A Curious Thought

Tag: Personal

  • Coming Back to Writing

    Coming Back to Writing

    What is this? A second post in a week?!

    My first three entries into this so called “blog” arrived at a pace of one per year, and each time I truly believed I had cracked the code—that this would be the moment I magically leveled into a consistent writer. Of course, that never happened, but the desire to try again never went away. In fact, I’ve been returning to writing for far longer than these posts give me credit for.

    So why do I keep returning, even after repeatedly proving how difficult consistency is for me?

    Thinking about that question, I remembered a class I took in middle school—my 7th grade Spanish class. Shout out to Ms. Santiago and La Libre, my school in Puerto Rico. In that class, we had an assignment where we had to create a book: a short story, poems, or any original written work we wanted. The point of the assignment wasn’t just writing, but understanding the publishing and editorial process by writing an author bio, thinking about the role of a publishing house, designing a cover, and more.

    I had completely forgotten about the assignment until two weeks before it was due. My cousin, who was in the same class and had the same assignment, reminded me by casually asking how it was going. I immediately felt panic. We had been given two months to work on it, and I hadn’t done anything. Now I had to cram everything into two weeks. I worked hard, got a lot of help from my mom and her best friend, and somehow managed to turn something in.

    Of course, I had to title it, “Two weeks ago, when I remembered this assignment was due, an author was born!” I was trying to be funny, to make light of a stressful situation, but I didn’t realize then how true that would turn out to be. I learned so much in that class. No, I don’t remember a single thing about anything we read, but it’s the class that made me fall in love with reading and writing. Without it, I don’t think I would’ve ever felt the desire to pick up a book or write anything beyond school work—or at the very least, it would’ve taken me much longer to find my way there.

    So if I love writing so much, why don’t I do it more often? And what is consistency, anyway? What makes someone a writer?

    I’ve been beating myself over these questions for years. Ever since that assignment, I’ve thought of myself as a writer—but can a clock that doesn’t work still claim to tell the time? It might look like a clock, but it doesn’t behave like one. Is being a clock an identity or a function? And can I really be a writer with long stretches of zero writing?

    I once had dreams of writing novels, children’s books, poetry, and I believed that these were the things—producing finished work, publishing consistently—that truly made someone a writer. Writing was a function, a kind of factory line: churn out words, then churn out more. Over time, I had to accept that I couldn’t fit the version of a writer I had invented for myself. I couldn’t write as consistently as I wanted to, and I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t a writer after all.

    But still I keep returning. I keep creating. Whether it’s music, literature, or photography, I’m drawn back to the act of expression. Music lets me reach feelings that language can’t touch. Photography opens a portal to moments in time that words would only blur. Writing sits between the abstract and the concrete, forcing me to slow down, to organize, to make sense of ideas I don’t fully understand yet.

    After this realization, the question quickly shifted from “Am I consistent enough to be a writer?” and became “Why do I keep coming back?” And that question was much easier to answer because the answer was quite simple: writers write—but more importantly, they return to writing. Even after long gaps. Even without an audience. Even without proof that it will stick this time.

    A broken clock may not keep perfect time, but it’s still the first place you check.

    It’s taken me a long time to get to this point, and I still might not write as consistently as I’d like. But that’s exactly why I keep returning. Because at the heart of it all, I love writing. Because this is who I am and this is what I do.

    I am a writer.

  • Living With Our Monsters: Personal Reflections on Grief Through ‘The Babadook’ and ‘Next to Normal’

    Spoilers for the horror film The Babadook and the musical Next to Normal.

    The Babadook and Next to Normal

    I recently watched the pro-shot recording of the musical Next to Normal (2025) that premiered on PBS. I went into it blind, having not seen the musical before and having no prior knowledge of its themes or what the story was about. I was in awe of the work of art I experienced. Everything from the songs and music to the performances and production flowed beautifully and powerfully. The musical deals with themes of mental illness, loss, and grief, and how these can affect a family if not addressed.

