If My Heart Could Speak

I took a little break from writing beginning the new year because I received a piece of feedback that sat with me for weeks. I have been sharing my blog with the people in my life and I decided to branch out and share my work on Reddit. I made a post promoting myself and my work and I let the universe decide what happened next. It received some attention, not a crazy amount, but enough for me to feel seen. I wasn’t expecting someone to respond but I received a notification that a user had replied to my post.

“Resii, your work is really good but it’s just very fucking depressing.”

This sat with me for a while. I started overthinking everything I have ever written. I looked back at old journals, I looked through my notes and journal apps. I read through every single poem, every single half-finished entry and I realized they were right. I talk mostly about dying and how I want to be dead. I write about heartbreak and how no one has ever really loved me. I write about my pain, my struggles and all of the battles I’ve fought throughout the years. Sure, in between it all is a love letter or two, maybe a few poems here and there expressing shreds of hope. But the main source of my writing is my pain. This made me think about the impact I was having on my readers who are not just people I know, these are also my friends, a few family members and even some of my colleagues. I questioned the impression I was giving off to these people. So I stopped writing anything too depressing. I removed the post on Reddit so I can re-evaluate the direction I wanted to take my work. 

I tried changing everything about the way I write. I wanted to make myself sound like I’m hopeful, like everything is sunshine and rainbows over here. I started to hate writing, it felt like I was forcing myself to type words with no meaning. Whenever I would take a seat and start writing, everything would start off so positively and light and as I kept going, it would just become deeper and heavier. I had to delete a lot of characters, I restarted hundreds of times. One day I got so fed up that I said “fuck this” and just started writing whatever I was feeling. It was the most writing I had accomplished in weeks but it was also the most depressing, darkest, grungiest work I have ever written. I have experienced writer’s block in the past but this was the most satisfying unblock I have honestly ever experienced.

I learned a lot from this experience, the first being that I shouldn’t listen too much to what people think of me. It’s a lesson I’ve adopted in my personal life, but never in my writing career. My work is not for everyone. I do talk about death a lot. Suicidal ideation is the core of my words. On the outside I may be a cute, bubbly, outgoing girl who loves to giggle and be playful, but inside I’m twisted and dark. It’s what I love the most about myself. So, yes, my work is very depressing and raw but that’s what makes writing my favorite thing in the world. I can be who I want as a writer and I will always choose to be “depressing.”