Believe me, I tried to be organized. I tried to categorize my writing by using different software, trying different writing routines, putting time limits and deadlines, creating content lists and calendars and storing every idea that I have.

But at some point, all those ideas become a beast and overflow the bounds I try to restrict upon it, and then I feel overwhelmed and lose track.

I do have a system, but that system is not as neat and structured as I’d desire. It’s a messy one. When I force a neater structure, it seems to backfire. I become organized and on track for a couple of weeks, but then I’m back to square one.

Sometimes my ideas feel like they will get lost in that infinite space where I’m unable to see their endpoint, like an endless well. I write them down and they get lost somewhere, and I forget them for a long while because I simply don’t have the time to extend them further.

Sometimes I’m equally amazed but scared at the volume of the ideas I have and the speed at which I can work on all of them. This is the part where messiness start to feel like a problem. But as much as it can be a problem, it can also be a blesssing.

Ideas don’t ask for an invitation

We want ideas to come to us when we want them to, but the random ideas that pop into your head never come to you on demand. Their occurrences are unplanned.

You can’t control when they’ll appear in your mind. It can come at the most unwanted times, or it may never stop by when you’re waiting for it.

Inspiration strikes whenever. It doesn’t wait for your schedule or try to fit it. It just barges in like an uninvited guest, but is never unwelcome.

This is the nature of being an artist. Your brain, aka the idea machine, works and makes connections in the background and spurts out ideas at random moments.

It collects the ideas from the movies you watch, books you read, content you devour daily, and takes inspiration from your unique environment, surroundings, your encounters, and boom, it creates a brand new idea that you can work on later.

But you never know exactly when those ideas will stop by. You can’t force them to come to you. You can facilitate their speed via nourishing yourself with more intellectual food and apply a writing routine, but that doesn’t guarantee their fast arrival.

These little gems might come at you during shower (the most likely setting), when washing the dishes, or when taking a walk, and not when you’re staring at a blank screen in front of your computer. It’s all uncertain.

Sometimes an idea comes to you at 2 am when you’re trying to sleep, and not writing it to your notes app or getting up to write it down on paper feels like a crime.

Your brain works outside regular working hours, and that contributes to the messiness, too. You can’t shut your creative brain like you shut down your computer after 5pm at your day job.

But sometimes contrary to those 2am ideas, you don’t feel the spark to write in your initially planned time slot.

The uncertainty in writing

Perhaps this uncertainty pertaining to writing is what makes me uneasy about the messy nature of writing.

I have a desire to control, hence I want to organize everything into its littlest details. I want to know exactly what I want to write, and when. I want to have my plan laid out. I don’t want to leave it to chance. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Some days, and some weeks, I’m bursting with ideas and have the energy to go in depth on them, analyse them, and magnetic prose flows out of me. Yet some others, I feel demotivated and can’t seem to get into flow. I sometimes don’t match with the energy with my own brilliant idea.

Your mood and motivation are also important metrics. No matter if you have tons of brilliant ideas stored, if you’re not in the creative mood, or in a rut, the right words just don’t seem to come out of you.

Maybe you’re too distracted, or sometimes your life’s circumstances don’t allow you to create at the speed you desired and you can’t help but hit pause.

Uncertainty is scary, because you don’t know what your next brilliant idea will be, or when you’ll be able to execute it, but it’s equally exciting as it shows you all the possibilities and what could happen.

The messiness inherent in creativity

The mind of a creative person is messy. You have like a thousand tabs open in your brain, and it’s really hard to tame them and limit them to one organized space, at all times.

Some of your ideas will be lost in an ignored notebook, some on the notes of your phone, some on your Notion, some on your docs, some on the random scribblings on the book you read, and some on flashcards or A4 papers. And that’s okay.

While knowing my ideas are scattered somewhere feels uncomfortable and raises the urge in me to sit down and gather them in one collective space, I know that doing that will take way too long and is not logistically possible.

