Last week, a part of me permanently signed off the internet. For a good part of the last four years, I had been known as Everyday Isa —a non-angsty girl in her 20’s who wrote mostly about love and life. It was not glamorous, I did not gain an exorbitant amount of recognition for doing it, but it was big in its simplicity. Being Everyday Isa had allowed me to connect with different people from all around the world, become a better writer in the process and find a patch in the infinite abyss of cyber space that I could actually call my own.
So, yes. I know it seems odd to end something that had, for the most part, brought me a ridiculous amount of joy.
When I was a freshman in high school, silly in all the ways a 13-year-old could be silly, my friends constantly commissioned me to write for them. No, they weren’t no-gooders who wanted me to do their English homework for them. Rather, they were bored and curious – just as I was bored and curious. And because they knew I loved to write, they asked me to make stories for them.
In the middle of Math class, when my brain could no longer stand to take in what an integer was, I’d concoct poems about the girl whose crush just wouldn’t notice her or make haikus about one girl’s spite towards her ex-best friend. (Random fact: I spent a huge chunk of my formative years in an all-girls Catholic school.) My favorite thing to write back then were chapter stories – micro novellas on falling in love and childhood friendship, each one accompanied by a delightful surprise ending. I’d pass these silly literary attempts to my seatmate or type them up as a birthday present for my school besty. The ideas came out of me unfiltered, each a new landscape to play around with. In my mind, what I had were an infinite number of blank pages so I just wrote and wrote and wrote.
The things I wrote back then were juvenile and ridiculous but I felt free. I felt comfortable with writing dumb and glorious things because I was a dumb and glorious kid who was just beginning to figure out exactly what she was all about.
Last week, I quit being a blogger. When I think about being 13 and the immense freedom I had back then, I realize that what I’ve been ultimately missing out on most is the simple joy of creating something new again and again and again. The blank pages in my head have been replaced with expectations and obligations and to be ruled by those is just no way to live.
You see, the thing about carving out your identity in the online world is that that identity has every chance to trap you when you’re not looking. Being a blogger gave me the space to be Everyday Isa but life had caught up and I had eventually outgrown my own creation. I was no longer fresh out of college. I was no longer living in the poetry of my young adulthood. I was no longer lost or ruled by the pain of lost love. Instead, I had transformed into a different woman, one with sharper edges and stronger convictions. It hadn’t happened overnight but it had happened somewhere along the way and the next best step, it seemed to me, was to start fresh.
I’m smiling now as I remember being 13. I was unwise but I was also terribly unafraid to crumple up the stories that I knew weren’t working. Now might just be the time to go back to poetry and novellas, hopefully more glorious than dumb, to reinvent and to edit and to get comfortable in this new skin. Now is the time for me to try building words in the offline world like I used to when I was running more on love than idealism.
What I’d like to tell all aspiring writers now is that we shouldn’t fear the blank page. After all, it is the blank page that roars with potential, that screams with great kinetic energy. And in the end, the fate of all writers is simple: to shake words off the page and start anew.
Illustration by Genie Espinosa
