I don’t quite know what direction this piece is taking but I’ll take my chances. My thoughts are muddled but the urge is real.
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Writing is not my first passion but I’m hoping to be forever infatuated with it. Along the way, I wanted to do and to be many things – a singer, a dancer, a fashion designer, a chef. But somehow, I still ended up here. Pen on paper (figuratively and literally). I’d like to think that I spent a lot of years being candid about my life – the joys and sorrows of first love, the struggles of an angsty teenager, the difficulties of being a law student and now, a young working adult who does not have everything figured out. Spoiler alert, nobody else does either.
After moving out at the end of last year, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. Time that I have so effortlessly wasted on Netflix instead of being more productive. I know better than anyone that if you stop practising, you will start to lose touch. For me, that’s especially true with my writing. It’s so easy to use work as an excuse for feeling exhausted at the end of the day. But aren’t most people? And yet, those with a side hustle will still, well, hustle on. And to think I wanted to be a copywriter after graduating from university.
I can barely write a decent piece to publish these days simply because I have nothing interesting to write about. It’s the truth. My life has somehow turned into a boring soap opera that nobody watches. It’s so mundane and routine to a point where I find myself just sitting in a thoughtless position scrolling through Instagram like the black hole of waste that it is. Numbers and statistics don’t bother me anymore. I simply do not care but I care that my time is being underutilised and fruitless. What is the point of being a writer who does not write?
Instagram truly is a stupid social network app and yet I am still addicted. Does that make me equally stupid? Maybe.
It is so easy to just live in the grind, isn’t it? Everything seems so black and white – uninspiring, dull, ordinary. Making your morning coffee is just a routine check (I don’t even drink coffee), the drive to work is filled with traffic and lousy drivers who never signal when cutting into your lane, you spend more of your day at a messy desk than being at home with your inner thoughts, by the end of it all you just want to lie in bed and pretend that the 5 hours of sleep you’re getting every night is actually the 12 hours that you can no longer take on a weekend because now you have chores to do and you have to adult. Think about it. There’s nothing inspiring about your day-to-day. It’s as though we are all living in a systematic coup of frustration and anxiety about the next “big thing”, whatever that may be – and whether it comes of course. Becoming a grownup feels like you’re a toddler who just learned to walk and is now being thrown off a boat in the middle of the ocean and expected to swim. No one ever told me that buying a toaster and a vacuum cleaner would bring me so much joy and despair at the same time.
But we’re called to live extraordinary lives. Even though we feel like our lives are just that. Ordinary. The truth is, none of us are ordinary. In a world of billions, there is only one of you and only one of me. So when I wake up tomorrow morning, I really do hope that I don’t feel like just a tiny speck of dust in a beach full of sand or a pot full of dirt – depending on whether you see your glass as half empty or full. I personally go for the latter only after I get out from a bout of self-depreciation and doubt. I am a pessimist to my core, which I hate and hope to someday eliminate.
It’s a mantra: I am not ordinary and my life is not ordinary.
Heck, what 26-year-old can stand tall and proud to say that they’ve kept a teenage hobby alive after more than 10 years. I started writing at the age of 15 and I haven’t stopped since. I am one hell of a bloody good writer, even if I do say so myself. I don’t usually condone vanity but sometimes, you need to be a slightly narcissistic because ain’t nobody gonna love you like you, boo. But of course, God loves you too.
x