Also, upkeeping that structure will be tough and will stress me eventually, and it will get messy once again; just as like how your room gets messy after a week you cleaned and organized it, your writing ecosystem can get messy with time.

You can attempt to organize it once again, but it will get messy again. But that’s okay, maybe the trick is aiming for a disorganized structure. There can be structure in the messiness, too. Even if it’s messy, if you know where to look in that mess, then you’re good.

Too neat is boring and sterile anyway. Messiness can help fire your neurons to make new connections.

It’s impossible to turn up to your creative work with the same drive every day, we’re humans after all, not robots. Art needs personality, and the human touch. And creativity isn’t always predictable in terms of when it will come. We all experience creative burnout.

Messiness can be writing for 10+ hours at your creative high yet not being able to write a sentence for days after that.

That’s why it’s best to batch produce articles when your creativity flows for times when you feel burnt out, as you can always publish those ready articles whenever you feel stuck.

Embracing the messiness and turning it into an advantage

So instead of trying to be too organized with my writing, I’m accepting the messy nature inherent in this craft and choose to see its bright side. I can have my inspiration and ideas scattered in my room and in my mind. The messiness doesn’t devalue them.

Maybe that’s what spices up the creative process anyway. Perhaps it’s the messiness that makes writing or being a creative so attractive and adds flair to the process.

Sometimes that messiness is exactly what gives you a strange momentum, something that being neat and organized doesn’t give. That messiness spawns incredible ideas.

Creativity is not like a 9-5 job requiring you to do mundane, robotic tasks. It is mostly unstable, unpredictable, and playful. And that’s the fun part.

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in a total of 20-21 days, on a manic writing spree. You don’t always need to follow a set structure, your ways can be more unorthodox, more messy, if you work better that way.

Of course, it would be easier if we could just turn up in front of our laptops and spare 2 hours for writing each day and write really good stuff consistently, but that mostly doesn’t portray the reality of being a writer.

Somedays what you come up with is going to be shitty, and some days it will feel like you wrote godly sequences.

Sometimes you will write on your bed, on the couch in the living room, on your desk, at the kitchen table, or at a neighborhood cafe.

Sometimes you will write on paper, on your journal, on a napkin, on your notes app, or on your laptop. And that variety is something that gives you a lot of inspiration.

Sometimes you will work on an exciting new idea, and ditch the order of your content calendar, and that’s okay too, because plans can change.

Because when you sit on that newfound idea, that initial idea unlocks even more indepth ideas and develops it, and I don’t want to miss on that spontaneous magic.

Sometimes being planned is good, especially if you’re a creator who needs to upload content regularly. It gives you a roadmap on what you can write about, but always sticking to a plan can make you lose that creative spark and play associated with the fun nature of creativity.

Your plans can act like a guidebook for you to be open to possibilities, but sometimes what should matter is what you want to write at that moment, and what’s bursting out of you. Or if you can’t muster to write, not pushing yourself to produce work you’re not proud of just because you wanted to fulfill a wordcount.

I simply don’t want to ignore a whole essay that literally flashes in my brain, ideas there but unconnected, waiting for me to tie them, and voluntarily lose those unique connections my brain formed for a preplanned piece. But maybe that’s just me and the way I view it.

Maybe my creative process was never meant to be neat in the first place. At the end of the day, I’m happy to work with this chaotic mess and let it inspire and energize me.

But I’m curious, how does your creative process look like? Is it messy like mine? And in what ways? What kinds of strategies do you employ surrounding your writing?

Like many budding writers, I trace my passion for writing back to right after learning to read and write.

My first writing project was creating little storybooks with pictures drawn by me, which we could say was my first unofficial self-published writing experience, lol.

I was also passionate about writing poems, a long-lost desire I once had, which was later replaced by a passion for writing long-form. I wanted to become a novelist, a storyteller, and that desire lingered for a long time.

In the past, to be a writer, largely, was to become a novelist, a book author, in most people’s minds, and was in mine, too.

When you uttered the word writer, the image of a book writer usually popped up in people’s minds. Because writing a book and publishing it was a serious undertaking, especially back then. Being a writer automatically made you reputable.

