Writing used to make me happy. It doesn’t anymore. Why? I don’t know.
The more I think about it the more I realize that I don’t really care about the “why”, on its own. I do want to get the feeling back, however, the joy I used to get when I wrote.
And sadly, it seems quite obvious that the only way to get it back is to understand why it disappeared in the first place.
It used to be that when I wrote, every step of the journey brought me joy. From the conceptualization of the stories and poems to the actual feeling of writing them down (back when I used to jot my writings on a piece of paper typically because there was no electricity and my laptop was bad and I had to get the thoughts down before I could get the laptop to turn back on and type).
Perhaps that’s why the joy disappeared? Because I now have stable electricity? It’s worth considering in its deeper context, but I don’t think it’s a juncture worth stopping at.
Anyway, as stressful as the process was, I loved it very much. Those were genuinely the happiest writing moments for me.
Mostly, however, I was happy when I was done writing and was typing on the laptop, reading again what I had written, and appreciating the beauty of the words that had been brought forth by my lonely, lovely brain.
That was a long time ago. About ten years ago, in fact.
I stopped seeing the beauty in the things that I have written. This is perhaps the biggest reason for the loss of joy in my writing. I stopped seeing the beauty in the things that I wrote and this coincided with the moment that I stopped seeing a purpose behind my writing.
Before I explore this further – partly because I suspect it’ll be the end where the answer ultimately lies, or a dead end – I would love to explore another path. That perhaps one of the main reasons that I no longer feel any joy when I write has to do with the fact that I have finally accepted that I would never write as good as I think that I could. Or should.
That, no matter what I write, it will never be as good as what it is in my head.
Of course, I am not the only writer who has felt this way. I forget who but I think it was William Faulkner who said something along these lines: you have a story in your head; you write it down, and the best you can do is hope to get as close as to the thing itself as possible.
I paraphrase, of course.
But anyway, the more I wrote, the more I realized that the thing I had written was not as close to the thing in my head as I had hoped. And the more I realized that I had to get closer, the farther I got. And I continued to get farther and farther away.
I admit, though, amazingly, that there has been, as a matter of fact, an improvement in my taste and aspirations since my early days as a writer. So it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that one of the reasons that I continued to get farther and farther away from my goal; from the pictures that were in my head; the words that I wanted to get down, was because the quality and the standards and the aspirations of those things continued to become more and more refined; with less and less margin for error.
Still, there was, no doubt, a regression on my part as well.
Eleven to Twelve years ago when I started to seriously write, even when the written words fell short of the world in my head, the written words were still beautiful in their own right. I didn’t spend as much time moaning about how much I had fallen short, because I was still quite satisfied with where I landed.
Nowadays, not so much.
Should I just learn to appreciate what I write and not fuss about what it could have or should have been?
Did I become a worse writer?
I probably did.
And even though, as I mentioned, the worlds in my head did improve in their aspirations, even those became less appealing to me. The truth is, I lost faith in them. I lost faith in whatever I was trying to create even before I created them. Everyone knows that if the ideal is flawed, the manifestation has no chance.
I started writing this essay to figure out how to get my joy of writing back. I started knowing that to do so, I would have to explore the reason behind that loss of joy. I had a few pathways in my mind to explore as to the reasons.
And I promised to explore a path that I mentioned could lead to the ultimate answer or to a dead end. I do not wish to explore this path anymore.
Very early as I started to write this introspective piece, as early as the first paragraphs, I realized the reason was more obvious than I thought. It took just a few words to figure it out. Now I know it and I am too embarrassed to tell you.
This is great news for me, of course. Not because it will let me achieve my goal of finally getting the joy back. No. Figuring out the reason is just part of the journey. In this case, not even amounting to half of the journey.
It is good news nonetheless that I found the answer because it has made me understand that as important as it is to find joy in my writing, and to be happy when writing, and that writing be a source of happiness for me as it used to be, this is not the only reason for me to write.
I should continue writing because it remains the most efficient way for me to unpack whatever is wrong with me. And hopefully find a solution. I will definitely try to write more introspective pieces.
Anyway, as for the reason I can’t find joy anymore in my writing. The ultimate answer that I said I will not reveal. It is simple. I can’t find joy anymore in my writing because there is no longer a purpose to it.
For what am I writing for? For whom? It doesn’t exist.
It used to be very simple: write. Get published. Show the world how awesome you are. And make some money doing it. After more than ten years of this, and all the failures in between, it is clear that this is neither a respectable nor feasible pathway.
So what next? What do I write for? For whom? For a while. For a while, I have been writing only for myself. I have been writing and publishing here on this website for myself and maybe one other person out of thin air to read. I thought this would be enough but is it? No joy possibly means that it clearly isn’t.
If it was, why am I not happy anymore when I write? Why else could the world and the words in my head have stopped being fascinating to me? It is because I have lost faith in them. That is what happens, I suppose, when blind faith proves inadequate.
