to create an excuse for staying in bed all day, you’ll drown yourself in both your sad memories and the tears that accompany them. Whereas if you’re feeling hopeful about everything because spring is finally here, maybe you’ll replay your happy memories like an old favourite song you rediscovered.

These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being.

— Virgina Woolf, Sketch of the Past (1939)

But I believe that there are moments, there it is again, when your mind and body are sized by neutrality and a moment of being surfaces like a message in a bottle. It’s those moments that make up your life, not the ones you condition yourself to prefer or post on social media. So what do we, what do I, do about these moments?

It all comes back to writing. Despite what I say, that whole thing about being fully conscious when writing, when I write I’m not really being. I’m remembering moments of being and non-being, I’m giving myself that time and space to be cognizant of any moments of being… God, I’ve said moments and being so many times, I’d be marked down for poor use of language if this was graded. I don’t actually like writing about writing. It feels performative because I haven’t written anything substantial enough that give me the credibility of writing about writing. Still, here I am writing about writing. But what can I do when I like to write about living and how I live, is through writing? Forgive me if it seems I’m saying I know better about being than anyone else. I really don’t. I’m capitalising off of Woolf’s theory after all.

I cannot offer anything profound about my moments of being except for the acknowledgment that they exist. And that I must record them. I am unsure of where this desperation to remember them comes from, especially because I never forget them. It is the grand moments I tend to forget, the details of what is obvious. I just know that this desperation, for whatever reason why it exists, fuels my enthusiasm for life and my desire to, as Anais Nin wrote, live through it again by writing.

Waiting for: exam results, university acceptance letters, rejection letters, an email reply, season two of my favourite shows, the bus that never comes on time, an apology, the wifi to load, a parcel from Vinted, the concert I booked tickets for almost a year ago, my hair to grow, summer, winter, autumn, spring, my birthday, love, success, small things, big things, God.

Waiting for God.

Part i.

For nearly a decade, my life expanded no bigger than home, school, and the Church. Growing up in a predominantly white community as a Korean girl, during a time when people knew nothing of my motherland but Gangnam style and Kim Jong Un jokes, the Church was the only place I could be Korean without someone asking me whether I was Chinese or Japanese. Every Sunday, I woke up early singing Church hymns as if they were Katy Perry songs and I dressed in outfits I thought would impress the boys and make the girls jealous. God may have ruled the Earth, but back then, I ruled the Church. It’s strange how when you’re little so many things mean so much in a way they never do again once we get older. Being the first to land a backwards walkover, the fastest at memorising bible verses and choreographies and lyrics to hymns, and specialising in both tree climbing and pinecone collecting somehow placed me at the top of the food chain. Of course, this was also because I was a bossy little diva who fit perfectly into the archetype of a spoilt only child but hey, I was only eight, cut me some slack.

I loved the Church because I felt it loved me. Not because God loved me, but the community.

At every Korean Church I’ve been to, there has always been a point system. The person who can recall the Ten Commandments or recite the lord’s prayer the fastest would receive a jelly snake and a dalanteu—a laminated piece of paper with a certain amount of stars on them depending on how well you performed. At the end of each season, the Church would organise a gift shop in which we could spend our dalanteus on bubbles, stationery, figurines, card games and more. Whenever Sunday came around, I tightened my shoelaces with the determination to walk into the Church and come out of it with more dalanteus than I had the previous week. After the service, the only thing on my mind was showing my new gymnastics tricks to my friends and winning at least one round of freeze tag. Where was God in between all of that?

I was told incessantly that God was everywhere, in the faces and places I loved. But if God was everywhere, then why, when I clasped my hands together and called to him, did he never answer?

As much as the Church was a kind of utopia, it soon festered into something that would poison every crevice of my life for the following years.

My parents found themselves grappling with the increasing divide between religion and faith. The priest began exploiting their contributions to the Church and demanding money from not only my parents but everyone who had displayed even the slightest act of kindness. He would tell them: those who pay the most at weekly donations, your prayers will be heard, those who donate any less than the highest payers must exercise your faith better or God will not hear you. I always suspected something rotten went on during those late afternoon meetings. I just didn’t expect to be so…shallow. If you’re going to be a villain, then the least you can do is be interesting.