To this day, I still want to be a novelist, largely to fulfill little me’s dreams. But from that initial writing dream, my journey with writing started to blossom and take different turns. It morphed into something more than just writing a novel.

As I grew up and as my interests, environment, and the world changed, the sole image of a writer as a novelist dramatically altered.

My journey in writing

Following my infantile dream of becoming a novelist, somewhere along adolescence, I was introduced to the concept of essays.

After reading a book compilation of essays by Montaigne, I toyed with the idea of becoming an essay writer like him. Writing about and discovering the existential and philosophical questions of life intrigued me a lot.

Later, I found out about journalism and the job title of editor. Writing for magazines and local newspapers always seemed charming too, like the ones we watched in the 2000s romcoms, where the protagonist is usually working as a columnist or editor for an established magazine.

Suddenly, I desired to become a hip editor with regular columns that embellish the magazine pages.

I would also read blogs on Blogger in high school because that was the thing back then; Blogger was the mother of influencing and social media, and I thought about running a blog at some point, but I was too young to understand the mechanics.

My love for writing then became a huge inspiration for my choice of major in university: psychology. But that mixed up everything even more by adding more options to the melting pot.

Studying psychology, I was now introduced to the brand new world of academic writing and academic journals, the concept of how research is conducted and written, and this whole new genre of writing. Now my writer persona has started to lean more towards academic writing, without me even noticing.

At university, the first job I made money from writing back at 19 was a part-time content writing job I had. My role required me to write about psychological topics in a user-friendly, conversational, and informational tone, which taught me a lot and had a huge role in shaping my writing style and goals as well.

While working there, one of the co-workers mentioned a website called “Medium” and how they were writing there, and how cool a place it was.

After the curiosity she aroused in me, I was immediately hooked when I saw the Medium landing page. After I sketched out my game plan for Medium, I quit the part-time job and put all my bets on the platform.

Medium and my content writer job added another layer to my writing repertoire. I started to write and share my writing in English for the first time, apart from the assignments I had, which were in English; before that, I mainly wrote in my native language, Turkish.

This is circa 2020, a couple of months after COVID hit, and when ChatGPT was nonexistent. Medium became a hub for me to write and store my work and display it online for the first time in my life, at least in that scope.

Then, 1 year after I joined Medium, I started to hear about a new newsletter platform called Substack, an alternative to other mailing sites like Mailchimp or ConvertKit, and a more social one, too.

Because of its easy usage, like Medium, I started my newsletter on Substack in 2021, which was mainly tied to my Medium page and nothing else. But after writing a couple of newsletters, I fell short of inspiration and quit, and Substack wasn’t as huge as it is nowadays.

In the years to come, my writing online became sporadic as I was more focused on my graduation, then my postgrad studies, then moving abroad, and completing all those projects, internships, and jobs surrounding my psych degree.

Writing always acted as a side gig that I could never find or spare enough time for, but I always wanted to turn it into a main gig. And what largely fed that problem was all these options laid in front of me regarding writing.

All these choices I had and could reach with writing felt liberating and suffocating at the same time. It was good to know I had all those options under my sleeve and could try my hand at most, but that freedom made it harder to follow one path and stick to it.

I can’t help but think what would happen if I only aimed to be a novelist and nothing else; if it would be easier for me. Or maybe if I stick to content creation, would it feel more seamless? But I don’t think that the answer lies in sticking to one path.

The ever-changing meaning of being a writer

I find that the modern world doesn’t reward one type of writing like it used to. Being a writer in today’s world means much more than solely being a novelist.

Even if your main thing is to write novels, you still need to have an online presence and be at multiple places with your writing at the same time.

You have to repurpose your writing, especially if you want to make a living as a writer and be successful or well-known.

The modern day also doesn’t make it easier for writers to choose their path and clearly define themselves as writers. There are a plethora of paths for you if you want to become a writer.

The term writer itself is too vague to capture all those options. What’s more, is that the writer as a novelist becomes an outdated description in today’s world.

