Writing Through the Noise
Still figuring it out, one page at a time.
Back in 7th grade,
during those pre-Google years, we had a curious little ritual—forty minutes of handwriting practice during arts and crafts classes. Pencils, pens, even those leaky fountain pens. The whole thing was meant to improve our penmanship.
And weirdly enough, it worked!
Years later,
my therapist told me to try something similar—just write. One page a day, whatever came to mind before bed. Nothing fancy. So I did. Two journals: one digital, one paper. Over six months, the soft copy quietly grew to over 12,000 words. The hard copy? That one got the filtered thoughts—the ones that felt like they deserved ink.
At some point, I got into blogging.
No schedule. No plan. Just writing whenever I felt like it. The community was fun, people actually read and replied. Over two and a half years, I ended up with around 600 posts, 10,000 comments, and a few hundred thousand views. Wild.
Writing sounds easy. It isn’t.
The whole thing runs on momentum, and once that’s gone… well, cue writer’s block. You pause, thinking it’ll help. Then you realise it’s time to read in order to write again. And once you start reading, you discover how little you know. That’s when it hits.
Reader’s block and writer’s block together‽ Brutal. Especially if writing is your way of feeling present. So you take a break, try not to beat yourself up, and if you’re lucky; you start again, this time without the noise in your head.
Now, someone might ask:
💭“But what’s the point‽”
Honestly? Fair question.
Depends on the person.
For me, writing helped a lot at work. Picking the right words can be weirdly stressful—emails, reports, proposals…everything needs a different tone. You’ve got to keep it coherent, fluent, and not make it look like it was written at 2 a.m. (even when it was). Formatting, layout, presentation—all of it counts.
During thesis prep, I struggled hard. Academic tone felt like a foreign language. I’d been playing with so many styles—formal, semi-formal, chatty, cold, warm, diplomatic-across press releases, MoUs, slides, newspapers, and magazine stuff. My tone radar was all over the place.
Honestly, life felt pretty clusterfucked.
But that’s part of the deal.
Writing isn’t about sounding smart. It’s about staying curious. Some days it feels impersonal. Other days it’s painfully close. Like some stoic figure trying to hold it together, except you’re secretly falling apart in the margins.
Took me six hours just to write an abstract. One paragraph. Six hours.
And weirdly, I think that’s okay.
Life’s short.
We can’t do everything. But I believe in writing things down. It helps to rearrange thoughts, clears out the emotional junk, and makes space for something honest. You find your voice. You accept your limits. And sometimes, in between all that, you say something real.
No hashtags. No neat conclusion. Just this: Writing helps—even when it doesn’t feel like it at first.
— Tanzil