As the months progressed it became impossible to ignore, even for me, just how corrupt the Church really was. The priest cared more for his reputation than the people’s faith.

We tried attending a few more churches but they all seemed to be infected by the same thing at our first one; affairs, plagiarised sermons, bullying, gossip. The Christians would call that sin. I’m not kind enough to excuse such behaviours as something so enticing. I just call that embarrassing human shit.

Not all churches are bad. I know that. But can the Church really be faithful when it’s an institution created to serve the people, the public?

“Religion is something between you and other people; it’s full of interpretations and theories and opinions. But faith . . . that’s just between you and God.”

― Beartown, Fredrik Backman

Part ii.

Then, a really bad thing happens and that’s all it takes for you to make your decision.

Like, someone you love gets sick and dies.

And it’s from here that people go two ways.

1. Pray that she finds peace in heaven.

2. Stare, as her flesh crinkles inwards into a pile of ash.

You can guess I fit into the latter category.

However, let me reassure you that I am anything but a cynic. It’s just that, while I’m here, I’d like to believe in life and everything that comes of it. I’d like to believe in what life can give and death cannot. Handwritten letters from friends, a phone call from parents, tree branches waltzing in the winter breeze, a dog’s kiss on the cheek. Faith is a remedy for many incurable things, it’s an extension of hope, often somebody’s last strand. Perhaps it is because I still have so much to lose, so much to hold on to, that I can’t see past the clutter of my life and reach God. After all, my fear of death has less to do with hell and more to do with my love for life.

God exists, I’m sure he does. But in the same way that I’m sure he doesn’t. Many of my friends are devout Christians, others chose to believe in a god with a lowercase g. The rest don’t believe in anything at all. And yet, here we all are.

We haven’t been to Church since nearly a decade ago. Though, my Dad still believes in God. I asked him how he did it, wait for something and someone that never begins or ends. I’m so sick of it, I can barely endure waiting for university acceptance rounds, I complained to him. It doesn’t change as you get older, he told me. I still wait for the weekend, a call from my sister, a bargain on Facebook market. I wait for the rain to come so I don’t have to water the plants, then I wait for the rain to stop hoping our roof doesn’t get damaged. I also wait for you and your mum when I realise I’ve walked too quickly, and while waiting, I watch you guys complain about me, laughing as if I can’t hear you.

And so I remember. It’s the space between that makes up my life, the words before the full stop.

Maybe God will find me one day. Or perhaps I’ll find myself standing in front of him. But until then, I don’t care to believe in him. Or her, if that’s what you prefer. Not when I already have so much love and tenderness to believe in. Not when I’ve been lucky enough to inhabit even the slightest blip of this ceaseless timeline of existence.

“We need each other as we need the Earth we share.”
― Maya Angelou

I’ve been on the internet since I was eight. This makes it ten years, almost eleven, that I’ve been chronically online. Don’t blame my parents for this, I would’ve found my way to a screen one way or another. I lingered on Tumblr, trying to figure out what “dead dove, do not eat” meant, before making the move to Instagram. One of my first posts was of a Sesame Street meme screenshotted from Pinterest. I was into cute cartoon drawings of marshmallows and minion memes, and I unabashedly endorsed the “keep calm and” movement…phenomenon? I don’t really know what to call it.

I soon realised the power of social media when my friend and Icreated a fan account for Ansel Elgort (prior to any allegations, I cannot stress this enough) after reading and watching The Fault in Our Stars. Whenever it rained during lunch, we would hide in the corner of our classroom behind the tables and watch edits of Augustus Waters and Hazel Grace Lancaster, helplessly giggling and swooning over the “It’s a metaphor” scene. We repeated “Okay? Okay” to one another and set our lock screens as Tumblr fan illustrations inspired by John Green’s novel. The fan page was our project, something shared between us that no one else understood or particularly cared to understand. We called each other screaming and ran into school like headless chickens each time Ansel Elgort interacted with one of our posts and repeatedly listened to his singles Thief and Supernova on our walks home.

To this day, I look back at that time and think about how girlish we were in all the best ways. It’s infinitely precious just how much little girls can care about something.