When someone says they are a writer, what do they mean? They could be all of these things and more:

A screenwriter-playwright, copywriter, content writer-creator, ghost writer, journalist, columnist, academic writer-researcher, essayist-personal essay writer, blogger, Medium’er, Substacker (aka writing influencers), novelist, memoirist…

The list can go on. And then there are all these different genres. What are you gonna write about? Which topics? What is your target audience? What is your niche going to be about?

Writing has a lot of different mediums, and definitions, more than it ever did in the history of humankind. It can come in many shapes and forms. And now AI is added to the pot too, making everything more complicated and stiffening the competition.

Back then, to call yourself a writer, you needed to have published work, either a book, columns in a newspaper or magazine, or inside an academic journal.

You had to find a publisher who accepted your work if you wanted to get published, and that’s tough stuff; everyone knows that even J.K Rowling was rejected like 12 times before finding a publisher that would publish Harry Potter at last.

Now, you don’t need to find a publisher; you can self-publish your book and sell it on Amazon KDP, and if you’re lucky, reach riches.

You don’t need to work for a magazine or a publishing house; you can instantaneously publish your words on social writing platforms like Substack, Medium, or your social media accounts and reach thousands of readers through them.

Through typing words on your laptop, you can reach people’s hearts from the comfort of your couch and broadcast your writing to the whole wide world. Now, the distributor is the algorithm, not a difficult-to-reach agent or publisher.

The writer today is the publisher, agent, marketer, editor, and the writer itself, all at the same time.

We have so much more control over our writing compared to past writers, which is a huge advantage, if you know how to work with it, but it can easily become a disadvantage, too.

Being a writer had a more clear-cut definition in the past, but it was also harder to reach that title.

Whereas now, with the plethora of options and the ease to get into the craft, it’s equally easier yet harder to call yourself a writer. It also makes me think that the weight of the word writer held changed, and decreased in a sense, because of this.

The ease that the technology caused for writing to be easier made calling yourself a writer with confidence harder. Now the competition is steeper as everyone tries to have a go at it. There are now more words published, more content churned, and more books displayed in bookstores and on Amazon, daily.

Some view writing as a quick cash grab, and others have it as a side hustle, and some others who didn’t prioritize writing before are considering it as a full-time job, and everyone is more eager to find their inner artist.

Just as it became easier in some ways, it equally became harder to make it as a writer when there are tonnes of writers just like you, and you gotta work really hard to stand out and not get lost in that crowd.

It’s now harder to get heard, more challenging to catch and maintain the attention of readers, and you need to share the spotlight with more people.

But still, no matter how easy it might seem to become a writer, the ones who make it are usually the ones who stick to the act of writing, doesn’t matter the outcome, the external validation, metrics like money and fame.

No matter the medium you write in or how you define yourself as a writer, if you have a burning passion for this craft and can’t imagine yourself not doing this at some point of your life, and keep writing consistently, either that’s a poem, a personal essay, informative articles, a Wattpad fanfic, a fantasy novel, a memoir, you can proudly call yourself a writer.

Maybe there isn’t an exact definition of a writer anymore, but perhaps that shows us we don’t have to fit into one box and can utilize our passion for writing in a variety of ways.

So what is your definition of a writer then? What unique combinations of writing are you interested in, and pursue, or think of pursuing more in the future?

That’s why, after every article, essay, note, tweet, caption, or post I put out there in the online sphere, I reread it, view it, look at it again after it’s published, with fresh eyes.

I try to view it from an outside perspective, as I care about how I, my profile, and my writing look from the outside, and how presentable it all is. Add the fact that I’m not writing in my first language, so I need to be extra careful for any weird phrasings, grammatical, and semantic mistakes my work can have.

When I reread my work, I’m looking at my writing from a different angle, not as the writer, but the viewer, bystander, if you will. Through that perspective, I can immediately identify my mistakes and shortcomings, and detect much more clearly how I could make some things better.

