I used to write. A lot. I started writing a novel in 6th grade. I still think about it sometimes. It was standard kid stuff – all the characters were mapped to people I knew in real life. The setting was the first colony on the moon. The plot? I don’t think there was a plot…

Writing was also how I processed my feelings throughout puberty, and for a good while after that. I started writing online in 2003. Before that I exclusively wrote with pen and paper (including the novel!).

To give you an idea of the dropoff, here is a breakdown of my personal writing by year. Important transitional years (finishing a degree, starting a new job, moving across the country, etc) are indicated with *

Year	Number of Blog Entries	Unpublished Drafts
2003	143
2004	141
2005	109
2006*	112
2007	65
2008	92
2009	77
2010*	96
2011	95
2012	64
2013	47
2014	39
2015*	1
2016	19
2017	2
2018	0
2019*	0
2020	0
2021	0
2022	1	4
2023	0	1
2024*	5	2

A lot of my falling out of love with writing had to do with people’s reactions to it. The world has tried very hard to teach me that being my authentic self is not acceptable. My self-expression is offensive and should be contained. I stubbornly have refused to learn this lesson time and time again.

• The memories are hazy, but I vaguely remember my mom invading my privacy as a teenager and reading some of my private writing. I only ever found out she was spying on me when I got in trouble for something I wrote.
• My writing was weaponized against me by my ex and his friends in 2010.
• Some time around 2012, while I was a PhD student, I got called into my department chair’s office. I was scolded for a blog post I wrote that was reported to him by faculty in the engineering department. That situation was so absurd because (1) everything I wrote was 100% true, (2) I never mentioned the institution – how did random faculty in the engineering department even find my fucking blog that got like 3 views per year?, (3) what kind of leader doesn’t have his students’ backs? Actually, I know the answer to (3) – that department chair was extremely misogynistic. He didn’t really seem to believe women should be allowed to get PhDs in math. Fuck that guy.
• My sister practically disowned me after a series of tweets during her bachelorette party in 2014. For the record, I never said anything negative about her, her fiance, or her wedding! The worst thing I did was make fun of one or two of her friends (because they were being insanely cliquey and annoying!). And I apologized for the parts that I felt may have gone too far, but I didn’t apologize for EVERYTHING I wrote.

Looking back, I think writing was my only way of regulating my emotions when I was unmedicated for my multiple undiagnosed-at-the-time mental health conditions. But when I became an adult, authentic writing got trickier. I was already trained to know believe that (me + thinking + writing) = trouble.

Social media helped in some ways. I used Twitter for years as my place where random thoughts went. And for a while, Facebook was a good place for updates to family and friends, as well as meaningful posts & conversations with peers about issues that mattered to us. I quit Facebook for good (after a few failed attempts at quitting) in ~2018. Around the same time I stopped writing for myself.

I started feeling the itch to write again many times over the years. That feeling has been the strongest these past few months, as I finally begin to recover from years of burnout and mental health emergencies. So here I am, writing about not writing…