Social media became a place of community for me. It still is. It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say it was where I first discovered that I wasn’t alone, that something wasn’t inherently wrong with me just because I felt and thought a little more than what seemed like everyone else in my life.

Of course, for all the versions of myself the internet has preserved and helped me accept, there were times the social media was the instigator of my self-esteem and body image issues. Spiralling deeper and deeper into the depths of K-pop, I began to see my body as an organism measured by its aesthetic value, not all the other wonderful functions operating inside the external cage of vanity. I’d rather be punched in the face than lose a streak with one of the popular people in school and having less than one thousand followers on Instagram was social suicide. Throughout high school (ages twelve to sixteen in Australia) my hands would shake each time I pressed ‘post’. For the following hours, I’d proceed to stare at my notifications, refreshing every three minutes to see who liked my post. Given my paranoia, one might’ve thought I was a celebrity. That certainly wasn’t the case.

Post-Covid, after a three-year reading drought, I fell back in love with literature and started caring less and less about the presentation of my flesh. It’s like I suddenly remembered who I was, who I used to be before social media became a social currency, my social currency. I was quite literally revolutionised by reading, even if it was Keira Cass’ Selection series that did so. I deleted Snapchat and Tik Tok, and created a new Instagram account account, letting only my close friends and mutuals follow me. This exclusivity of my personal Instagram liberated me from my fear of judgement. I knew the people who I allowed into the digital landscape of my self-expression would not criticise me for being me, and if they did either I could remove them or I chose to believe they had every reason to.

When a friend from primary school looks great in their recent post, I’ll compliment them in the comments without a second thought. When a mutual of mine uploads an outfit photo on their story, I’ll like it without hesitation. If you spam your story with photos from your travels, I’ll spam back with likes because I sincerely love to see what people are up to. Isn’t that the literal point of social media? To connect with one another? For years I refrained from commenting and liking people’s posts, even though we were following one another. I feared that I’d violated someone’s online space and reminded people of my online presence. I could barely handle this acknowledgement of my being in real life. But along with the selectivity of my personal Instagram account, came the unspoken confession that if I accept you, I like you enough to let you see me and support you.

When someone likes my story or comments on my posts, I am indeed reminded of their presence, not just online but in my life, and suddenly I wish to see them or if they’re a mutual, make the effort to grow closer with them. This single interaction prompts me to communicate with them, whether that be a text asking them how they are or a simple reply to their story. As much as I appreciate my own presence, I’m barely anything if not the people who I know and know me. With every person in my life, is another world. It’s because of my relationships with others that my life is ever-expansive. So why should I work towards severing such connections when we live in a time where it’s been made easier for us to sustain them?

Given the way things are, I know you know what I mean by this, kindness couldn’t be more important right now. I don’t mean passive niceness, but actually going out of your way to be kind. Social media make us negligent of genuine human interaction. We seem to settle for the bare minimum because we’re all exhausted from being constantly online. But just how much of our time online is spent communicating rather than consuming and curating? Witnessing someone’s story about their recent travels in Japan is not the same as asking them how their trip was in the inbox that awaits you one swipe away.

If you exist in my online space, it’s because I want you here. I’d hate to spend all my time online sending and deciphering cryptic signs. My English literature and art history degree demands too much of that already. I know most of us won’t delete social media. I certainly won’t. And yes, I hate to say it but Substack counts. As long as I roam the halls of the internet, I’d like to make the most of it and reach out to people while I can.

So no, I’m not ashamed to like your story.

It’s an extension of my affection for you.

I can only hope that it doesn’t scare you away.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince

Like everyone else, one of my favourite books of all time is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It’s a timeless manual for life, a warning for the endless ways adulthood discolours your soul. It’s probably my most re-read book and a story I can undoubtedly deem as quotable. But mostly, I’m thankful for this book because it forces me to confront the reality that I’m not the exception. Despite my mere eighteen years of life, I too am guilty of being just another “grown up”. When adults are characterised as villains, one of their defining traits, or more accurately, lack thereof, is their creativity; imagination.