    After watching the musical, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the film The Babadook and think about all the similarities between the two. Both stories are very different from each other, and are also told in different ways (one being a musical and the other a monster/psychological horror movie), but they both deal with grief and mental illness in a family that is being destroyed by the loss of a family member and both deal with the ramifications of not addressing this loss and how it can build to be an oppressive presence that gets in the way of their lives, sometimes violently.

    The Babadook has been one of my favorite movies since the moment it came out in 2014, and my love for it has only increased through the years. It has helped me deal with my own experiences of loss and has given me an avenue to experience and make some sense of it all. I don’t have much knowledge about the musical Next to Normal, but seeing the similarities, I can see how it can also help someone navigate the aftershocks of loss.

    My Personal Journey

    I made a friend after high school that quickly became my best friend. We had both just graduated and were far away from our families for the first time and during this time we dealt with similar experiences: isolation, feelings of imprisonment, feelings of failure, loss of identity (religious/political deconstruction), which, at least to me, all lead to a a lot of confusion and a deep depression. During this time, the only one that knew that all these things were happening to me, was my new friend. With him also going through similar circumstances, we bonded deeply through our mutual support of each other. I genuinely don’t know how well I would’ve come out of all of it without him.

    Two years after my friend and I had met, I moved across the country back with my family, and a month after that, my friend died in a vehicular accident coming home from work. The pain today feels just as strong as it did then, and the hole and loneliness it left are still there. I lost my best friend, and the only person I could talk to about those specific experiences we went through. Now those memories are only mine and the feeling that no one else will truly be able to see or know is haunting.

    Fast forward four years. My dad and I went on a trip for a month, just the two of us. We had a month of bonding, of getting to know each other better, of working together and more. I remember visiting restaurants, going to the movies, and learning about this new place we were visiting. I didn’t grow up with my father, only visiting him every other weekend growing up or during the summers once he moved away, and this trip made me feel more connected to him.

    One night, as we were nearing the end of this trip, we were heading back to the place we were staying and a drunk driver ran the light and collided with out car. It was a very traumatic event for me. We were now trapped inside a card in the dark and my dad had lost consciousness. He didn’t gain back consciousness for almost a week, but I was conscious the entire time and I remember everything about it. The smells, the blood, the pain. I though I was going to lose my father, but I didn’t, and I’m happy to say he is alive and well, but the trip we went on together slipped from his mind. He experienced some memory loss from the accident and that month prior to the accident was lost and has never come back.

    This to me feels like another form of loss. I didn’t lose my father, but I lost the connection we built and the memories we made. I feel alone all over again, with no one to share the trauma of the car accident, pulling him out of the car, the fear in the moment that he might die, and the month that came before it. Now those memories are only mine, again.

    These personal losses have linked themselves to these works of art, and now I find myself searching for new ways to understand my own grief.

    Making Sense of Loss

    Both in The Babadook and Next to Normal, things aren’t just magically fixed at the end. They don’t have happy endings, and that makes sense. Both deal with heavy themes and families in extreme circumstances and it’s hard to find anything happy about losing someone close to you, someone you love. What they both offer is a bittersweet ending and the promise that there’s still hope on the other side.

    The ending of The Babadook has always been intriguing to me because the family is not rid of the monster. In fact, they have the monster living in the basement of their home, because the monster was never a monster. Throughout the movie, The Babadook was and has always been an embodiment of that loss in the family. In Next to Normal, it is Gabe. The depression, the anger, and the grief, that is all the monster and Gabe truly are, so the families cannot get rid of them the same way I can’t get rid of my own memories. They live with us.

    And this is where I find the light at the end of the tunnel. It may seem terrifying, the thought that the loss will never go away, but in order to fix a problem, we must know what the problem is in the first place. I have gone to counseling, talked with friends and family, and will probably continue to do so because that is how I battle and cope with it.

    In The Babadook, the family feeds the monster in their basement, not to make it stronger, but to appease it and find some peace within themselves too. In Next to Normal, the family decides to make hard decisions: the parents split and the father decides to go to therapy. That is how they battle and find peace. In my own life, I have found peace and light in knowing that these monsters will stay with me, and that all I need to do is figure out how to properly feed them and find peace for myself.

