WRITING: How did My Stress Reliever Turned into My Source of Stress?

I am new here. And this idea came up to my mind while thinking what would I write for Red Cash.

As an OFW, being away from home is lonesome. I often felt sadness and emptiness. Especially that I did not got a chance to witness how my son grew up. I wasn't around anymore as soon as he reached one year old. I am a single parent so I had to work hard for him.

Leaving my family behind, especially my son is too much for me to bear. Depression and anxiety started to eat me. Though I am not clinically diagnosed with this two. This is just how I named what I felt sometimes, well most of the time.

It is known to all Overseas Filipino Workers that social media platforms plays big role on coping sadness and homesickness. Spending some time on Facebook during my free time, I discovered this FB page. It posted some fictional stories, free to read for all. This was when I met new friends online.

We together spent some time on that page just to read and followed fictional stories that caught our interests. We were fond of tagging each other on a new stories that the page releases. As time passed by we were able to create a new page and started to wrote our own stories to tell.

Our fellow readers from that page started to read our works too. I was overjoyed. Somehow I got to share the fruit of my wild imagination. I am able to inspire others thru my works. At the same time I found a way to divert my attention whenever homesickness attacked me.

We manage to attract more and more readers. And for over the time I started to explore the writing world. I mean I decided to go out of my comfort zone and tried new things. I tried to join writing contests.

I thought I was good enough to join. I never knew that participating in such online activities had me change eventually. Well for a start I won fifth place on the very first WriCon I entered. From then on I joined many other contests and always landed on the fifth place.

But for a change, I won fourth place on the last writing contest I participated. And as a part of the prize, my piece was included on an anthology book.

But from the beginning my purpose of joining was to improve my writing. One way to improve is through critiques given by judges. Then I realized that writing with a good content is not enough. I also need to watch out for technicalities, which is my weakness. I learnt that technicalities had a huge percentage on scoring. So I must learn how to write properly. Knowing that I did not had any writing experience, not even when I was at school.

Thinking about this, I begun to study and joined writing groups that help newbie writers. These groups helped me grew and improved as a writer. But I realized that I slowly lost my interests in writing. Before I knew it, it seems like it was too late to save me. Daily activities and weekly assignments gave me a lot of pressure. It made me frustrated and anxious. My stress increased and my interest declined.

I came to a point were I literally shed my tears because I can no longer write what I wanted. I felt like I broke my wings. I became frustrated. I can no longer wrote like before, whereas I bleed thousands of word in just short time. But now my pen won't bleed an ink. Compared to when I was just starting my writing journey, currently I can only keep on staring blankly on may notepad for ten minutes or so. Unlike before, it took me days or weeks to complete a one thousand words one shot story at the moment.

Not just like before that I can finish a twenty thousand words stories within a month. Two different stories to be exact. Presently, I barely finish a two thousand words chapter in one month. My on going stories had been unfinished for almost two years now. I wanted to go back from where I begun. But it seems that going back is not an option.

I did not even know when and where did this started. I just really came to realization that I am no longer me as before. Writing does not excite me anymore like I used to felt. It became stressful to write. I questioned myself over and over again. "Did I regret swimming through the deep and wide ocean of words?”

And I keep on answering the same. "Nah! I never regret wondering around the vast ocean of writing like a helpless mosquito. Writing might worn me out, but I learnt a lot of things. I got to met new individual that has huge impact on my writing journey. I've found an online homes while wondering on this field."

Its just that it is a shame that I don't know how to come back. I don't know how to shake of this fear. The fear of being criticized again, after some one called my poem a trash. A poem that I wrote that has no rhyme at the end of each lines. Its funny that I always accept all the critiques that everyone gives to my piece. But calling my work a trash by someone who's not even a writer or a writing mentor is just too much to bear.