Yesterday, with that same aim, when I decided to look at how my Substack essays appeared from an outsider perspective, I couldn’t help but cringe.

I caught myself grimacing at how some sentences I wrote looked and sounded, how those paragraphs read after each other, how some failed to match and disrupted the flow, how some ideas were undercooked, or how some mistakes blazed through those margins.

As I was reading and cringing, I thought to myself, what if my friends, colleagues, or my high school crush saw this? What would they think of me? Ugh. I didn’t like the idea of that.

What if I become so famous someday that these cringe words follow me to my grave and latch onto me like the plague? (someone seems to think too highly of themselves)

As these mostly irrational and negative thoughts around my writing filled my brain, that cloud dispersed when I remembered my aims and the values surrounding writing, and just like that, I was back on track.

Why do I write in the first place? I write for myself and to fulfill my ideals and goals surrounding writing. I write because I enjoy the process of writing. I write to get inspired and inspire others. I can count a thousand other reasons.

Thinking about my purpose and meaning behind writing, I was able to quickly shake off that ominous feeling and see the value in my personal cringe-fest.

Feeling cringe actually shows you that you’re on the right path. Feeling cringe is good.

Yes, mistakes exist in my writing, but they only prove that I’m putting myself and my work out there, daring to be seen and discovered, and not being afraid to show my weaknesses and vulnerabilities as a writer in the process.

What matters is that my writing is out there in the world, published, despite some trivial flaws.

No matter how much you read and analyze your work before hitting publish, there’ll always be a sentence sequence or phrasing or a paragraph misplaced, or could be better constructed, elevated, or a word replaced with a more alluring one.

Your work can be infinitely improved. But the question is, does it need to? Or do you have enough time for that?

Sometimes, if I’m too deep in scrutinizing my work, I re-edit some words and sentences after the piece is published - no major changes though. Online platforms give you that flexibility, but publishing in print or your novel wouldn’t provide you with that same opportunity.

If you obsess over correcting and improving every little detail of each of your pieces and try to reach perfection, you won’t have time and energy to work on new pieces, and that will put you behind in your craft.

This is not to say commit blatant mistakes, willingly, but maybe leave that draft after the third or fourth edit, and even if you stalk yourself and see your mistakes or what could be better later on, be okay with cringing at them and them not being perfect, and just let them be.

Your ideas or how you execute them might sometimes sound cringeworthy, or you might have shared vulnerable things about yourself, or you might be afraid that your colleagues or acquaintances might see you online and think badly of you.

The thing is, yes, it can be cringe. But it’s probably more cringe for you anyway when you read it, because it’s you who’s being vulnerable, so it will probably seem much more cringe for you personally, compared to the reader.

And who cares what other people think? There’s a very low chance that all those people will look at and read your work secretly, and even if they read it, so what? With the fear of invisible opinions and ideas of nonexistent critics and commentators, you sacrifice your own abilities.

When you worry about other people’s opinions and ideas, you put away your own dreams and ideals. No one’s opinion is worth pushing away your ideals.

With the fear that you’re not writing perfectly, and are not ready yet, you’re losing time and momentum. With worrying that you or your sentences are not cool enough, you're handing the spotlight to others and staying in the shadows. By doing that, you’re missing the opportunity for growth and the chance to become so much better.

If you do nothing, if you don’t share your writing, your unique voice, you won’t risk the feeling of being cringe, but you’ll lose the chance to reach and learn so much more and master your craft.

No one starts out as perfect. Everyone learns along the way. This is your trial-and-error board. It’s an ongoing, never-ending experiment, and the results show you what works and what doesn’t, so that you can factor in those datapoints when you’re working on your next piece or chalking up your strategy.

Your more amateur, “cringe-worthy” past work can even show you how much you have improved compared to the past, and that’s invaluable in itself.

Cringing at your own work is not bad; in fact, a dose of cringe is even healthy. It shows you that you dared to write and hit publish, even if you don’t feel “completely” ready yet, or fully equipped with what other expert writers seem to have.