    Processing Grief Through Creativity

    It’s difficult dealing with heavy emotions head-on, to stare at the monster in the face. Sometimes it’s easier to approach grief indirectly, and art offers a powerful avenue for that journey. Art creates a safe distance, a buffer that allows us to examine our pain through metaphor, narrative, and emotional resonance without being consumed by it. Both The Babadook and Next to Normal provide this buffer, allowing audiences to witness the twisted and terrifying forms of grief while maintaining enough separation to process it safely.

    What makes these works so effective is how they refuse to offer easy solutions. Instead, they acknowledge that grief becomes part of us, something we learn to live with rather than overcome. In the end of The Babadook, with the mother feeding the monster in the basement, I felt a profound sense of recognition. That’s exactly what writing, talking, and creating about my grief has been. Bringing food to the grief, acknowledging it, giving it space to exist without letting it take over my life.

    In writing this post, I’m engaging in the same ritual yet again, feeding my own monsters through creativity. Putting these experiences into words allows me to examine them from different angles and to make sense of them. By connecting my personal story to these artistic works, I’m not just processing my grief, I’m transforming it into something that might help others name their own monsters.

    Perhaps that’s the most powerful aspect of pressing grief through creativity: it transforms isolation into connection. My memories of my friend and the lost time with my father may be mine alone, but in sharing them through writing, they become part of a larger conversation about loss. Like these works of art that touched me, maybe my words can offer someone else that moment of recognition, and the comforting realization that we’re not alone in learning to live with our monsters.

  • Journeying into Blogland

    There’s something so innately human about wanting to share our experiences with one another. We seek individuality and self-expression while also seeking community and audience. From cave paintings to cinematic blockbusters, we yearn to share a piece of ourselves with one another.

    Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

    I have wanted to express myself through writing for most of my life and have made many attempts at it. I’ve delved into poetry, storytelling, both short stories and longer pieces, journaling, and many other things but have always stopped for one reason or another. This is yet another attempt at continuing that journey, although one that I hope sticks. This entry is mainly for me to look back at and see where my mind was at the time, establish some goals and set expectations for I want this project to be.

    So why blogging? In retrospect, I think the reason my other attempts didn’t work before was because I felt limited by the medium (pun intended) I was using. Poetry is great, but am I only a poet? Too limiting. Another reason I think those failed is because I suffer from getting-bored-and-wanting-to-try-new-things and would move one to something else before I fully explored the format. Still, blogging has been a thing I have always stayed away from. A story or a poem can be self-contained, there doesn’t need to be a sequel for it to work as a story or poem, but is a blog with only one entry even a blog? The commitment to something that would require me to come back, revisit and add to it always scared me off, but I’m older now (even if not any wiser), and I think that might be exactly what I’m looking for.

    I don’t expect anyone to read any of my posts, or at least that’s the mentality I have coming into this. It seems paradoxical to me to go through the effort of creating and editing a piece of writing, publish it for others to see, and claim that no audience is needed. Why choose this format if it’s not for others’ consumption but my own? The reason I’m intrigued by the format of blogging and sharing it publicly is the commitment I would have run from in the past. I want to express myself, and hopefully improve my writing and communication skills in the process. This seems to be a great way to push myself to do that. My hypothesis is that a good balance between the structure of a blog format, the freedom to talk about anything, and a healthy appetite of curiosity is exactly what I need to improve and finally stick to a consistent writing pattern.

    So what am I going to write about? Honestly, I still don’t know yet. I have too many interests to choose just one, and I’m adding things to that list constantly. I hope to write about anything that I’m curious about at the moment, whether it be history, technology, art, “insert your favorite topic,” etc. I want this to be a place where I can deep-dive into random topics, process through thoughts and ideas, and learn along the way.

    In conclusion, I want to develop a new habit of writing that promotes an active attitude towards learning and researching. I am an expert at nothing, but am curious about pretty much everything. We have the world’s information at our fingertips and I want to do my best at learning as much as I can while documenting my journey.

    If you’ve read this far, thank you. Stick around and I might surprise you with my positive attitude towards public transportation and my negative attitude towards Norman doors.