If the Little Prince came up to me and asked if the drawing above was frightening, I’d say yes because it resembles a mountain with a steep cliff, and I’ve never really been a big fan of heights. My answer is arguably worse than those who confidently ask why they should be frightened by a hat. At least they’re not pretending to be anyone they aren’t. I construct my answer through observation. The Little Prince wouldn’t ask me if his drawing was frightening in the first place if he didn’t want me to tell him it is frightening. So I give him the answer he wants. Or at least, I think he wants. But I’m unable to go one step further. My eyes skim past the head of the snake and frantically searches for any possible way I can manipulate my answer so that the inquirer knows I’m not like everybody else. I forget this is The Little Prince. He can see right through a fraud. I’m a tortoise who wanders in the deep end of the shore. The water smacks my face and I cannot breathe, but as long as my feet touch the ground, I’m certain I can endure.

Since I began school, I was never praised for my creativity. I didn’t have much to offer. I could copy someone else’s idea, maybe even execute it better than theirs with my attention to precision and perfection. But what was the point when it was never mine to begin with? The other day on Instagram I came across this video of a primary school teacher showing student examples from her Think Outside the Box Thursday weekly activity, in which students must transform the given image into something entirely else. I was in awe of how creative these kids were. And while I hate to admit it, I truly couldn’t see past the snowflake.

I remember partaking in similar activities like this during my earlier years of school. I don’t remember what we were assigned to do, or whether I managed to impress anyone. However, the paranoia that someone would discover my inability to invent remains ingrained in my memory like I’m a branded pig waiting to be slaughtered. To have something I create stand on its own is something I don’t know if I’ve ever or will ever achieve. The kids who drew the UFO and Ice Dragon don’t seem to feel the need to explain their works because it already makes sense. Just like the Little Prince who drew a snake that swallowed an elephant.

I’m more like the kid who barely turned the snowflake into a playground. I make sense of things by expanding and elaborating on an idea. I’m diseased by the urge to provide context for everything that’s ever come of me because I care so much not to be misunderstood. Mind you, this is different to wanting to be understood. I’m okay with remaining unknown, but for some reason, I’ve always feared being known in a way that doesn’t align with what I believe to be my character. Perhaps this is where my affinity for curation derives from. The artistic gods must have taken pity on me—a child who’s mastered the art of tracing and an adult who decorates their plainness with feigned intellectualism through words—because where I suffer from a drought of creativity, I thrive from an abundance of curation.

Now I don’t want to get too cocky, so in my most humble voice I say, just one look at both my bookstagram and personal Instagram demonstrates my, well, somewhat successful, curation of a personal aesthetic. I know we’re all tired of hearing that word but it’s always been incredibly important to me as it’s one of my main forms of self-expression. Although I’m disinterested in changing and constructing my aesthetic with every micro-trend that assaults my screen, I’m invested in creating a visual language of my own, one that communicates my style, taste, and the general way I perceive the world around me.

Some may argue curation requires creativity. I don’t disagree with that. The thing is, curation may require creativity, but creativity can stand completely on its own. Of course, these statements are by my own definition. Curating something means to organise what already exists into a larger piece or collection that prioritises cohesion. Creativity plays a big role in this because curation is also a form of art. However, I’ve always viewed creativity as something primal, a messy process with often an even messier result. A thing scratching the walls of one’s soul, dying to be purged from the confines of flesh. I associate rawness and realness with creativity. Curation is more of a polished front, one that I frequently hide behind in my attempts to be an interesting person.

My calling to be a writer, if I can even call it that, intensified my shame towards the absence of my creativity. Many people collectively agree that to be a writer means creating characters and the stories they tell. I had things to say, just nothing much to create. In my two years of college, years eleven and twelve, I took a university creative writing course. I met some of the most wonderful, beautiful, and talented people in that tiny classroom of ours and while I don’t think the course necessarily improved my writing in a way I’d sought, it led me to this revelation that I wasn’t a creative writer, just a writer. My friends excitedly discussed their ideas about subverting Greek myths and fairy tales, characters inspired by their favourite songs, and experimenting with mixed media. I sat there nodding enthusiastically without saying much but the occasional “that’s such a great idea” and “you have to send it to me”.

