Sometimes I find myself comparing my writing style to other people and wishing it could be more… Factual. More poetic. More thoughtful. More impactful. More… well, you get the idea. I’m jealous.
I’m also jealous of the past me who wrote effortlessly and spent hours pouring over paragraphs to find the perfect phrasing, tapping away on a dinky Nokia phone and saving notes upon notes of stories.
I cried for days when I accidentally erased a huge chunk of it with no back up but after school commitments started ramping up and I entered my A level year, the writing ground to a halt.
Another factor was my possession of a smartphone. Smartphones are wonderful, wonderful things.
They are, however, awfully distracting. Manga my parents never allowed me to read much of was suddenly available to me. E-books were mostly free to read online, any title at all, if you looked hard enough. Mobile games, too. And I met a lot of friends who had the same interests as me on the Instagram app, and spent hours every night (I say night because they were in the US and UK and I had to stay up late to be able to talk to them) chatting away.
I was also pretty depressed- I use this figuratively, I was down in the dumps for a bit pending my run-in with the school after they found out I was dating my classmate- relationships were highly frowned upon. I dropped from a 3.6 GPA (upon 4) to a 2.8, I was forbidden to contact him (we had to email/ pass notes) and so I vented by writing.
There was a period of time where I would sleep-type (is that a thing? I don’t even know) and send my boyfriend an endless amount of texts, most of it poetry, sometimes it was just a word that later sprawled into a wall of text. It was as if a mysterious muse would bless me, every night.
I would check my sent folder on my dinky little Nokia phone and find poems I don’t remember writing, story ideas I’d never have dreamed of fully lucid, gibberish that probably made sense to me half asleep but lost to me awake.
Always quick to capitalise on what I had- I fine-tuned and edited them and created some of my best poems. This stopped after we started openly dating again, and I confess I miss it a little, that feeling of waking up in the morning with a surprise in nay, not my inbox, but my sent folder, waiting with bated breath to see what I created the night before.
It felt surreal to be honest, and sometimes I wonder where I pull all those thoughts from.
Wonder if it’s cheating if I don’t remember writing them all.
Wonder if I’ll ever be able to write like that again.
Random Rambles 