Why I write

“Remember what it was to be me: that was always the point.” - Joan Didion

A new week has begun and I haven’t written at all over the weekend—and I promised myself that I would write every weekend. I do the best I can, to write and to keep better logs of my days and weeks, to have something to remember, something to look back to. I wish I was better at it, but the reality is majority of my time these days is taken up by work, and the rest of it I end up wasting away by doomscrolling because by the time I finish work I’d be so mentally exhausted to even do anything else. But I try. And I know I need to eliminate the doomscrolling entirely.

A few days ago, I found a journal entry from last year:

“I don’t think I ever wrote to you about Mio, but he is a little cow kitten my mom found in the parking lot. We started feeding him in the last week of January and he has been ours since. We have taken him to the vet once to get his eye checked—he hated the medicine. But somehow his eye has gotten better. I love him, and I wish to one day be able to give him a warm home and lots of toys to play with. I am happy to see him every day.”

Now Mio’s here—playing, sleeping all day, and eating well. And it’s nice to have a journal entry to look back to because I get to see how much progress we’ve made since, as well as how strongly I felt about wanting to rescue him.

Which then also reminds me of Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook essay—one of my favorites. About the purpose of keeping a notebook: to remember the person you were at a specific moment. How we write things down to remember—to remember what specific people meant to us on a particular day or hour, or minute. Because we want to remember our first impression of something (or of doing that something), possibly of someone, too. And that sometimes we think we’ll “always remember” important events: “I’ll just make a mental note of it.” But in reality everything is fleeting. Didion says write it down, so that people, places, and certain events will always be there in case you ever want to come back to them sometime in the future—but also so that they don’t ever haunt you.

“Remember what it was to be me: that was always the point.” - Joan Didion

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are all well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. […] We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” - Joan Didion

This is something I hadn’t really considered ever since I was little. The girl obsessed with hoarding notebooks and always had one with her almost everywhere. I was already writing all sorts of things: short stories about cats, my numerous horrible attempts at songwriting, really really awful poems at the age of six, and my thoughts on why red is fundamentally better than pink (I was just an emo kid and always dissed the color pink out of spite). Growing up, I’ve always enjoyed reading magazines front to back, so in my free time I would also collect my favorite articles and rewrite them in my notebook so that I had them in one place. My mom never understood why I had to rewrite everything (neither did I at the time, to be honest, just that it was something I loved to do) but it always made me feel safe—keeping my favorite words in one tiny notebook, for no particular reason or purpose.

I just wrote whatever I could, and that was it.

It was also around the same time that The Barbie Diaries movie came out. It’s not a lot of people’s favorite Barbie movie—they say the animation was so bad, plot so corny—but it spoke to the (then) little part of me that always just wanted to be writing. And so I started keeping a diary of my own, too, because of it—a habit that has stayed with me ever since.

Now I keep a whole ecosystem of notebooks. You can never have too many.

Now, the question: why do I write? I write because it’s the most natural thing for me to do. I write because I want to remember a lot of things—and understand a lot of things. I write because I can’t draw; I can’t dance; and I can’t sing. Not that my reason for writing is directly tied to my not being so good at those things, which has always been a frustration, because to draw beautiful art and be able to express myself that way must feel great too. That said, I’d still choose writing had I been good at drawing or singing; it feels the most personal to me, perhaps even the most intimate. There’s satisfaction in seeing an older version of myself through my words that I can revisit, or meet again, any time I want to.

“Today, I got a new keyboard and it had a very distinct computer smell that reminded me of home,” on March 4, 2026, in my journal read, “The old internet cafe I frequented when I was younger was my first thought (because we didn’t have a family PC growing up), but I realized it wasn’t that. It was the smell of keyboards and computer screens in the computer room back in high school. Back when my days were so simple that the small classroom at the topmost floor of the G— building—which fits approximately 30 students—was somewhat of an escape to me. From the window, there was a clear yet distant view of the highway leading into the city. During lectures, I’d often daydream about running out of class, stepping onto that highway by foot because I just didn’t care, and walking all the way to Manila just to watch city lights at night. Or simply to live a little, to experience something different.”

I think the point of writing is to understand that certain objects or places aren’t as literal as they appear to be, as far as the personal essay goes. This is what my new keyboard meant: a little girl wanting something bigger than the little provincial life she has. That although she is surrounded by the people she loves most at home, lovely family though not too many friends, she knows there must be something else out there. She doesn’t do much—not like she has a choice anyway. Between home and school there’s practically nowhere else to be. But surely there is something waiting for her elsewhere, she knows this. And all she wants is to live in the city; the goal is pretty straightforward for her.

I’d write her back if I could, but I guess this short essay is something for me to read a few years from now. This should be good enough.