The First Time I Remember Writing

The first time I remember intentionally writing something, I was around nine years old. I wrote a short story about a little drop of water going through an adventure and continuously transforming from one state into another. It would evaporate and become part of a cloud, return back into rain, fall into a river again, and continue a similar cycle repeatedly.

I don’t remember if the story itself was good or not, but I still remember the experience of sitting there and trying to put an idea into words. After that, writing kept reappearing in different phases of my life.

On the last year of middle school, when I was fourteen and had just started school in fall, I started writing daily memories, events, thoughts, and reflections in a notebook with a pen, filling one after another.

Some of those writings were very direct and simple, and some of them were intentionally cryptic. I remember that even at that age, I sometimes enjoyed wrapping my thoughts in subtle and metaphorical language, as if I wanted the writing to carry another hidden layer underneath the obvious meaning. Then later came the weblog years during university, when I started publicly writing online for several years before eventually stopping again. Then after some time, another phase of writing would begin, and once again it would slowly disappear.

Writing Privately and Writing Publicly

Looking back now, I realize something important, that I never actually stopped writing completely. What disappeared at different phases of my life was not writing itself, but public writing.

Private writing remained almost constant throughout all those years. Random notes, unfinished reflections, scattered Word documents, observations about life, frustrations, judgments, ideas that I wanted to untangle, or simply thoughts that I wanted to revisit later.

I know a lot of them were complaints about different things, more like a method to vent off in private. Those never fully disappeared from my life. Public writing, however, was different. It came and went in waves depending on my experiences in different periods of life.

For a long time, I thought I wrote publicly because I simply enjoyed thinking and writing. And to some extent, I still think that is true. Writing has always helped me discover thoughts that were not completely visible in my own mind until I forced them into language.

Even now, there are times that I start writing with one opinion or one assumption and by the end of the page, I realize that my actual thoughts were slightly different from what I originally believed.

When Writing Becomes Presentation

I no longer think that intellectual curiosity was the entire reason behind my public writing. The older I get, the more I realize there is a major difference between writing privately and writing publicly.

Private writing is raw and uncensored because there is no audience involved. There is nobody to impress, nobody to judge you, and no image that needs to be maintained. Thoughts can remain incomplete, repetitive, emotional, badly structured, or even contradictory or embarrassing. They do not need to pass through any filter before appearing on the page.

Public writing changes that process. The moment an audience exists, even if it is a very small audience, even if there is only the potential for an audience, writing becomes presentation to some extent.

Looking back now at the way I wrote publicly during my late teenage years and early twenties, I can clearly see that I often wrapped very simple emotions or opinions inside layered language because I wanted the writing itself to sound sophisticated and intellectual. At the time, I most likely interpreted that as depth. Looking back now, I think a large part of it was connected to identity and attention.

The Desire to Be Seen

In hindsight, I observe myself wanting people to read my writing and become curious about me. I wanted them to feel that there was something thoughtful, emotionally complex, observant, or sophisticated behind those words. Even if I was writing about personal frustrations, relationships, disappointments, or observations about life, I rarely wanted to present those things in a completely direct and vulnerable way.

Instead, I preferred to transform them into something more enigmatic and symbolic. In some sense, the writing itself became part of the identity that I wanted to project outward to other people. 

Interestingly, I no longer say this with embarrassment or disappointment. I think many people who publicly write are, at least partially, trying to be seen. Otherwise, why would anyone publish their thoughts publicly if there were no possibility of an audience? Public writing, by its very nature, assumes the possibility of being witnessed by somebody else.

That does not automatically makes public writing fake or meaningless. Public writing still creates something that private writing cannot fully create on its own. Once another person reads your thoughts, interprets them, challenges them, or even misunderstands them, your ideas begin interacting with a world outside your own internal dialogue.

Sometimes feedback exposes weaknesses in your thinking that you completely missed by yourself. Sometimes another person understands a thought in a way that even you did not originally understand when you wrote it.

Why I Stopped Publishing

As the years passed and life slowly became more structured around adulthood, responsibilities, work, marriage, and stability, I noticed that my relationship with public writing also started changing.

Around the years that I got married, finished my PhD, found stability in work, moved to Atlanta, and slowly built a more structured adult life around responsibilities and routines, the emotional urgency that once fueled my public writing became quieter. Not necessarily gone, but quieter. I still continued privately writing scattered thoughts and reflections, but the desire to convert those thoughts into a public identity weakened significantly.

For years, I assumed this happened simply because life became busy, and to some extent that is probably true. But I no longer think time alone explains it completely. I suspect another part of the explanation is that some of the emotional needs that once pushed me toward public writing had already been fulfilled elsewhere in life.

Perhaps the need for attention became weaker. Perhaps the need to externally project identity softened after marriage, career, stability, and adulthood started shaping my life differently. Or perhaps I simply became more comfortable with existing privately inside my own thoughts without needing them to constantly be witnessed by other people.

Returning to Public Writing

After creating this personal website in 2026, I find myself returning to public writing once again. This time feels a bit different. I still understand that public writing naturally contains some level of desire for audience, visibility, feedback, recognition, or connection. I just think I understand those motivations more honestly now than I did before. I no longer feel the same pressure to artificially complicate my language or hide simple thoughts underneath excessive symbolism just to appear more intellectual.

What interests me more now is the process itself. The process of thinking through writing, revisiting assumptions, documenting observations, and watching how thoughts evolve once they are forced into language.

In some sense, this article itself is an example of that process because I started writing it simply trying to understand why public writing repeatedly disappeared from my life, and somewhere during the process of writing it, I realized that the answer is probably tied much more closely to identity, audience, and the desire to be witnessed than I originally wanted to admit.

Nowadays, there is also the motivation of potentially making money from writing, which, honestly, is another strong factor that cannot be ignored either.

Understanding the Pattern

I do not know whether this return to public writing will continue for years or eventually fade again like the earlier phases did. Maybe it will follow the same cycle once more. Maybe it will not. But at least this time, I think I understand the pattern more clearly than I did before, and perhaps understanding the pattern itself is enough reason to write about it publicly one more time.