As I wrote earlier in a note on Substack, writing to me has always been about documentation and expelling what weighs on my mind at specific times and in specific places. I truly envy those who are fuelled by their creativity and have the capacity to create worlds that aren’t just the ones they inhabit but extend far beyond their personal realms. My stagnant perception that writers had to be grand in their creativity prevented me from writing anything real for a very long time. Then, at fourteen I read Normal People by Sally Rooney. My life was changed. Then, at fifteen I read On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion. My life was changed again. Then I discovered Mieko Kawakami, Clarice Lispector, Elif Batuman, and none other than Annie Ernaux. All these writers appeared to be concerned very little with the story, but the extension of their thoughts instead. Remember what I said about expansion and elaboration? They were doing exactly that. In no way am I claiming these writers aren’t creative, they certainly are. But they chose to write in a way I resonated, still resonate with: Writing as articulation rather than creation.

In her book about her abortion during the 1960s in France, Ernaux closes with this musing:

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.
Annie Ernaux, Happening

And that’s what I mean by writing as documentation and articulation. I won’t say more about it because Ernaux here, has said more than what I’ve been hoping to find in my own vault of words. I may not be able to write a compelling story when given prompts about a dystopian world or what I ate for breakfast. The sketches and scraps in my common-place journal are accompanied by paragraphs of context because I still don’t know how to leave things be without justification, even when they’re privy to my eyes only.

But as long as I write, I’ll write about the life I’m experiencing, the people I meet, and the worlds I reside in because no one else is me but myself. Can it get more original than that? And when my words resemble that of another’s thoughts, I’m not repulsed, only grateful that I’m not alone. And these are more than enough reasons for me to continue writing.

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I am infamous among my friends for being terrified of snails. It’s the first ever real fear I had. Walking to school during my primary years after a night of rain was the equivalent of medieval torture for me. Every slab of concrete was slathered with snail remains, each splotch of intestines resembling the next like a stamp on an envelope. It was less about the literal state of the dead snails that made my skin crawl but the process it took for it to die. By its two dimensional transformation, someone or something had to have crushed it. That squelch of snail flesh splattering against the pavement rang in my head like a morning alarm until I found something else to think about. I’m particularly disturbed by insects with fat, elongated bodies. Technically a snail is a mollusk but that just pisses me off even more. Caterpillars, leeches, slugs, worms, this genre of creature… I can’t even talk about it, it’s really that bad. I’m too scared to search up a photo of a snail so here’s a cute sketch I found on Pinterest.

My second fear is another animal. Also known as killer whales, Orcas are at the top of the food chain in the ocean and as a badge of honour, they get a really cool name: the apex predator. I’m well aware that orcas are incredibly intelligent and that they rarely ever attack humans. Even when they do, it’s usually not their intention to do so. It’s not its theoretical threat to humans but rather, its sheer size. Since I can remember having dreams, most if not all my nightmares consisted of being lost underwater. Utter darkness, not a single bubble of warmth, impossible to see further than arm’s length. The vastness of the ocean makes my skin crawl. So it’s no surprise that I’m terrified of the one species that conquers our underworld. Although I’d love to be, I’m not one of those girls who always wear their swimmers underneath their clothes during the summer, wanting nothing more than to dive head first into a wave. I’m the kind of girl that lingers at the shore collecting sea shells while pretending not to think about getting caught in a rip and being chomped in half by an orca. My remedy for this fear has always been to rewatch that one Octonauts episode where the crew help save an orca stranded on a beach.

Obviously, snails and orcas aren’t the only things I’m scared of but it makes me sound interesting and quirky when I talk about those two first and then introduce the fear that consumes my every choice and way of being: forgetting. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I can’t really recall a time I feared forgetting. There were numerous instances in which I flaunted my memory. Whether that be learning bible verses and Bruno Mars song lyrics off by heart within a mildly impressive short amount of time, or memorising how to spell kaleidoscope and dodecahedron before everyone else in my class.

