Trying to Write Creatively and Finding Fanfiction in the Process, or Vice Versa

I keep wishing I’d been born just a little bit more creative. I’ve been writing from a very young age (and, unfortunately, in just the English language because my education is colonial enough to have me mastering the colonizer’s language before my own) and I’ve tried my hand at musical instruments and, hell, even art. But I always keep falling short.

Writing is the only thing I’ve stuck with. My short stint with a guitar was just that—short, give or take 2 to 3 years. My time with a piano was a one-time offer at best: I learned the stuff, performed the recital, and left everything at the stage because I never learned anything again. Don’t even get me started on my attempts at art, if they could even be called attempts in the first place. I can make subpar publicity materials on Adobe Photoshop and maybe mix and match colors well, but that’s about the limit to it. (Feels like it needs a ‘lol’.)

But writing, writing in English especially, comes easy. Rereading my old works, even the ones that make me cringe now, really has me believing that my grasp of the language isn’t all that bad, that I actually have facility for it. English comes naturally to me and, weirdly, writing comes naturally to me, too. I express better in writing. It was only in college that I got a little more articulate in speaking publicly, but, even then, I’d still write myself a whole script or speech and memorize it, even for mass protests on hot days where I’m tasked to represent my organization. This pre-written speech is even in Cebuano, my native tongue that I learned too late. (Side note: Join your nearest national democratic mass organization today!)

I kept writing, even when I’d fallen short at all the other attempts at creativity. I keep telling people that I wrote my first story when I was 9 and I remember it being about a cat, and that was weird because I hadn’t owned a pet in Cebu, much less a cat, until I was 14. We had Kitkat then, our precious shih tzu who died in 2017 and a baby I still miss very much.

The story about that cat, that I don’t even remember, was not technically the first thing I’d ever written. I had kept journals and diaries from the age of 6, or whatever age I was when I learned to write. You could say this was heavily inspired by Barbie Diaries. Using my allowance, I’d buy diaries with locks from the small stores outside of school. I would write almost every day—about nothing special in retrospect, but when you’re 9 years old and crushing on 5 different male classmates, everything was special.

I kept writing. People knew me in school as the one kid who writes. I feel like it was one of the reasons why I was chosen to participate in a preliminary exam where the student who would spell the most number of given words would go on to compete in an inter-school spelling bee. I went on to represent my school and won first place against 6^th graders while I was the only one in 5^th grade. It was cool.

After that, people saw me as someone good with words. By the first year of high school, or Grade 7 as we called it, I had a notebook (a “lineless” one, the sole Christmas gift I’d asked from my mother the year before, because pretentious me said I didn’t want the limits of lines) filled with writing prompts and original characters. I wrote so much that I managed to fill it by the time the 3^rd quarter of the school year rolled in and by then, it was also well-worn from being passed around so much among my classmates. For some reason, they enabled my shitty prompts and ridiculous characters.

“Good with words” was a tag that followed me well into college, too, but this was my own doing since I joined both the student publication and the university’s creative writing organization in the first semester of my first year, within months of each other.

You can say I really like writing. I mean, I spent these last 8 paragraphs talking about it.

In all seriousness, though, it’s my only outlet. It helps me make sense of the chaos in my head and I’m someone who’s very particular about organization, too, and more than anything, what’s in my head should be the neatest, cleanest, and clearest organization of anything, if nothing else.

So, it’s absolutely horrifying to come to the conclusion that even after all these years of trying to write creatively, I’m still bad at it. Once I realized I was bad at it, I promptly stopped writing (creatively), too. When once I could think up the most exciting and even romantic scenarios on a daily basis, now I’m crippled with my own self-fed thought: I just don’t write good.

Sure, maybe we can say it’s just the paralysis that comes after having your work critiqued (skinned alive, more like) in writing workshops with renowned, multi-awarded, and well-known writers, but you’re supposed to get over that in a few months or at most a year. You’re supposed to keep writing after that because that’s the point. I’ve joined and even organized not more than 10 writing workshops in my life. I’m always grateful for the critique I receive and I’m always excited to do my best again, but somehow, I just couldn’t then. I managed to edit some of my works that have been through the ringer at workshops, but they never are good enough. They don’t have that zing to it. I don’t know why I’m looking for a fucking zing either.

Last year, in August, I got into Korean popular music, or Kpop. Technically, I’d gotten into it in early May, during the hell-est of hell for a graduating student. It was the last stretch of the semester and I could only find comfort in watching performances of Blackpink. From there I branched out.

