I’ve always loved words. [1] I grew up reading books. My parents tried to be kind and loving to me, and one of the ways they showed their love was to provide me with all the books I ever asked for, and them some. I did some writing, but it wasn’t all that great. I’d do really well on my English tests in school. I wrote a few songs as a teenager, but none of them were particularly good. I have a few pieces of writing that resonated with people, but I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them.

Quora honored me as a “Quora Top Writer” in 2012, and at the time that was a huge deal for me. I felt incredibly excited, and I started to begin to really believe that I might someday be a “professional” writer. A person whose ability with the written word was undeniably on par with any other professional’s ability with her craft.

When I first started a blog, it was all about keeping up relationships with my friends. I’d sometimes rant and rave about things that excited me– books, movies, current affairs. But most of it was just about how my life was going, how angry and frustrated I was with school. How I was excited about music, how sometimes I felt like everything was beautiful, and how sometimes I didn’t see the point of anything.

At some point I started writing “socialpolitical commentary”, if you could call it that. My first experience about it was just complaining about my country– I got far more responses for that than anything else I had ever written, and I enjoyed feeling relevant. So I wrote more about that sort of thing.

As I look back now, I find it really hard to be confident about the causes of my past behavior. Hell, why am I even writing this, right now, while I’m here?

The only thing I can be sure of is that I can’t be sure of anything. I was genuinely excited about some things. I remember being legitimately angry with the Education Minister when he said that it was “puzzling” that Singaporean students weren’t motivated, self-directed. I also remember sometimes wanting to write things simply because I knew people would share what I had to say. I was eager to identify any mistakes that the media or administration might make, and I ripped into them. I do feel like a part of it was a righteous sort of fury, a sense that wrongdoing or incompetence should not be tolerated. Another part of it was me feeling disenfranchised.I’ve always loved words. I grew up reading books. My parents tried to be kind and loving to me, and one of the ways they showed their love was to provide me with all the books I ever asked for, and them some. I did some writing, but it wasn’t all that great. I’d do really well on my English tests in school. I wrote a few songs as a teenager, but none of them were particularly good. I have a few pieces of writing that resonated with people, but I’m not entirely satisfied with any of them.

Quora honored me as a “Quora Top Writer” in 2012, and at the time that was a huge deal for me. I felt incredibly excited, and I started to begin to really believe that I might someday be a “professional” writer. A person whose ability with the written word was undeniably on par with any other professional’s ability with her craft.

When I first started a blog, it was all about keeping up relationships with my friends. I’d sometimes rant and rave about things that excited me– books, movies, current affairs. But most of it was just about how my life was going, how angry and frustrated I was with school. How I was excited about music, how sometimes I felt like everything was beautiful, and how sometimes I didn’t see the point of anything.

At some point I started writing “socialpolitical commentary”, if you could call it that. My first experience about it was just complaining about my country– I got far more responses for that than anything else I had ever written, and I enjoyed feeling relevant. So I wrote more about that sort of thing.

As I look back now, I find it really hard to be confident about the causes of my past behavior. Hell, why am I even writing this, right now, while I’m here?

The only thing I can be sure of is that I can’t be sure of anything. [2] I was genuinely excited about some things. I remember being legitimately angry with the Education Minister when he said that it was “puzzling” that Singaporean students weren’t motivated, self-directed. I also remember sometimes wanting to write things simply because I knew people would share what I had to say. I was eager to identify any mistakes that the media or administration might make, and I ripped into them. I do feel like a part of it was a righteous sort of fury, a sense that wrongdoing or incompetence should not be tolerated. Another part of it was me feeling disenfranchised. So there were many reasons.

I’ve been a content marketer for two years, which is a very specific sort of goal-oriented type of writing to do, with business objectives and everything. I think I’ve gotten substantially better at it, even though I still feel like a little bit of a fraud [3], but in general I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on things and I’ve achieved some results, helped my team get recognition, all that good stuff. But I’m talking about writing– as a writer I feel like I’ve developed a sensitivity to how words come out, how they fall about. I think it’s pretty clear that my writing style is changing and evolving from year to year. These vomits tend to capture a certain style, but the way I write for public consumption is evolving. More on that elsewhere.

This vomit started out as a Medium article that I wanted to publish called “deciding to write (sorta)”, being about how I was getting tired of doing vomits and wanted to start writing for public consumption again. But halfway through I decided, fuck it. Let’s stay the course.

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[1] The first sentence that came into my mind when I started writing this piece was “I’ve always been a writer”. And that’s a simplistic, narrativistic sentence. It’s the start of a really predictable journey. Predictability isn’t a bad thing by itself, but if you’re serious as a writer, you ought to bring something to the picture that isn’t trite.

[2] And I don’t mean that the way I might have as a smartass teenager– it’s just a starting point, not a conclusion.

[3] I suppose I should really sit down and analyze what I’ve done, and look for the gaps, and systematically fill them out, and so on.