This fear of forgetting sharpened once I met this silly little guy called grief. I’ve briefly mentioned this before in a previous Substack entry and this specific experience is scattered all over my online presence. I’ll probably bring it up again and again and again, in attempts to simultaneously expel and welcome grief into my life. I’m talking about the death of my best friend, Chloe Lee. Writing about her sometimes feels exploitative in the same way writing about anyone feels invasive. What right do I have to impose myself onto a person’s existence except for the flimsy excuse that I’m a writer and it’s what I do? Chloe was my first encounter with both life and death. She was the first friend I ever had and the first friend I ever lost. I’m now older than she ever was and will ever be. As the years pass, my memories of her melt away like the morning frost on a wilted, crisp, autumn leaf. I’ve become someone she has never met and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember her through the eyes of a person I no longer am. I’m beginning to feel like I don’t know her and question if I ever knew her at all. Ivan says it better than me:

Because a living person has their own reality, he says. The person who's gone has no reality anymore, except in thoughts. And once they're gone from thoughts, they actually are completely gone. If I don't think about him, literally, I'm ending his existence.

— Intermezzo, Sally Rooney

One of the last things I remember Chloe saying to me and those around her was, “don’t forget me”. This has haunted me more than any embarrassing moment during high school. Initially I was baffled by her suggestion that it was possible to forget her in any way. But she’s always been wiser than everyone. She must have known the natural way of humans. We forget, even those we love with every single one of our atoms. I’m living proof of that. The guilt from forgetting is oppressive and suffocating like airplane air. There’s nowhere to turn and the only escape is to jump, but without yourself is worse than forgetting, it’s simply the end of things, pure nothing.

My fear of forgetting transcends grief and infects all corners of my life. A large part of why I write book reviews and annotate my favourite quotes is because I’m not only terrified of forgetting profound words, but also forgetting the person I was while reading the book. Forgetting feels like I’m actively erasing a fundamental layer of myself, that without, I cannot be truly me. I spend more hours in lectures journalling how I feel than taking notes and I regularly update my commonplace journal with literal scraps of my life. Even my pet peeve is an extension of this fear. The one thing that makes my hands shake with rage other than slow walkers, is when adults dismiss “teenage” issues like a satirical comic strip at the back of a newspaper all because they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be fourteen. I’ve made countless vows to myself in my journal to never forget how valid and real my feelings are at every point in my life. I refuse to betray myself by being the laughing track to my own suffering.

“When someone's been gone a long time, at first you save up all the things you want to tell them. You try to keep track of everything in your head. But it's like trying to hold on to a fistful of sand: all the little bits slip out of your hands, and then you're just clutching air and grit.”
— To All the Boys I've Loved Before, Jenny Han

In the film Perfect Days, during his break the protagonist Hirayama sits at a park and looks up for a couple of moments before taking a snapshot of the light filtering through the tree leaves. Defined as komorebi, he captures a specific movement of nature, the kind so mundane it barely exists without the context of appreciation. These scenes moved me intensely. They spoke to me, they were telling me what I needed to do. I bought an overpriced film camera on eBay the next day. It’s become another weapon in my battle against forgetting.

I also hate forgetting because it makes me feel like a fraud. How can I call myself Chloe’s best friend if the only thing I can remember about is her favourite Queen son? It’s Radio Ga Ga. How can I confidently tell people that Frances Ha genuinely changed the trajectory of my life when I can’t recite the iconic What I Want monologue? How can I claim that my favourite Sally Rooney novel is Beautiful World, Where Are You when I always forget Alice’s name.

But as always, there’s a quote that blows wind on my wounds of paranoia:

“Memories don’t disappear. Where do you think all the countless memories of what you see, listen, and feel in your life go? They’re all smeared into your soul. Even if your brain forgets them, your soul doesn’t. It's been keeping every piece of it.”

—Lovely Runner (2024)

I know my fear of forgetting is integral to who I am just like my fear of snails and orcas, maybe more so. It’s a manifestation of my grief, a reflection of my values, and a personal philosophy that guides me through life. However, it doesn’t have to be so painful. I’m learning to befriend forgetting. We may never be close like I am with remembering, but I’d like to be at least polite acquaintances, just so we don’t end up hurting each other like we have in the past. And remember what I said about being an optimist? What a privilege it is to forget at all, because what else could that mean but to have experienced something worthy of remembering in the first place.