In August, I was introduced to the boy group Stray Kids. They are the love of my life now (sorry, Kyle! You’re my top 1, still). They’re the first boy group I’ve ever gotten serious on and really my bridge into Kpop.

Now, I’m not new to fandom. I’m a child of the internet and fandom is, quite frankly, all I know, so, in the same sense, I’m not a complete stranger to fanfiction. I love it. I’m an avid consumer of it. My friend calls me the “secgen” with how I organize my SKZ (shorthand for Stray Kids) fics recommendations into a meticulous list (actually, twitter thread) of fics per pairing/ship, complete with short summaries, tags, and links to each fanfic.

I’m not just good with words; I know how to love and appreciate them, too, hence the meticulous list of recommendations.

It wasn’t until I read the most perfect fanfiction of one of my favorite SKZ pairings (when we cross at intersections; seungjin) that I decided I would write fanfiction, too. For the first time in my life.

I’m not new to fanfiction but I am new to writing it. One psychometrician board exam passed and one oathtaking ceremony later, I managed to write a fic, with much, much encouragement from a friend, of course, who is also into Kpop and likes fanfiction. She had to deal with my overthinking and for that, I was grateful.

I posted that fic on January 2020 even when it was supposed to be a Christmas and New Year fic because my anxiety got the best of me and I took too long to finish it. I still did, anyway, which I consider a wondrous feat in itself for someone who hasn’t been writing creatively. As I said in my author’s note, it was my first time writing fanfiction and it had been 4 years since I last wrote fiction in general, not to mention it was my first time writing in third person, too, and in present tense.

I don’t think my fic is any good. I still find many things to hate about it. But I’ve posted it. I’ve received some comments and several kudos and it really lights up a fire that’s long been dead inside me. Fanfiction is nice in the way that there’s always an audience, a market, for it, so you’re always sure someone, at least one person, is going to appreciate the content you produce. I like that I write fanfiction. It’s fun and interesting and while I do still wish that I had the ease of practice of several of my favorite fanfiction writers, who have been writing for years, I still like to think that me writing fanfiction is a win.

I don’t think I’ll ever find a creativity that’s enough for me. A work of my own that I find good enough. I don’t even know my own writing style. I flit from one style to another, depending on whose work I’m reading. A panelist told me in one of the workshops that when you start out with writing, you always end up mimicking other writers’ voices before finding your own. I’ve been writing for years and I never found that voice. But I truthfully don’t think I’m in any place to stop searching now.

I got myself out of a dark place recently. I’ve managed to watch TV shows and continue where I left off from last year, and I’ve started writing again. Just recently. There’s a lot of hurt and anger from everything that’s happened to me that I haven’t processed yet—because I’m still too prideful to seek therapy but also self-aware enough to know I need it—but maybe, or at least, when I’m writing, the weight gets a little lighter to bear.

Always,

Claire

8th Lupus Birthday

I was born left-handed.

I am not entirely sure if that is something you are born with or something that you pick up from your surroundings so let’s just say I was born with it. I’ve lived my whole life with a left hand on my pen, on the ladle I use to cook, the spoon I use to eat, the chopsticks I learned to use, and the elastic that ties my hair. Even the foot I used to kick a ball during my brief stint of soccer-baseball in freshman year of high school was my left.

It was never really a problem. One of the times I remember it being annoying to me was when I’d bump my elbows with my right-handed seatmates—nearly the entire class—in Grades 1 to 2. By Grade 3, we already had separate armchairs. Another instance is whenever my mother would tease me while I’m cooking, saying I looked awkward holding whichever cooking utensil. It’s all just mundane memories and doesn’t really affect the way I live my life or how I see it.

Up until the hospitalizations, of course.

I’ve been hospitalized enough and have been through enough pulsing therapy (chemotherapy) to know that it’s standard protocol for hospitals to create the IV insertion site on your non-dominant hand. This makes sense, of course. It helps you navigate your surroundings despite being attached to a dextrose. But I’ve also been hospitalized enough to know that my right hand has the thinnest veins. There have been many times, especially in the past two years, that they’ve had to insert into a vein in my left hand.

This paralyzes me, especially when trapped in a hospital room and having to rely on my mother to bring me to the restroom or to bathe me or to change my clothes for me. I’ve felt helpless countless of times—it tends to happen when you carry an autoimmune illness—but nothing compares to the helplessness I feel whenever my left hand is out of commission.

