Pain of Writing

 I should make more lists. I should write more. I should articulate what it is I'm doing, what it is I want, all things and more like this. I've known about this for a long time. 

I just realized sometthing a few moments ago. That part of why I'm so hesitant to do it is fear. Fear that it wont be good enough. And this fear is in part due to experiences with my father. 

My father has done a lot of admirable things. What I'm going to talk about isn't one of them. 

He would constantly shout at me about handwriting. If I got a question right, while studying. It didn't matter if my writing wasn't good. If I wanted to write a story. Didn't matter how good it was unless the handwriting was good. If I wrote about anything at all. Didn't matter what the fuck the content was, if the handwriting wasn't good. This was some arbitrary bullshit to me even 15+ years ago and it's even more arbitrary and outdated nonsense now, when he's doing the same thing to my little sister. He taught me that no matter the quality of my work, no matter how much passion, effort or cleverness I put into it, it didn't matter because there was some arbitrary metric he had made up and decided was important for some reason. Regardless of if the rest of reality agreed with him. And the same fear has stayed with me - been projected now onto recommendation algorithms in twitter, substack, linkedin, lesswrong, other blogs. Always this feeling that there's someone looking and judging, at any time they could just rip apart my work, say it doesn't fucking matter. That all my effort means fuck all, their standard is what's important, what they say goes. 

Even now, as I write it, I have that fear. 

What's worse is that on top of constant judging, shouting, insulting and shaming, he would also make me write lines. I fucking hated this with all my breath. Even something that I actually wanted to learn, like hindi, he would ruin with his bullshit. It made me and still makes me extremely fucking angry. I can see now, that the same bullshit is making my little sister not like maths. When she was 4 years old, I would make treasure hunts for her, with puzzles of Elsa and Anna from frozen, with Elsa being trapped in some room, with questions like "Elsa's Room is double the room number you're in now, plus 5". And she loved it. She'd ask to play 'Treasure Hunt' so many times. And was so excited whenever I made one. Soon, I changed it from Frozen, to jokes - with the setup of the joke being on a card and the punchline being in the place she had to solve an algebra question like "(Green + 12)/15 - 20 = The Room" to find. And when she found them all, she'd turn them over and match them in a grid to find a message I'd written and a star in the center connecting them all. She learnt about negative numbers, percentages, square numbers, fractions and more, well before it was taught in school because of this. 

Now, she doesn't want to do maths anywhere near as much. Unless I really go out of the way to wrap it in other things, she doesn't want to do it - and it's not like that with other subjects - she loves it whenever I show her a little physics experiment, like a couple drops of milk in water and a white light going through it, to make blue, that being how the sky is blue (but oxygen and nitrogen), the flow of water in a sink, balloons sticking to hair, anything like that. And in time, I want to make enough that I can get a place for her to feel safe and be free, where she can learn about things and explore things without the worry that I had. 

But enough about my sister for now - my fear - it's hard. 

I know there's many many many worse things. My parents have had much worse. My father had worse. I've gone hungry a few times, but never really been at the genuine risk of starvation, unless you count the time when he kicked me out of the house for a while, and it seemed like I would have to stay at mum's shop, though that got resolved relatively quickly. Even that wasn't a real risk of starvation. Neither have been the other things. 

But this is mine. I'm not sure how things will change from this post. My father would force me to write. That was not helpful at all. But then he would shout at me, insult me, tell me I'm never going to be anything no matter what, if I don't have good handwriting, that this isn't going to change unless I do lines as he says. 

This is bullshit. 

I know it's bullshit. 

I think its true

it's bull

its nonsense

i f i don't do this then this wont happen

i need to do this thing in order to do this

its my fault if i dont do this then, then this wont happen

its my fault

i wont ever get anything unless i do this thing

i wont ever do anything or be anything unless i do what im told

things i know are not true

even now, as i write this, my thoughts are that 'this will get better if i force myself to write everyday'

what makes things more stressful now is that i'm better at making justifications than my dad was. so i can point to actual things - 'look, these guys got better at programming, at making coding tutorials, at youtube videos, at writing, at all of these things, by doing this thing over and over' 

'i should force myself to write a blogpost every day'

' i should force myself to code every day'

' i need to force myself to do x every day' 

its my fault if i don't do x every day

the thing about fear and pain is that if things are true or false, if its believed on the inside, it still just hurts. 

theres a difference between knowing something to be true and hating and fearing that its true. 

a painful truth and a truth clean from pain

the difference is the experience

not necessarily the truth itself

i dont know how to fix this