My problem with putting words into thoughts has been something I’ve been struggling with quite a lot lately. I remember when words were like a vivid dream to me; they’d shelter me from near madness, keep me focused and help me discover who I am. When I reached adolescence, music, specifically piano, helped me put my thoughts into words. I never cared about logistics of writing or how beautiful it sounded; I just wrote, wrote, and wrote. I was focused on cleansing my brain; writing was about me, till I discovered pain. I know that I’ve often written about this in previous blog posts, but I can’t seem to get over this one little thing.

Everyone has their pillar of reality, the one they’d all return to in case it all falls apart. My relationships with people I mostly cared about always spiralled back to their fascination of how beautifully written my words seemed to be. There was always one missing variable in that equation, however – my belief in myself.

It’s hard writing about this, I must admit with weary hopes. What’s even harder is admitting it. There’s this thing about wanting to be a perfectionist; it slowly eats you away. Kind of like when you smoke knowing with every breath you inhale, you’re killing your lungs, but you just don’t care about all these health ads, nicotine patches, and your friends telling you to quit anymore. You’ve grown immune to all these attempts to make you quit. Perfectionism is a cigarette that never seems to die out. It’s fueled by this insanity to defy all odds; this insanity is incurable, I’d like to believe we’re either born with it or not.

I’m not a smoker, nor am I advocating it as a habit. But I’m simply, beyond doubt, tired of feeling insufficient all the time. I hear people tell me nice things; I want to believe them, I do. I just can’t look at anything I’ve ever written or played to be any good at all. At times, I’d stay up just reading what I’ve written and dig through it for flaws. I find so many flaws. It’s depressing. I can’t even find the right words to express the amount of sadness I feel knowing I could do so much better, but here I am doing so much worse.

I wish I could go back to seventh grade. I wrote my first poem then. It was beyond lame. I remember being so happy about it. It was then that I started carrying a notebook wherever I went. I scribbled random thoughts here and there. I had a messy handwriting. It was my little pot of joy. I loved it. I recently went through the notebook and was taken by shock at how childish anything written in it is. But it made me so happy. I want to be happy about writing again.

Take me back to happy thoughts. Pain is ugly. I don’t want to become a bitter writer. All great writers of history had shady endings; they either committed suicide or vanished with mysterious reasons. I’m not comparing myself to them. I could never be that good. I just know that I’m living with the bitterness of a writer, and cursed with a black cat’s luck. There’s this unexplainable sadness within me that I can’t uncover. It’s consuming me. I’ve adapted to it. I don’t think about it anymore. I just let it grow like a cancerous tumor that consists of ill thoughts and voids. I’m okay. I’m losing my mind, but I’m okay.