Some days ago I was making gyoza for the first time. One small dumpling involves so much prep. I chopped vegetables for over an hour, to the point that the spots on my hands where my joints are have turned pinkish or red. They kinda hurt, too. The worst was the actual dumpling. Pleating the dumpling wrapper was already hard in itself but pleating with your left hand especially when most tutorials showed right-handed individuals was an entirely different bridge to cross. I even remarked to another left-handed friend that day, “We really live in a right-handed world.”

There’s a disconnect there from the rest of the world. A computer mouse is placed on the right side so I grew up using my right hand to navigate the web. The knobs that turn on stovetops are turned to the left. When left-handed people use their left hand to turn that switch, we’ll look weird and our shoulders will make all kinds of funky shapes just trying to turn one burner on.

There’s a disconnect from the rest of the world. An asymptomatic lupus patient navigates the world on the same pavements that healthy people do, looking normal, living normal, and yet there is a disconnect.

I definitely can run, but not as much as others do. I can stay out in the sun, but only briefly. I went through the motions of school and college and lived my life as a student as normally as I could, but it never played out the way others’ did. At one point, I was an officer and member of six student organizations in college just to compensate for this. I always lived my life trying to do what I want whenever I could and even sometimes beyond my limits, because I could never know if I would be able to do them again.

I was asymptomatic for a long time. It was easy to ignore my limits when I couldn’t see them. I pretended not to have them. I pretended so much that I almost died from it, in 2018. Now, two years later, I’m still spending the majority of my days recovering. But that’s a different story and it’s a story I’ve already told.

Today, May 21, I celebrate my 8^th lupus birthday. It’s been 8 years since my official diagnosis. I only remember this because I’m a serial documenter. A year after I was diagnosed, I found my 14-year-old self’s journal and I had written about the diagnosis. I don’t remember what I wrote (or I’ve repressed it), but I remember the date. Since then, I’ve always considered my diagnosis my second birthday.

I don’t always write a post during my lupus birthdays. I think I’ve only written one once before this. But every year, if my schedule permits, I go out to eat alone. Pesto buttered porkchops from The Brown Cup is my go-to but there were other places before I decided it was my permanent lupus birthday meal.

My parents first didn’t agree with this concept. I think they found out on my 4th lupus birthday, when I was well into college. I think it made them sad so I understood that. My sister and I explained to them the rationale behind it—it’s just me celebrating surviving another year.

A few days ago, when I announced my lupus birthday was near, my mother and my brother asked me why I don’t celebrate it with them, like you would a normal birthday.

In truth, I like celebrating it alone, treating myself to a meal alone, because it is still a lupus birthday. I don’t want the real birthday fanfare over celebrating my diagnosis with an illness that I’m still not sure I can be truly okay about. It’s already the 8^th year and the anger I feel still feels like it’s the first.

It’s a truth that’s hard to swallow. Every day is different for me. I never get to know what happens. This makes it harder to accept and each time something unexpected happens because of the lupus, I feel angry all over again. I never get to plan out my day ahead of time because once my kidneys decide out of nowhere that they’re tired and want to go to bed, I have to go to bed, too. This is particularly frustrating for me as someone who needs plans, as someone who’s so detailed with the way I spend my day. But I got to work around it, especially in college. I learned to take each day at a time, learned to troubleshoot whatever came. I even learned to schedule my rest.

I applied for a person with disability (PWD) ID card in the 7^th year. Just last year, a few months after turning 21. It’s a testament of my denial of it. But I see my ID as a symbol of me finally processing things and truly confronting what the lupus is to me: I have lupus. It is not just a mere nuisance in my life, no matter how much I try to separate myself from it or deny it.

But I am Claire Obejas.

In many ways, just like my PWD ID, my lupus birthday is just a symbol. Something I can look forward to for the first half of a year. I can at least look forward to my actual birthday in the second half.

The lupus birthday doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a made-up thing.

I still feel giddy anyway. Labels and names must mean something for someone like me, whose major love language is words of affirmation.

I need to celebrate as many things as I can while I am still able to. Even this entire write-up feels like something I should be doing for the 10^th year, but with lupus, I never get to guess if I’ll get there. I’ll just have to get there.

***

For my “birthday” wish, a tutorial on pleating gyoza would be nice.

Always,

Claire

The world made small.
Anda, Bohol. April 2017.

[Also found on Medium.]