that unpublish button is seducing me
I have a problem. And because I have since discovered that I have no original experience whatsoever in my life, I’d assume that other people have been disturbed, threatened, annoyed, and seduced by that unpublish button too.
In The Year of Magical Overthinking, Amanda Montell discussed how everything that a person has participated in making increases its personal value. So even if we see a perfectly cheap and generic pencil holder from Miniso, we’d still prefer the very disfigured clay project we tried to make that one Christmas. That’s also the truth for me. Kinda.
But why do I keep hating what I’m writing?
Writing for me is a release, an exorcism — I’ve said that a thousand times in a thousand writing pieces. And yet, whenever I try to look back at my writing (most of the time only in passing, when I’m fixing something on my blog), I’d end up hating everything. I’d want — and at some point I really did — to unpublish everything.
Is this vanity?
I understand and do believe to the core that writing will never be perfect, and that’s the entire point of it. The raw incoherence is part of the message. And yet why does a part of me long for structure? for cohesiveness that resembles something that is factory-made?
I want to write about many things. I want to write prose because I can no longer write poetry like I did in my teens. I want to write simple, unserious things. slices of my life. Share some thoughts on media that I’ve consumed, whether in the form of an unfunny one-liner letterboxd review or a complete breakdown and analysis of a 3-minute music video. I want it all — but a part of my brain wants to box myself into only becoming one thing.
Because one thing is safe and secure. One thing is less risk and confusion. Generic. Easily liked by everyone and anyone.
But I don’t write for everyone.
I write mostly for myself, as a release. An exorcism.
Why would I force my writing to remain one thing when I am not? I am a complex human being. I am not one adjective, and so I will try not to flinch when my writing sometimes does not correspond to each other. If I write in categories, so be it. That’s me. Its reflection in my writing is not a bad thing.
And so seduce all you want, unpublish button. My resistance starts with writing, nevertheless.