I have broken my covenant of writing and posting a blog every week here. It felt as though falling into a rabbit hole—one hole after another, and there’s no ending to it. Not only posting a blog here, but also, I have abandoned my writing project for a while now, and my characters were buried—in need of rejuvenations!
Writing is hard, but it’s liberating and rewarding at the same time that’s why I love it so dearly. Being in graduate school and writing academic essays is different; it is not as satisfying and rewarding as doing creative writing, although academic essays do require creativity in its composition as well, but still, it’s a different kind of writing, and I find it tiring. It’s not that I hate it. It just could not fulfill my desire to create. Throughout the two semesters at University of Malaya, I tried to learn as much as I can and I liked it a lot so far, reading diverse literature from the Victorian literature to American literature and then to the Malaysian and Singaporean literature; discussing and analyzing the texts; writing essays about them. It’s challenging at times, but it made me a better reader, and I know I will continue to grow as the program goes on.
Nonetheless, at the back of my head there’s always a voice haunting me, telling me to write down the stories I have kept in my notebook and in my memory. It hurts when I’m not able to write them down, and when I have the time to write I could’t focus because of the readings and the assignments I have to deal with for my classes. Maya Angelou was right when she said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you” because it affected me so greatly that I felt depressed and overwhelmed. So I've stopped writing for a few months now to focus on my graduate studies, and it did feel like—what Franz Kafka called—“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity” the whole time. I started to have weird dreams, in which I believe a manifestation of my repressed, unfulfilled desires to create and to write. I know that all I have to do is sit down and write, but I chose not to. Instead, I binge-read and binge-watch TV series, ignoring the stories inside of me, and the voices in my head that have made me insomniac.
Now, some writers might call this a “writer’s block,” but I want to call it procrastination and denial. I've claimed that I'm a writer, and I need to re-claim it and stop procrastinating and denying it. I have chosen writing to be my lifestyle, an art and a vocation that I love, and a sheer spiritual devotion that teaches me about humanity and God. Writing is my home, and I am coming back home, NOW!