This article is dedicated to think back on how external metric and internal metric pushes me to do more writing
“Your writing is actually so good”
“Bro, why not upload it to youtube, you can literally save lifes”
“I learned so much from you”
“You’re actually right again, you really should share these”
Those are very kind words that I have recently recieve. I don’t really share my writings. I used to think it’s not that good and I mainly write when I feel like it. To be honest, when my friend says that it could save lifes, I thought it sounds like a strecth as much as I feel that I have very little experience on writing. A lot of butterfly effect has been going on recently. The first article that I wrote in 2023 is when I felt troubled and I wrote to better understand myself. The irony is that I talked to a girl about writing and asked “Have you ever write when you’re stressed out?” As she nods and explains its relatableness and that shit just struck me like “Oh she just like me.”
We bumped up to each other quite often and I only realized when I started speaking incoherently and my hands started to shake everytime I talked to her. I didn’t want to admit it and I didn’t want to succumb to the emotions as well as much as I know it really won’t work. Due to geographical and time disadvantages, falling for her is actually so unreasonable. Yet, The Absurd still reigns over me, my hands were still shaking even if I don’t want to. I talked to a friend about this and I say “Bro, you actually need to make a move, I need to know for certain that she is not into me so I can stop thiking about her.” Things were quite emotional at that period in time. Writing really helped me overcome the unknown as I began to understand myself better and also where her attributes that made me fell for her. It is quite an understandable human experience. Her likes about philosophy, how supportive she was when I was talking about my articles and my art, her funny response to my god awful jokes, her jokes as well. I created an article in which I called “The Art” as the first article this year and it practically kind of snowballs into other articles after I realized how much I like writing again. The Art is practically an honest confession. I only thought, what are these overflowing emotions that gave me so much energy yet I understand it very little. This is absurd! She’s a great person and we are going to depart! I want to talk to her again. But I’m so busy working! She’s so busy as well! It’s always so ironic to look back that the very first instance of sending her “The Art” that she quite accidentally gave an impression that she didn’t care. She said that she will listen to it at the weekends after I requested her in monday and by the weekends she practically didn’t inform me anything until I ask her at sunday night in which she replied at monday 3 AM that she didn’t got the time because she has another assignment next week. In my head “Isn’t this just basically the same thing that she said last week?” By the next week I kind of have managed to make her listen to it and we had a great time together as I have confessed and turns out she really liked the things I have written but doesn’t feel the same way as I do to her and that’s alright. Not only she listened to the art but The Self and The Joy as well. This was my first ever in person compliment from someone that I have ever recieved about my writings as my writings are personal in nature. The reason why I make her listen to it because the piece is derived from my frustration out of the absurd condition in which she has a role in it and I just want her to know.
Along the ways I have also wrote articles more about the general human nature in which she is not mentioned at all at those articles. Though, her compliments undeniably serve as a really positive feedback to my writing. It’s almost as if I forgot the metric on why I wrote in the first place. I didn’t necesarilly write to be handed compliments. I wrote because I want to understand myself better and why am I feeling the feelings that I am feeling. As the sum of my experiences, why am I the way I am?
It’s almost funny on how I also wrote a letter before our departure and I realized the day after that from talking to a friend that she may never cared about me at all to begin with. In a sense that I feel the reason why she complies to listen to my writings and did the thing she does is done out of guilt rather than out of care. I felt a weird sensation in which “Huh, I must’ve been deluded by a wrong image of a person.” This is mainly influenced because I’m under the impression that had I not nag her multiple times to listen to the things I’ve wrote, 100% she wouldn’t have done it. I don’t think she’s that interested in the first place, she has other more interesting things to do and I’m bottom feeder priority in her book. I was quite sad upon this realization because it moves from I always thought she’s incapable of time management in which it’s more to the fact she’s unwilling to make time for me. Then in my head, why say the word “Care” at all? The word “Care” was a high influence that drove me towards affection towards the first place. Then, who have I been writing this letter to? I called her and asked her not to read the letter and we sort of had a heated argument about it. I explained how me as a person as the sum of my experiences drove me to have a much more significance attribute towards the word “Care”, the same word that she spouted from her mouth to me has driven me to wrote the things I write including the letter in which I no longer feel that it’s destined for you and instead the one that actually cares. Therefore she is not worthy of the letter so don’t read it. She explains that it’s because she doesn’t have the mental capacity to talk about philosophy all the time and that’s why she sort of postponed our supposed meeting multiple times. I never know that I really made that much of a bad impression that I only care about philosophy. I did ask her to talk about philosophy because I was under the impression that that’s the thing we both loved talking about. I never know it requires that much of mental energy because I’m biased me and my friends used to talk about philosophy every night and never got tired of it, if anything it makes us so entertained.
I only recently realized that my argument was a quite dumb one because even if I fall for her for the same reason the word care has so much gravity and I was quite influenced by it. Even if it came out of her mouth and it what pushed me to make my art. Why would I want to diminish the thing that makes me, me? Had I not have extreme emotions in which even if its the result of my past experiences, I wouldn’t have created the art that she enjoys. And the word “Care” has really broad weight. As much as I was influenced just because it was one of the most sweetest thing that quite frankly saved my life in the past being heard from a stranger from the suicide prevention hotline trying her best to stop me from suicide. It could also has different weight to someone else. And if I were to bring the argument, then don’t say the word “Care” at all, now she’s treating me like she literally doesn’t care and has stopped replying to my messages. I don’t know if its just bad timing because she’s in holiday right now. But it’s really bad timing to leave my last messages as that.
I have just realized that she in a sense have accidentally put some weight to the metric of the value of my arts. I mean it’s fine, but it was not supposed to be that way in the first place. The metric should be how much I appreciate my own art. How much I am proud of what I’ve created. The metric can be external but the external should not be the main metric.
As much as compliments are nice but it should not mean when it’s stop coming I would stop writing.
I recently re-read the articles that I’ve written back in 2022 and I was astonished how amazing it was. It was The Inability, In 2022 I published my writing on substack. It has a really beautiful comment from a stranger that says: