Where Meaningful Conversations Rust away

Rising into a writer on Facebook and earning a career out of it, I have seen it destroy me inside out as a writer.

Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash

I stopped writing on Facebook in 2019, when I fell sick with my writing, and more, with the audience I served online.

It may sound hypocritical now, given that I have received much appreciation and kindness from my readers over the years, to say that they made me sick

But I was really sick.

My creative energy was drained to the extent that on some days, I felt almost nauseous when faced with writing articles before deadlines. It didn’t happen once or twice. This continued for two years, the time that my boyfriend encouraged me to engage in regular exercise, get more sleep, and take a break from constant thinking.

During those writing-depleted years, I went to the MFA Program in Creative Writing. I couldn't write much beyond finishing “homework” like an obedient student.

On one occasion, a famous writer was invited to join us in a craft talk. Obviously, many of us hadn’t read any books she wrote that gave her some important awards. To break the awkward silence, one student asked: “I heard that agents only want to work with you if you have at least 2,000 followers on your active Twitter, or 20,000 on Instagram, is that true?”

The writer fell into silence for a minute. Then she said something like this: It is true that in the publishing industry, your social exposure is very important for your book to be chosen and published. The more followers you have, the more books you can sell. However, I believe that writing is still a major part of a writer’s career. What to “expose” if you have nothing to show to your readers? What if you build 10,000 Twitter followers and you still haven’t finished your book? Focus on your writing, finish the project, and then move to the next stage with social media.

I then searched her name on the internet and found some of her beautiful books. I read them till the end and admired the author. She had the courage to reject the lure of 'social exposure' and focus on her craft

*
Being sick as a writer means I couldn’t write.

My head refused to input and charge new information and generate new content. Before this illness, I used to be a professional in content generation. I was proud of myself that I could put a timer and finish an article before a certain amount of time. But I just stopped doing it. Too many barriers intervened. I felt no achievement in writing. I didn’t feel being understood by the audience. I had developed a general resentment toward my audience, without targeting any specific individuals.. I was a bird losing its voice and being shunned by its flock.

I couldn't move away from the haunting thought that my writing didn't help anyone, didn't change anything no matter how hard I tried. I was taking advantage of the stories I wrote without giving them their legitimate urge to change for the better. Nothing changed after my writing.

Given that my career rose from social media, my emotion relies heavily on the online audience. At first, most people were kind and communicative. If they didn't agree, they said it and explained why. If they liked, they expressed their praise. Early on, communication between me as a writer with the audience was straightforward and civil.

Then, the propaganda machine appeared online. Some days, my writing was bullied with thousands of mocking or smearing comments. To be honest, I didn't read comments that much so they couldn't be a factor to affect me. But then I gradually saw a lot of "real" readers (I mean real people, not technical fake profiles) start acting as brutal as machine-generated propaganda.

That hurt.

I lost the sincere ground of writing, where writing means to help communicate and curate meaningful conversation. I lost the ground to the propaganda battlefield.

The online content environment turns extremely toxic and becomes taciturn, mostly bullying, targeting attacks rather than hosting civil information exchanges among people. One time I was mocked by this profile, with a photo of a lady at my mother's age, she wrote: "Cunt, do you have anything else better to do than writing this shit, shit head?" - It was much dirtier in my language before this translation. It was hard for me to wrap my head around a profile of a charming-looking lady in traditional clothes with her family could write such bullying sentences. I was angry enough to write back an even worse reply: "Little sister, could you go back to mind your business of taking care of your family?" - I called a lady as old as my mom "little sister". I mocked. I felt satisfied. I fueled the fire of hatred and stirred it bigger. I closed the laptop and didn't write for some weeks.

Why did I get furious? - Two years after that comment, I met one of my readers in Washington DC. She invited me out for cakes and we talked about life. She said she loved my writing, but her closest friend hated me. I asked who was your closest friend. The reader reminded me of that cruel exchange of comments and said, it didn't stop her from following my writing because her closest friend was bullying me.

I was sad after the meeting. It turned out the profile I called "little sister" was a real human being. It was not a bot with a fake profile. That human being was as old as my mother, yet she was cable of throwing fists at a young writer, no reasoning was needed, and no argument started, just fists and shit. I felt sad about myself. Was I so low that I lost my cool? Was I that angry to be that upset with an old lady? Was I that bad of a human being to throw bad words at others when they did the same to me?

I became afflicted by my writing, which manifested in physical issues. I was constantly angry. My writing was a rage. There was so much resentment in everything I spat out on the pages. My pages were smeared with smugs, mocks, and hostilities, manifesting in cruel adjectives and bashing verbs... yet my readers praised them - with more wrath. I fed the loop of a raging audience. I first became a writer then a victim, then a producer of this toxic online content mechanism.

How did I end up like this?

*

I grew up with writing like having an imaginative childhood friend. Writing used to be with me when I grew up and frustrated. I had a little cat and writing, that empathized with me when I was confused and miserable in my teenage years. Writing fostered me into a wholesome human being in some aspects that my parents couldn't provide me with. Writing gave me the empty space to imagine capabilities and arrange my subtle world of being into layers of joy for every spark I saw in my childhood. Writing, like my little cat, was there when I was rejected by my first crush, or being abandoned by friends, or being upset with my teachers at school. Writing shaped me into what I was, and what I am.

What did I do? I turned writing into this angry monstrous creature. It didn't deserve that. I didn't deserve that.

I stopped writing, for the good of both of us, writing and me.

*

In the MFA program, I found out about Yiyun Li, a Chinese author who refused to write in Mandarine. When she first started writing in English, her professors, fellows, friends, and relatives didn't believe she could make it.

