TEST STORY

After many months of hiatus from writing, battling myself against constant anxiety, unrealistic expectations and failed beginnings — I finally attempt to write a piece: right here, right now.

Nine loops of Juan Thugs’ “Momay” played through my ears after I decided to write this. Where do I start? I have failed myself. It isn’t writer’s block, that’s for sure. Your writer here just have a tremendous amount of unrealistic expectations and big ideas that a sudden burst of energy can’t provide. “Lumilipad na naman ang isip ko,” the song lyrics said then it spat random words like ‘shotgun’ and ‘buddha’.

I promised to myself that I will write a novel this year. My first novel (actually a novelette) “Duplex”, is just one big satirical shitpost answer to a popular Wattpad horror novel titled “Diary of a Psychopath”. I was enraged by the sheer stupidity of the story and the mindless gore surrounding the plot itself, so in response to the book, I wrote an even more stupid plot with overwhelming amount of graphic imagery such as the main antagonist recieving a fellatio from a decapitated head with the resolution of the villain getting killed in a non-climactic way. I dedicated the book to fans of Vic Sotto, don’t ask me why. I don’t know either.

I started to write another novel. It’s a crime drama, its about a gay couple in early 2000’s running a sex shop deep in the underbelly of Manila in front of a cinema house that was exclusively only showing bold movies. When a law was passed seizing the bold movie industry operations, the cinema died and the reception of their shop also from both buyers, the public and the increasingly threatening homophobic mayor of their barangay when a crime scene involving one of their products was used a murder weapon. Then, things go downhill quickly.

I know it may sound interesting, but I simply do not have the mind capacity to write the entire thing since I am suffering from anxiety all throughout the lockdown months and coping up with things that affects my creativity. Turns out, I’m not the only one. My good friend Basil is writing also a novel at the moment when we talked about it in our podcast, Basil reveals to me that (s)he scrapped the whole idea because (s)he do not have the will to continue further. Same as I was experiencing. Some sort of a midlife crisis or an existential dread and constant pressure in needing to find a job during this crisis stressed the hell out of us. Now we both have jobs: Basil’s now a call center agent and I am a salesman at a mall—a job which I am really good at.

But I thought that my suffering will cease. Yet once more, my job hinders me from writing more. Ironic because during the time in which I am jobless, I cannot write a single damn thing. I punish myself from day to day with slapping my face while looking in the mirror and saying that I must take a break from social media and do something productive. But I was sad, I need someone to talk to me.

August came. I’ve written nothing so far. I even thought of copypasting my posts from my Wordpress account to my Medium here — what a way to go and I thanked my mind that it suppressed the urge. What else I can say to everyone who will read this?

I promise, from now on, I will not let my Medium account be left in a dormant state ever again. My passion is writing, but the mind is so strong that even me can hinder this skill through overthinking. Ishtak is long gone, he’s just a character. D.J. however is totally different from him. Thank you for taking the time to read this write-up without any direction at all. I appreciate your patience.

Thanks.