There’s something exciting about an empty page. There’s nothing on it, so it’s not wrecked yet. There’s only possibility. I can type anything, form any word, weave sentences together to say anything I want.

When I look back—way back—at my life, I find that writing has always been a companion. As a primary schooler, I scrawled in notebooks with multi-coloured pens; a baby chronicling baby thoughts about my baby life. After I was shown how to use computers and learnt how to type, I amassed a collection of floppy disks in which I saved Word documents containing stories of my own composing, stories so convoluted and melodramatic (and cringe!) they were perhaps better off presented as long-running soap operas. I never shared any of these files with anyone—in hindsight, a good thing—so no one ever read these rambling stories. I created worlds and characters for my own amusement. In short, I wrote purely for joy.

I haven’t done that for a long time.

I’ve not realised the novelist ambitions of my childhood, but I did become a journalist and a non-fiction writer, so close enough. What I hadn’t appreciated as a kid is that writing professionally makes writing, well, a job. I still love writing, and still consider it an integral part of who I am, but things have got more complicated. There are deadlines, so I’m no longer writing on my own time. There are editors and readers, so I have to make sense to more people than just myself. There are consequences—serious ones, too, like defamation or contempt of court or POFMA orders or whatever else the powerful might think up—to consider. Now that I’m an editor myself, there are even more responsibilities: to ensure high standards, to think about contributors’ ethics and safety, to build and protect my publication’s brand and reputation.

There are so many factors to consider—including the pressure of having rent and bills to pay, a sure-fire way to kill the romance of any occupation—that the joy of writing is sometimes overwhelmed by an avalanche of questions and considerations and anxieties. Where it once was just about what made me feel good, these days writing is about bulletproofing arguments, defensive editing against possible misinterpretation, adhering to word counts, filing on deadline and maintaining house style. It’s even worse when I know that my writing is watched for mistakes that can be pounced on, no matter how petty or minor or inadvertent these errors might actually be. 

I tell friends from time to time that I feel like I’m becoming a worse writer, not a better one. I’ve gained more experience, but I’ve also become more painfully aware of how tiny the allowed margin of error is for a political writer in Singapore. My writing process is now cluttered with anxieties and uncertainties and (most likely) unaddressed trauma, weighing down my words and getting my phrases all tangled up. 

When I wrote my last blog post about emotional support K-pop and burn-out, I was reminded of how much I love this. Writing to express what’s on my mind and in my heart, taking out the fragments swirling in my head, examining them and arranging them this way or that, putting them on the page not because I need to come up with something by a particular deadline, but because there is a joy in the writing itself. That the piece has since resonated with others is a huge win, but that’s only a bonus on top of the fact that the process was healing for me.

After I finished that piece it occurred to me that maybe this is, if not the answer, at least a good opportunity for me to reconnect with the writer that I used to be, before I got caught in the swampy marshes of burn-out, adulting and responsibility. If I could set aside time to do more writing that’s predominantly just for myself, writing that does not have to wander into minefield of political sensitivities, writing that’s about other aspects of life—which has the added benefit of reminding me that there are other aspects of life!—I could rediscover the joy and comfort that I used to feel in words. And perhaps, through this process that focused on love, joy and healing, I could find a path to becoming a better writer, rather than an anxious one.