You know how I mentioned before that my parents hated social media? Well, they still do. But just a few months after my first ever panic attack, I discovered about the website Wattpad. I learnt that in just a few minutes, you could make an account and share your own writing to hundreds of readers. It sounded like a real dream come true and thought for weeks about how I was going to bring up making an account on the website.
December 2nd 2012 was when I finally made an account. Mum wanted to watch me throughout the whole process, making sure that I signed up under a suitable pen name since at the time, I was being bullied by students at my school. If they ever found out that I wrote online, then the taunts and laughs would spread quicker than wildfire. Joining Wattpad changed a lot of things for me mentally. I was opening up more but I had to be cautious. Not every user on that site was a friendly human being. I was soon trolled by accounts who got hissy that I wouldn't follow them back.
Nevertheless, the writing continued to be uploaded. I was writing poetry on a daily basis and this is why I credit poems to be my favourite style of writing and my biggest literature interest in general. I wrote poems about winter skies, the family christmas tree, bumping into people that you don't want to bump into etc etc. Those poems started to get read by users and very soon, I was entering and winning competitions for poetry.
My love of Wattpad continued for a few years until 2016, when after a bad break-up with one of the reasons being me writing online, I started to question who I was. If no-one wanted to date a writer, then surely I would be lonely for the rest of my life? I did quite well on the site, getting featured and meeting other writers. But the trolls never truly stopped and soon, I started to get hate for one of my story titles that I had posted. That was truly the final straw. I made the decision to walk away and call quits.
My account still remains and a few times a month, I log on just to make sure that everything is fine. But the real love for it has faded away with passing time. Poetry writing was a good escape for me but the people just got to me too much in real-life. I'm lucky to be dating someone now who supports my writing and always reads whatever I post. But back then, I truly knew no-one who would support my dreams as an online writer.
I fell into quite a bad slump and after the traumatic passing of my best friend in 2010, it was like my voice had fallen mute. People started to message me on Wattpad, asking if everything was OK but I never replied. With my anxiety and depression now by this stage at one of its peaks, I just regretted ever being online in the first place and doing something I loved.
I don't think now we can truly ever avoid being online. Sure, my Dad doesn't use any social media platforms. But, he likes to browse various sport teams and forums on the internet just to see the latest news and scores from across the globe. My Mum is on Twitter and quite active, that did take some hassling on my part to get her to try out the platform.
Penana as a website is somewhere I personally find a bit more comfortable. It's less... hectic? I'm not sure that's quite the right word. But Wattpad on the other hand was always crashing from too many users being online all at once and work getting deleted or copied. Even writing this book now, I'm scared that I'm going to end up copying another writer. But in creative terms, lots of ideas have been used and reused. I guess The Depression Diaries falls under that bracket of books that have been written and uploaded online.
I find it quite easy just to sit down and type out these chapters with little hesitation. On the other hand, actually physically sharing my feelings out-loud to loved ones is a different ball game. I've always been passionate at wanting to open up my experiences and share advice, in the hopes that someone, somewhere will be reading and thinking 'yes, this is so helpful!' No, I'm not one of those influencers but I'm just writing and being me at the same time.
That's all we strive to be. Being yourself, being you. There's that annoying little trap called peer pressure (and yes, I've been there many times!) but at the end of the day, it's up to you what you want to do, who you want to see and how you want to remember things. Keeping a personal diary of my own was a fun test, just to see what my writing truly looked like. I'm appalled though at what some of the entries sounded like.
- "I saw this person and they stared at me!"
- "My period came while I was out shopping!"
Gross, I was a clumsy teen OK? We don't want to write about those kind of things right? But then, I sat back and thought about why we do think about these things? There must have been a little trigger, a word, an action. Something that sticks deeply into your brain. Needless to say, I chucked my old diaries out and now, I'm trying to brave and write books like this one instead. It's still some kind of a diary but now out in public and not private.
If I do repeat myself, I'm so sorry in advance. I guess the things I repeat are what has stuck by me after all these years.
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