From mouthpiece to megaphone

A year of essays

I didn’t know when I stopped having opinions.

One day I was minoring in humanities, writing an essay comparing ‘enlightenment’ to ‘wokeness’ by referencing Albert Camus’ The Outsider and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While my peers ventured into banking/consulting, I wanted a career focused on writing and expression. I wrote spoken word poetry pieces inspired by Lin Manuel Miranda’s tight rhymes. I had strong opinions on human rights, my career trajectory, and why blue has been my favorite colour since I was eight.

But in the five years that followed graduation, I slowly became a lackey enacting on behalf of someone else’s ideas. I asked equity analysts what they thought of banks’ fee income because my editors liked that angle. My poetry notebook disappeared to a graveyard with my college literature novels. I looked at all the blue stationery on my desk and in my opinion-void state, I wondered what “favorite” even means.

Some time in 2022, I noticed a shift in the internet. The journalists I admired had their own newsletters and podcasts, imbuing their own takes on current affairs. Beauty influencers raised money for #StopAsianHate because they invoked empathy in articulating their story. Even the economists I interviewed would take their thoughts straight to LinkedIn and get more engagement there than in my articles.

Everyone on the internet had an opinion. I had none.

Curiosity catalyst

I didn’t know if writing would have me opining again, but a writing course made it sound very simple. An essay every week. Just a lone, simple idea, refined throughout the week before being published on the internet.

I started writing about myself first. I could draw on my experiences, uncover thoughts that never existed beyond my morning pages. I wrote about being queer, a sister, adulting. Then I ventured out to my comfort zone: informational pieces, not unlike explainer news pieces. I spliced quotes and meshed facts in my pieces about tech, finance, business. I started reading non-fiction books to expand my polymathic thinking. It would give me an edge to connect ideas from the likes of history, physics, and biology into my finance essays.

I came to enjoy the rigorous process of crafting a free-flowing idea into a shareable essay, but I got frustrated as I hit my limits. I was seeing that my friends who wrote could string together complex ideas via really beautiful and punchy sentences. I wanted to be bright like them. Be creative like them. Have something creative to offer in my conversations with them.

If I wanted to really make it as an independent writer on today’s internet, I'd have to become more fastidious about my craft.

Novelists are great at creating tension, plotlines, and making better sentences, so I took up fiction after a years-long break. Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow showed me how to write punchy sentences. Babel was a masterclass at how to surprise readers with unkind plot twists. A Little Life demonstrated that using specific, SAT-level words can make the story bloom. The rhythmic shifts in writing tempo is a stark contrast from my news articles, which were straightforward and easy to read. I wanted to inject colour into my otherwise monochromatic writing.

Writing informational pieces with flair became easier. But the true challenge, I learned, was writing myself back into my stories.

Journalists had to write ourselves out of our articles. There was no place for our voice — only of those we interviewed. But my writer friends convinced me that my own story is much more interesting than a generic article that GPT wrote. It’s what makes my writing unique, and nobody can slap their byline on my writing because it’s so irrevocably me.

Perhaps coincidentally, I started therapy about six months into publishing weekly on Substack. In the comfort of two armchairs, I recounted moving countries twice before I was seven, running under sugar-apple trees in my grandparents’ backyard, and the desperation to emigrate. The nightmares came clawing back so vividly that I realized I was sleeping on my own experiences and stories my whole time. The combination of my writer friends’ urging and therapy proved to be a virtuous cycle. I’d think of a story that would illustrate a point I’m trying to write. I’d recite that story to my therapist. I’d massage my reflections back into my writing.

Writing also had a surprising effect of uncovering the upbringing that cradled me in my early years. To everyone’s shock — including my own — I started rereading the bible.

I was raised with parables. My family, Sunday church, and school were all Catholic, but I dismissed most of the religion when I came out as gay at twenty. I shoved the copy of my bible to the back of my cabinet, thinking this is just a book written by some dudes millennia ago. But then when I became attentive to writing, I started seeing the parables everywhere. Music, prose, and much of modern culture stemmed from the religious text. The bible is an OG literature book. Viewing it that way prompted me to start reading it from page to page, albeit slowly.

Exploring my own thoughts

While I was already reading and consuming information pre-Substack, it’s only through a year of writing that I could hear my own thoughts emerging again. Much like the question: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody heard it, did it really fall? I say, If I have a thought and didn't write it out, did I really have a thought?

So I started writing out my opinions:

I had gripes with how business conferences were run and thought they needed more accountable organizers, less digitizable content, and a curational approach.

I had a hunch that internet firewalls in corporations prevent employees from upskilling so I wrote about how consequential those decisions were.

Some opinions also lead to actions. Like how I had an inkling that maybe my baby brother didn’t belong in the “all men are trash” trope. And it spurred a phone conversation with him.

Writing stopped me from taking the world as-is and started questioning. I’ve read more books in the past year than I did in the prior five. I take scrupulous notes and cite them in my essays. I write out half-baked ideas, then sit with them for days, refining them one word at a time. Writing is a practice, a discipline, and a honing rod for my thoughts.

Will continuing to write every week eventually lead me to become a True Writer on the Internet? I’m not sure. But it already feels like I’m back in my college dorm, pouring over humanities texts from other thinkers, trying to thread ideas that survived centuries and are prevalent today. I’m curious and hopeful about the world again.

I also know why my favourite colour is my favourite colour:

From the study desk shoved into the corner furthest from the door of my bedroom, blue represents an open sky. A world yearning to be explored. As I imagined standing on the edge of the earth, seeing the horizon line. The water is also blue. Seas reflect the infinite possibilities of the skies. Blue is the colour of the outside. As long as I keep looking up and outwards, I can continue to bring vastness back into my writing.

Thank you to friends who helped me shape this one-year-of-writing piece: Oscar Hong, Linart Seprioto, Steven Foster, and Michael Dean.

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Looking back: Germany well understood the U.S. fixation on race purity and eugenics, the pseudoscience of grading humans by presumed group superiority. Many leading Americans had joined the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, including the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the auto magnate Henry Ford, and Charles W. Eliot, the president of Harvard University. Source: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.

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Update log:

• 🎂 It’s my birthday! What a full-circle moment with this commemmorative piece and my art book launch.

• 📖 Reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson (19% completed). It’s a gripping story on how caste was introduced not just through colonization but also the U.S.??

• 📕 Babel by R.F. Kuang was so good! Great for people who are into: historical fiction, languages (fellow polyglots where ya at!), British circa 1830s, anti-colonialism, linguistic nerds (many etymologies), dark academia, a sparkling touch of magic.

• ✍️ Write of Passage is back for cohort 12. It’s been so great to reconnect with a lot of writer friends again.

• 🎙️ Catching up with my backlog of Beautiful/Anonymous episodes. Chris Gethard’s honesty in the follow-up phone calls is so tender. I somehow only listen to these when I’m relaxing, e.g. while painting outdoors.

• ✈️ Flying to Melbourne in two weeks. Hit me up if you’re there.

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