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

I grew up in Canberra my whole life. It’s the first place I ever called home. My parents reside there, I became who I am over there. I am who I am because of there. I’ve met all my closest friends there, it’s where I learned everything I know now. I walk through streets with relaxed shoulders, I don’t have to use maps to navigate my way through public transport, and I know where to buy the cheapest books. I’ve memorised the layout of all the bookstores and which days the good barista is in at the local coffee shop. I can look at the sky and predict the weather, I always know how to dress wherever I go, and my email inbox is filled with updates on the latest events. Just a month ago, my life extended no further than the borders of my city.

Canberra is one of a kind. I mean this literally. It’s an entirely planned, man-made city. Its sole purpose is to be a capital city. It was inhabited by Aboriginal Australians, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, for more than twenty thousand years. The Federation of Australia was established in 1901 by the British Colonies and for almost a decade, Sydney and Melbourne were in a long dispute over which would be the National capital. The solution: to make a city between the two. And thus, in 1913, Canberra was born.

Since then, Canberra has gained a rather…boring reputation. It would be more accurate to say that it’s been deemed so boring that it failed to gain a reputation at all. When people ask me where I’m from, I don’t immediately say Canberra, but I begin by saying, the capital of Australia. Of course, they assume I’m from either Sydney or Melbourne and before they inquire further, I clarify that I’m actually from this tiny place called Canberra. The conversation goes the same way. They exclaim they thought Sydney was the capital, and that they’ve never heard of Canberra. Then I respond yeah, a lot of people think that, pretending to find this interaction just as amusing as the first few times it happened.

Even when I meet people from Sydney and Melbourne, or other parts of Australia, I barely feel a kinship with them. They’re always so keen to tell me that they went on an excursion to Questacon and the Parliament House in primary school. They say this while smiling a smile that struggles to hide its patronising judgement. They say this like we are on the same side, and I agree with their perception of Canberra; a dead, retired, dull, just boring, utterly boring, city. I laugh it off, but I’m hurt. I’m sensitive when someone attacks someone or something I love because it means they’re criticising my choices in love.

I’ve always been certain of Canberra’s beauty, something I’d never find anywhere else in the world. Living in Edinburgh has only reinforced this belief, so much so I’m starting to think this is the first time I’ve ever had faith in something. How I feel about Canberra is in complete isolation from Edinburgh. I’m not tipsy from the concoction of nostalgia and sentimentality one downs after leaving their hometown. I’m as sober as I’ve ever been. Canberra isn’t suddenly beautiful to me because I miss home. No, it’s time for me to make my own corner here in this new city and I’m thrilled about it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Canberra is quietly beautiful. If Canberra was a book, then it would be Stoner by John Williams. Mundane and monotonous, yet undeniably moving. You reach the end with tears streaming down your face, and you don’t know why but already you’re filled with a sadness that you’ll never experience it again. Despite now living in objectively one of the most beautiful cities in the world, I feel less inclined to take photos in Edinburgh than when I was in Canberra. Edinburgh’s beauty is so bold, so public. You cannot disagree with it. What I see, everyone else sees.

Canberra’s beauty lies between moments. Like watching the birds gather on the power line while I wash the dishes or the way the evening light embraces the street sign as I wait for the bus. Other people may not recognise these hidden details, maybe they don’t even exist in the realm of others, but it means so much to me, it makes me feel special, like Canberra is mine and no one can take that away from me. Canberra is such a personal city. It’s moulded around your very being and at some point, you start to feel as though you created it, you’re creating Canberra by merely living.

The roads are big but they’re accompanied by walkable paths. The buses are always a little late or a little early but never anything too drastic. There’s no viral restaurant but you’ll never struggle to find a good place to eat. Hanging out with my friends usually consists of overpriced karaoke, a visit to the farmers market, bubble tea in the city, and thrifting at the nearest op shops. It’s nothing grand, but it’s enough and on good days, it’s more than enough.

