sol.ace_r

Whenever I’m asked why I started writing, I find myself thinking for a long time.
It’s not because there was some grand reason or a clear turning point.
I didn’t suddenly have an epiphany one day and pick up a pen in a moment of resolve.
It’s more that days when I felt I couldn’t not write kept piling up.

There were days when I couldn’t cry.
If I cried, it felt like I would collapse; if I said I was fine, it felt like I’d be lying to myself—so I just sat there, unable to say anything.
Back then, writing didn’t fix anything.
Instead, it stayed beside me.
It didn’t say “It’s okay,” and it didn’t push me to cry either.
It simply kept me company, holding that place together with me.

I learned early on that people can’t live while carrying everything they feel exactly as it is.
The heart overflows more often than we think, and that overflow quietly breaks a person.
Even without obvious incidents, even without anything particularly tragic, emotions create their own weight.

It’s even more so for hearts filled with many colors.
If you don’t let them out, they end up covering everything.
It’s not that each emotion is a problem on its own, but that as they overlap and accumulate, there comes a point where nothing can be distinguished anymore.
What you like and dislike, hope and disappointment, the will to endure and the wish to give up—all of it merges into one mass and presses down from the inside.

So I started writing.
Not so much to organize things, but to endure.
To not forget.
To leave behind, at least for myself, the proof that this wasn’t over yet.

Drifting away from music happened in a similar way.
It wasn’t that music let go of me first.
I had simply gone too far away at some point.
Whenever I tried to hold on, it kept slipping through my fingers, and while my love for it hadn’t disappeared, the moments when I had to prove that love kept increasing.
Like a relationship where you have to keep explaining even though you love, or keep showing results even though you cherish it, music slowly wore me down.

“Am I not good enough?”
“Is it true that I just don’t have talent?”

These questions followed me less as a search for answers and more like a habit of doubting myself.
There were moments when liking something wasn’t enough to keep going, and each time, I was shaving myself down bit by bit.

Writing was different.
It didn’t demand a right answer.
It was okay to be slow.
It was okay to be clumsy.
It was okay to stop halfway—and it accepted all of that as it was.
Because it wasn’t a person, it didn’t leave.
It didn’t change its attitude over time.
It didn’t insist on judging whether I had done well or not.

So I held on to it.
To live.
To endure.

I didn’t put music down because I hated it.
At the time, I didn’t know how to keep loving something while being hurt by it.
I simply chose distance so that I wouldn’t break any further.
Choosing sentences instead of melodies, blank space instead of notes, was less about running away and closer to surviving.

To be honest, it wasn’t so much because I loved writing as because I felt like I would collapse if I let go.
Writing wasn’t a hobby—it was a railing.
There were too many nights when it felt like I would fall if I didn’t hold on to something.

Those nights didn’t always come in dramatic forms.
At the end of an ordinary day, a day that seemed well endured, there would suddenly be the feeling that nothing was left.
That emptiness would grab me by the ankle.

I’m not very good at letting passing emotions simply pass.
If I don’t hold on to a fleeting scene, a thought that brushes past my mind, it feels like that moment disappears along with it.
Writing was how I stopped that from happening.

“This wasn’t something that never happened.”
A way of saying that to myself.
Even if no one reads it, even if there’s no response, it lets me tell myself that at least this emotion clearly existed.

Relying on people is still difficult.
I’m too careful, and in the end I swallow things alone, afraid my weight might become a burden to someone else.
The moment I start to expect something, I’m already preparing to be hurt, so I’ve chosen to endure on my own.

Writing was the one form of dependence allowed to me.
Something that doesn’t become a burden, something I don’t have to fear losing.

Writing doesn’t leave.
Even if I can’t say anything today, even if I come back days later, it’s still there in the same place.
That sense of stability was something I found hard to learn from people.

Why I feel this way, why I get tired so easily, why I can’t give up on romantic longing.
While I write, confusion turns into sentences, and sentences gain a momentary order.
Not a perfect answer, but an understanding that says, “Ah, so that’s why I’m like this.”
That single understanding is what let me live through the next day.

I’ve always been closer to questions than to certainty, and closer to leaving things open than to completing them.
Because I’ve already experienced the weight of disappearance.
I couldn’t just stand by and watch emotions disappear, or days disappear without reason.

That’s why I know that without writing, I would scatter too easily.
Stopping writing doesn’t feel like giving up a habit—it feels like denying all the time I’ve lived through at once.

Waiting for me, accepting me again even if I drift away for a while, not leaving even when I don’t do well.
The sense of stability that was hard to receive from people is something I learned from writing.
Someday, writing may become not a railing, but a road.
There will surely come days when it’s okay to just be, without doing anything.

But for now, because I know there are hearts that collapse even behind faces that look fine,
I leave these confessions—ones that don’t have to be spoken aloud—in sentences again today.

In a way that doesn’t require crying.