I was already a professional liar by the age of ten.
Every August 31st, the night before school resumed, I would sit under a dim lamp and churn out a dozen “lovely summer stories.” They were works of pure fiction, fueled by the cold dread of an impending deadline. To my younger self, writing wasn't an art; it was a tax I had to pay for existing in the school system.
For the next twenty-five years, the tax only got higher. In middle school, a one-page essay felt like a descent into madness. By graduate school, my thesis was a semester-long hostage situation. Getting words out of my brain was a violent process—like wrestling with an almost-empty tube of toothpaste, hacking at the plastic just to get a smear of substance.
Then, the tectonic plates shifted.
It started in my iPhone Notes app. Over four years, I accumulated 6,000 entries. It was a digital junkyard: terrible puns, podcast fragments, and ideas to be patented like "Snag™"—a wild idea for virtual tags in the real world that I’m still convinced would make Evan Spiegel sweat. Looking back, 99% of it is garbage. But it wasn't about the quality of the trash; it was about the habit of the haul.
I realized that the "toothpaste" struggle happened because I was trying to squeeze out something that hadn't been put in. You cannot extract order from a mind that hasn't yet learned to observe its own chaos.
Now, the struggle has been replaced by a quiet addiction. I am no longer fighting the tube; I am mapping the architecture. Writing has ceased to be the "vegetables" I’m forced to eat and has become the scalpel I use to dissect the noise.
I spent half my life avoiding the page. Now, I find that without the page, I have no place to put the world. Writing is no longer a task; it is my reason for being.