I’ve never been very attached to places. My friend called me a ship once, afloat in the world without a tether to anything but the way of life. She’s a writer too. She told me that her stories begin with places. A description; the colours, the smells, the way light bounces off surfaces, and even details of the people surrounding her. It is only when I know something is permanently in my life that I get attached to it. Like my home in Australia. Many of my poems and journal entries have been written outside in my backyard garage, on the outdated granny couch falling apart at the seams. The sky looks extra blue there, like someone has turned the light on outside and dust particles float around like jellyfish. But as long as I know a place is not wholly mine it holds no great value, at least nothing more than aesthetic weight. This is why my stories usually start with a concept.

A passage from my work in progress titled, Light Encounters

Many essayists, including Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Deborah Levy stress the significance of place in their works. Although I enjoyed their pieces on California, Nashville, South Africa and whatnot, until recently I’ve never quite understood what it means for a place to mean something to me. It’s only a matter of time till I feel at home in Edinburgh and I’ve yet to feel homesick, which is perhaps a good sign. Instead, I feel this sense of detachment, like distance is an illusion and I’m simply floating in the singular space that makes up Earth. In an attempt to reach the ground, I’ve been thinking about Canberra a lot recently. I think about Canberra and I smile.

What a comfort it is to have left not because I hated a place, but because I was assured a place in the world that I love, a place to return to.

Most writers I have met claim to write because they love writing. Whether it be because it allows them to create worlds they cannot access in reality or because they find a sense of fulfilment in arranging words like puzzles to be solved, I have never been able to relate.

When people ask me why I write, I give them an answer that sounds thought-through, but conventional enough that it doesn’t raise any eyebrows. I tell them I write because it allows me to capture the moments of humanity that we live for. I write because I love to explore human relationships and yearn to create my own portrait of human intimacy. I write because I am drawn to the ways in which I am able to construct sentences that can speak for people out there, just like me, who long to be heard, but don’t have the courage to be noticed. While these are not lies, they are not complete truths either. As a writer, creating romantic narratives about what drives me comes easily, almost instinctively.

But recently, I’ve been trying to become more honest, and I have a confession to make. While I love having written, I don’t know if I have ever, even once, enjoyed the process itself.

My relationship with writing is akin to the way I feel about food. While others savour a cube of caramel melting to nothing in their mouths or relish a spoon of hot pumpkin soup as it settles on their taste buds, I swallow my mouthfuls mindlessly. A friend once told me that she loves eating because it allows her to appreciate the time and effort of the chef, like doing an artist justice by observing their artwork with utter sincerity. While I understand her sentiment, food, to me, remains something I simply consume in order to stay alive. Just as my body struggles without sustenance, I can feel my mind deteriorating when deprived of writing for too long. My certainty about writing is one of the only topics I can assert without a speck of shame and Mieko Kawakami phrases it perfectly in her novel Breast and Eggs:

“Writing is my life’s work. I am absolutely positive that this is what I’m here to do. Even if it turns out that I don’t have the ability, and no one out there wants to read a single word of it, there’s nothing I can do about this feeling. I can’t make it go away”

Breast and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami

Despite my conviction, on some days, I despise how impossible it is to know which combination of words is the closest to correct, I detest not knowing whether to write less or more, and I feel like I’m drowning in the fear that my work will be meaningless to most people. And worse than all of the not knowing, is the knowing that feeling these things is the lot of a writer.

Even as I’m writing now, I’m plagued with trivial doubts about grammar and sentence structure and whether this piece will even make it out of my drafts. The hidden Grammarly premium suggestions only exacerbate my apprehension. But I know that without the completion of this piece, my question will be unanswered, and I’ve always been the kind of person to never leave a page blank on an exam.

The world doesn’t make much sense to me until I write it down. Every day is saturated with question marks and although I’m rarely able to straighten out their squiggles into an exclamation mark, the attempt in trying to understand is what liberates me from the burden of uncertainty.

In her essay with the same title, Why I Write, Joan Didion articulates that writing for her is also a tool for comprehension:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

Why I Write, Joan Didion

There are many things I love, and only a few things I like. And yet, I happen to like being alive. Right now, I don’t know life enough to love it, but I’m not opposed to it in the far future after we sit down and have more meals together. I want to pass through time with the utmost appreciation for what makes my life my own and I believe the best way I can do that is to feel first and understand second. Writing enables me to do exactly that and that is why I write.