It shows that you’re willing to learn on the road and not afraid to make mistakes. It shows that you’re not afraid to be vulnerable and speak your truth.

In fact, praise yourself for being cringe, praise yourself for putting yourself out there, and being brave enough to do so, because not everyone dares to do it.

Without putting yourself out there, you can’t be discovered, so you’re on the right path if you’re cringing.

It all ties back to perfectionism. Perfectionism prevents you from being cringe, but it also prevents you from doing anything at all, or showing any personality in the process. It stalls you.

You have untapped potential sitting in your brain, but if you don’t do anything about it, if you don’t share it with the world, per se, it will stay dormant, and those ideas won’t blossom, but instead fade away.

But what happens when you share them is that they tenfold in volume, and you get to burst with ideas.

I finally got a copy of Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon last week and read it, which I had been intending to read for the longest time.

It’s like a little guidebook for your creative journey, which takes 1-2 hours to read in total. You can finish it in one sitting and leave immensely inspired.

In it, he says you need to have a “willingness to look stupid” to become an artist.

This phrase alone made me more open to the idea of being cringe, and leveraging from there.

He says no artist ever fully knows or understands what they’re doing when they’re starting out, but they just act like it. You simply fake it till you make it. You fake your way into being a writer by writing now.

Another valuable lesson from the book was: you need to share in order to receive. Without sharing, you can’t expect others to connect and resonate with you and your work.

You can’t keep everything to yourself, bottle up and gatekeep the insights and ideas you have, and expect others to follow you. You need to share your ideas to attract readers. That’s how you build an audience.

He also says it’s never good for a writer to spend too much time in retrospection, which resonated with me a lot.

Yes, you can stalk yourself and read your past work every once in a while, but don’t do it so frequently that it prevents you from sitting down to write and look forward because of latching onto the past and overanalyzing your past work or being in love with it.

So start from here, and start now. Commit mistakes, look stupid, and cringe, but show up and keep going. And don’t look back. That’s my call to action for you, but a constant reminder for myself too.

For starters, I write leisurely. I write to reflect on my past and current experiences and record them, like diary entries, to look at things in perspective, and with the hope of going back on and perusing those entries in the future.

I write to find relief and let go of my emotional burdens. I write to analyze situations, clarify my thinking, and give life and add a bit of jazz to my inner monologue.

I write to keep things in order, keep track of my life, and to check in on myself in a way that spoken words or any other human interaction can’t.

I write when I’m happy, sad, indecisive, stressed out, burnt out, angry, in love, obsessive, ruminative, or ashamed. I write whenever and whichever feeling and mood I possess. I write because that’s the best way I know how to express myself.

But then, I also write to escape. From the throes of daily anxieties and the scary future prospects. To shun away from what is expected of me in the real world. To escape from tedious normal-world jobs and hold on to a glimpse of hope that maybe, one day, writing can turn into my actual job and I will become a world-renowned writer.

Don’t we sometimes all write to escape? Writing, like music, TV series, films, books, YouTube videos, or any type of art or content, can serve as a getaway from whatever pain, sorrow, stress, and worry we’re trying to dampen and perhaps find quick relief and distraction from.

Or even when nothing is wrong, we still escape, through these outlets, to a more enthralling world. A world that is more exciting and less dull compared to the one we live in. We escape to imagine and mull over better possibilities.

But it’s not only emotions that writing or other escapism mediums make us escape from. They also enable us to escape future responsibilities and things that need to be sorted out in real time.

They enable us to procrastinate, without feeling much guilt, because we’re seemingly doing something productive.

How can writing be unproductive, hard to imagine, right?

The problem with writing as an escapism agent is that, because it seems a productive activity, it doesn’t make you feel like you’re purposefully escaping from something, but doing something useful with your time. It surely doesn’t have the same effect as doomscrolling and numbly staring at the screen for hours of your day.

I liken it to cleaning. Cleaning also looks productive on the surface, but if you’re using it to escape and delay taking action on your other responsibilities, then it becomes an issue. What matters, then, is the function.

