Since I was around 13 — the time I had joined my school's newspaper club and began writing my personal thoughts to be published — I have been fascinated by the world of writing. At the same time, it became an essential activity for me because back then (or maybe still), I was genuinely terrified to verbally express my thoughts and feelings due to my heightened social anxiety. Writing had enabled me to communicate both to myself and others, and thus empowered me immensely.
I felt and still feel most joy when I am able to see my genuine self in the words I wrote down, and most authentic in written form, because when I'm talking to others, I tend to uncontrollably suppress my true opinions and seek to say things in a way that seems to be what others want to hear. But in writing, it's like I'm talking only to myself — when I'm facing my laptop with a Word document open, I am really in solitude. I often forget that people will read my columns when I'm writing them, so the work is free from my internalised, imagined gaze of others.
However, ever since I moved here in 2022, I stopped writing because I was just overwhelmed and exhausted from living by myself in a country so far from home, and all I could do was survive. I was slowly losing myself, gradually losing grasp of what I was truly thinking and feeling.
Then I started writing for Observant last summer. The more I wrote, the more natural it began to feel. It made me mindful of my daily thoughts, including those so subtle I would have ignored them the year before. It allowed me to explore feelings I had otherwise buried. I finally reconnected with myself like I used to, or even more deeply. I no longer feel voiceless. Not only that, it also let me reconnect with others as so many interactions happened because of the columns I wrote.
My columnist work is coming to an end, but I intuitively know that I will continue writing somewhere and somehow, with the confidence that writing is in no way powerless or meaningless, but can do something — for myself, for others, or both.
Yuki Nakamura, a third year bachelor student Arts and Culture