"It’s the absoluteness of the abandonment—with such determination that it is a kind of suicide," Li wrote about the weight of her decision to stop writing in her mother tongue.

Li didn't allow her book to be translated into Chinese either. She wrote about this strange liberation from her mother when she knew that her mother couldn't read anything she wrote. This liberation gives her the strength to write more and more.

I read almost all of Li's books. I found this strange soothing assurance when I read her. She loves writing. She writes through the borders of languages that forced and confined her into the body of a Chinese woman. She now can write in any language she wants. She is liberated in her own mind.

My first essay when I started writing again was an essay communicating with her first essay in the book Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. I read the essay and cried. Her honesty broke my heart. My heart was broken and I didn't know its injury before I read her.

How hard was it to endure my heartbreak with writing for so long? I wrote in an attempt to reconnect with myself, through Li, a stranger who had given me the courage to rekindle my relationship with my childhood friend.

*
I didn't get better from the writing sickness. I got irritated whenever I read in Vietnamese. So many writers use language as a propaganda tool to earn fame and trap trust. There is no kindness and understanding of the consequences behind words and sentences. I decided to stop reading. Stop my source of fury.

Those days I sat at the Martin Luther King Library in San Jose seven days per week. I walked to shelves, took out a book, and read it since morning until I was tired, walked out for lunch, and repeated the deed until I lifted my head up and there was no sunlight outside.

I read in this alienating language, English. The language I have no emotional connection with, the language I get to admire the capacity of expression yet I didn't take any emotional fallout from it, the language I could be moved by a beautiful poem yet I didn't feel cringed towards it. The pure joy of knowing something new without consequences, I got it.

Then I found The Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky. How fragile and painful he wrote about the tragedy and family happiness in the war machine. Kaminsky has this beautiful talent of putting mundane moments of life next to the atrocious blow of war violence. He described and arranged the happiness of people in this little republic so easy to achieve and so hard to keep from the other side of the firing point: 

“While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses ” by Ilya Kaminsky. - “Deaf Republic.”

Then I met these professors/poets who called my name from the depth of anger. They urged me to write about the beauty from the crack of pain, the little hope amid the messy life we have to deal with, the tiny freedom we fight so hard to keep in the hands of tyrants, or just the daily admiration with the smell of leaves I love. They suggested I find some fun in creating sentences and words and learn to love what I created.

Instead of asking me to write, they introduced me to other writers, many strange horizons I hadn’t heard of. They conversed with me as if pouring some water on a dying plant, hoping nothing much but watering might have been the last right thing to do. The outcome didn’t matter.

I was alone when writing those years, but I was not actually alone. I walked with my professors out of the class when they wrote down some names I should read. They sent me texts, articles, paragraphs, or images of something I should notice. They asked me to think.

I woke up at 7 a.m., walked to the library, and wrote until night. The street was blowing strong wind and dark when I returned home. My hand was so stimulated by this urge to write that they were dancing in my pockets. I was excited. I was loved, again, by my childhood friend.

In the fourth year of not writing any articles on Facebook, I wrote a small thing with everyday effort.

*

At the same time, I was liberated from my mother tongue. Is it a sin to abandon the language I was born into? Is it a crime to scrape off the flesh of my tongue that made me a wholesome person? Is it a betrayal act to turn my back on the language bridge that took me to literature? I thought about this when I wrote a poem for my beloved friend that she would never read, or when I wrote an essay about my Mom that my Mom would never know its existence. 

I thought about those questions when the book finished. My mentor and teacher in Vietnam asked me why I didn’t write it in Vietnamese. “Because nobody wants it,” I answered him, shrugged it off, and changed to another topic. It was true that no publisher in Vietnam wanted to print a poetry book, except if it was from Ocean Vuong. No printing house wants to risk a new name in poetry, a category never sold out. 

When I answered my mentor, I realized that the isolating time I had in that library stripped me off the desire to entertain some audience. I didn’t ask for likes. I didn’t pursue “social exposure”. I was not in a thirst for approval. I just wrote the book. I was not only liberated from my language, I was liberated from the crowd that fed me the desire to write angry content. 

*
Last year I started writing on Substack. I suddenly realized the problem with being a social writer on social networks. There is no comprehensive communication on Facebook. People swipe down their phones, see one image, and think of that snapshot as the final conviction of truth. Someone blows another photo, another conviction of truth. Nobody has the whole truth, yet a comprehensive informative flow of information or story doesn’t exist on Facebook, not even to mention the truth.

Those who attacked me had seen some screenshots from elsewhere and believed them. They came to me to ask for final judgment. If they couldn't find it, they spat on me. 

Just like the hanging stage in Britain in the Medieval times, there was a powerful guy standing there delivering a short speech (a snapshot) that made all the city angry and throw rocks at the person on the rope, waiting to be killed. I was just that person on the rope of my article, who stood obviously there to be spat on me because everyone already prepared their final judgment. 

Writing in Substack gave me a comprehensive space to present a story, an essay, or an article with images/graphs/references/notes. There are enough media tools to make a story work, instead of using all the anger and exploitive tactics to gain readers. I have more space to move about with words, paragraphs, italics, bold, and regular. How simple it is to love writing. 

And then there is the audience - the readers who actually take their time to read through over 2,000 words. Some paid for my time of writing (Thank you so much!). Some wrote back to argue with my approach. Some asked questions. Just like the old time.

I come back to writing, through a long way, with my deepest gratitude to those who stood by my side and watched me in a muted state of writing nothing.