Why Writing Is My Forever Love: The One That Never Ghosted Me ✍️💘

  Why Writing Is My Forever Love: The One That Never Ghosted Me ✍️💘 Here is the messy truth that every creator eventually has to admit: I did not pick writing because it was easy or trendy, I picked it because it picked me first. Reading was the first spark, drawing was the cute crush, but writing is the relationship that kept showing up when the algorithms did not, when the views dipped, when my attention span sprinted away.

If you have ever stood in Barnes & Noble, Fully Booked or National Bookstore and felt a book spine hum like a live wire under your fingers, you already know what I mean. Writing is what happens when that electricity refuses to stay quiet. It is the voice that will not let you scroll past your own life.

I learned to love words before I learned to perform them. Childhood felt like a series of secret tunnels made of paper and glue. I would sit on the floor with a book and vanish so completely that the world had to knock twice to get me back. That was the first miracle. Then came the second one, the one that never stops shocking me. At some point the stories I read started asking for an exit, like a crowded theater that needed a new door. That door was writing. I did not realize it then, but every chapter that gave me chills was quietly leaving tools on my desk. A set of rhythms. A sense of timing. A taste for the kind of detail that feels like you just found someone’s diary and they left it open on purpose.

People love to compare writing to drawing as if they are rivals when in reality they hold hands. Drawing is the image that grabs your collar. Writing is the explanation that saves your life. When I sketch, I catch a mood. When I write, I chase the why. Drawing shows the gleam on a teacup at 4 p.m. Writing sits you down and tells you why that cup is the last clean thing in a messy kitchen and how that matters to a girl who promised not to cry today. Writing is the long exhale that turns a pretty moment into a true one.

There is a reason book culture keeps exploding on the internet. BookTok did not make readers. It just turned the lights on. Suddenly you could scroll and find ten people who cried at the same line you underlined at midnight. Suddenly the shy kid who used to hide their paperback in a bag has a community that will argue about which chapter wrecked them the most. That same energy flows straight into writing. The page is no longer a lonely place. It is a crowded, glittery train station where people are late for their feelings and you can volunteer as the conductor.

Back in the Philippines, in Manila, the annual rush to MIBF hits like a festival of permission slips. You walk into those halls and it feels like a city signed a treaty with imagination. Tables stacked with debuts and deep cuts. Authors leaning over podiums trying not to shake. Readers lugging tote bags that could bench press a scooter. I remember every time I go there I feel the same tug that I get in Fully Booked on a quiet weekday or at National Bookstore while waiting out a thunderstorm. It is the tug that says take this home and turn it into fuel. Writing is my forever love because it lets me repay that debt. Every page I write is a thank you letter with a deadline that only I can see.

There is also the discipline nobody posts about because it looks boring on camera. Writing taught me how to show up at a desk when the day has already taken one hundred small bites out of me. It taught me to forgive bad sentences as if they were practice laps. It taught me that focus is not a thunderbolt. Focus is a faucet. You turn it slowly and the water looks weak at first. Keep turning and it surprises you. On mornings when the words do not want to come I bribe myself with an ugly goal. Write a paragraph that nobody will ever see. Then another. By the time I hit the third, the voice that sounded rusty starts to sound like me again. By the fifth, it sounds like the version of me who got enough sleep and believes in happy endings.

Writing is my forever love because it is honest about the work and generous with the payoff. Drawing gives you instant applause in the form of a pretty frame. Writing asks you to wait for the echo. Sometimes that echo is a comment from a stranger who says they felt less alone because of a sentence you almost deleted. Sometimes it is a friend who admits the piece you posted helped them call their mother. Sometimes it is you, two months later, reading your own paragraph and realizing you finally told the truth about something you used to avoid.

Reading lit the fuse. Writing keeps the light on. I remember the first time I realized a book could be both a mirror and a window at the same time. That is not a metaphor you forget. The mirror told me who I was allowed to be. The window told me there were more rooms. When I write, I am trying to leave both behind for someone else. A mirror that flatters without lying. A window that opens without slamming shut the moment life gets loud.

Let me be clear about the economics because creators need to hear it. The path is rarely linear. Some days the analytics will treat your work like lost luggage. On those days I remember the physical places that raised me as a reader. I picture the maze of shelves at Fully Booked where I fell in love with a paperback I did not plan to buy. I remember lining up at MIBF with a list that I promptly ignored because a debut author read two paragraphs that hijacked my wallet. I think about National Bookstore on a weekday afternoon when a random aisle becomes a time machine. Then I open a blank document and try again. Platforms change. Pages do not. Writing is platform proof in a way that keeps me calm when everything else gets loud.

Another reason writing wins is the way it respects memory. Drawing captures an emotion like a snapshot. Writing lets you track it across a timeline. When I write about a breakup, I can include the coffee stain on the saucer, the text message that landed like hail, the shoes I wore to pretend I was fine, the song that ruined a perfectly good walk. That level of detail is not indulgence. It is documentation. It turns a chaotic feeling into a map that other people can use when their own weather turns strange.

Reading words silently inside your own head is a small magic trick. It makes the voice feel like it lives in your mouth for a second. When a reader tells me they heard me, I believe them. Not because I shouted, but because they let me whisper.

Finally, writing lets me fail in private. I can be clumsy in a draft without burning a hole in the internet. I can try out a risk and delete it before sunrise. I can throw away a paragraph and bring it back six months later when I figure out what it was trying to say. That kind of sandbox is priceless. It makes the public parts better because the private parts were allowed to be messy.

So yes, I still draw. I still fill sketchbooks with faces and furniture and the way rain leans sideways on bad days. I still read like a thief casing the place. But writing is the one that kissed me on the forehead after the party and asked how I really was. It is the one that holds my hand while I turn a hard thing into a true thing. It is the one that will be here when the trend cycle forgets my name.

💘 WATCH: https://youtu.be/9J0twDTNF-E

If you asked me to pick one love to take into the next decade, I would grab a notebook and a cheap pen without blinking. Not because I think writing will make me famous, but because I know it will keep me honest. The only question that matters now is simple and scary in the best way. What story do I not want to tell yet, and what happens when I write it anyway?