Writing is the ultimate solace. It is as intimate as confessing to your lover and as public as delivering a speech to a stadium, naked. But unlike those things, you do it in the safety of your own home. That’s why so many people are tempted to write on the internet where gatekeepers don’t exist, unlike in classic publishing.

At the end of the day, writing is an act of communication. It’s unfair for me to judge people on why they choose to write, to shout into the voids of the internet, but I feel it’s my right to call them out for the ill intent. I grew up in the modern internet era, where social media is king and blogs are written for search engines, not people. While I read books, internet reading contributed the most to the way I perceive things, and I loathe the picked up mental models.

Of course, writing is a very much an egotistic act for me. It is therapeutic. I get to relive and sometimes relieve what has happened to me and around me. I vivisect those countless subconscious moments, pluck them out of the timeline, examine them, and put on the right shelves. It is an act of designing my reality, one word and one memory at a time.

I am ungifted, and I don’t have something to say, I don’t bother having a strong political stance, no stories are crawling under my skin, burning my scalp, and keeping me awake at night. My writing is edited; I don’t speak nor write like this (yet); grammar and style are acquaintances, not my friends. But I am brutally honest with myself and my readers. I seek to retell how it were, to show how it felt, but not to convince how I wish I were. I am deeply flawed, ridden with desires, but I do not care for glory.

My goal is to tell stories. Not to be heard, but to connect.