It’s been tough to come to this conclusion for myself, but writing sure does sometimes help me procrastinate on what I need to do in the real world, and it becomes the safe haven that I can escape to no matter what happens there.

I tricked myself for too long into thinking I was being productive with my writing when I was using it to escape from real-world scenarios for my career.

I’m not saying my writing was for nothing; I’m proud of all my written work, but it also encourages me to procrastinate on chasing real jobs and putting myself out there in the real world, through shielding myself with the familiarity and the safety net of writing.

Because when writing, I’m not dealing with people, then I’m also escaping from people and all the problems they can bring to the table. It’s hassle-free. I’m also doing something I’ve been doing for years. It’s familiar, and it’s safe.

I write to escape and even resist the notion that I will have an ordinary and tedious job, a soul-drenching 9-5.

Sometimes, the $50 I make on Medium or the prospects of the money I can earn with my writing through any other platform or client can be enough to convince me that I can someday reach riches and welfare thanks to my writing abilities and my endless passion for this craft.

In short, it sells me and escapes me into a fantasy. A fantasy world in which I can be a Carrie Bradshaw, sitting behind a laptop, cranking out words, enjoying life, and earning enough to afford a luscious life in New York as a single woman.

The thing is, I’m not doing the act of writing any justice by committing this escapism. Writing is not the problem itself. I’m the one loading a lot of meaning and fantasy into it. Writing has its own reality and limitations, too.

I expect writing, all at the same time, to solve my mental health crises, be an emotional support pal, but also make me rich and prosperous, and save me from real-world responsibilities and a boring job.

But when you put too much meaning and expectation on something, you put a lot of pressure on yourself to make it happen, and with that pressure, you explode. When what you expect does not happen, it breaks you into pieces. I don’t want that to happen.

Now, being aware of how writing feeds into my escapism from the real world and things I really need to get done, I’m now better at compartmentalizing it and not merely using it as a procrastination tool.

I’m trying to see it for what it actually can do for me right now, and not get hung up on the deceiving ideal of the whole package.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying writing is purely escapism or that escapism is inherently a bad thing. I’m only saying that writing can have this invisible effect too, and being aware of this can help you see whether you use it to procrastinate on other things and gauge your expectations on it accordingly.

Yes, I will continue to write till the break of dawn, there’s no doubt about that. I will not cease to write. But I won’t let writing get in the way of my other priorities, by seeing it as a savior, that will magically save me from other responsibilities. Because they all can exist together.

I’m scattered when it comes to writing.

Sometimes being disorganized is part of the creative process. Some writers work better in a mess. Through that mess, they find sufficient inspiration. But some obsess over organization and neatness.

I’m the prior who strives for the latter. I mean, who doesn’t? I’m seeing all these journal ecosystem posts on Substack and can’t help but let my jaw drop and be immensely inspired by them; I can only aspire to be that organized. They are the reason why I was tempted to hop on the trend and write my own version of a journal ecosystem post. But at the end of the day, what works for others is not always exactly the formula that works for me.

My writing entries are usually dispersed through various mediums: I have a lovely assortment of notebooks for different causes that host distinct entries. I also have scribblings in lost Word documents in miscellaneous folders on my desktop, chunks and pages of writing in my Google Docs, musings in random pages of my various journals, and in random A4 papers and flashcards sprinkled around my room, and in my Notes app in over 2000+ notes, in my Notion page, on my Medium drafts page, and god knows where else.

Some of my notebooks & journals are untouched or discontinued, as I don’t want to ruin their beauty with just random ramblings and scattered notes, but want to devote them to a better cause. I’m making them wait for their time to shine.

I try to fit my journals into one theme, because what usually happens is I start a journal with one intention, but it then gets filled with other random scribbles outside the theme I predetermined for it. Instead of ideally using 5-6 notebooks for different causes, I end up using 1-2 notebooks in which I write everything.

Even if it’s more convenient, that makes everything look messier, making it much harder to find what you’re looking for when you’re flipping through the pages, and that’s what I don’t like about messiness.

Read more