the only time i miss drinking & smoking is when i need to write

00:00:00

An idea strikes, like whiplash, knocking the air out of my lungs. She is the boldest, most imaginative thing: an explosive wildling. She is mine. I reach for my laptop, fingers curled in the shape of the first sentence. The cursor blinks. I place my hands on the keyboard.

00:10:30

The cursor is still blinking, mockingly, a tiny metronomic jester counting each second I fail to capture the idea. The first sentence has evaded me. My fingers hover above the keys, lost, awaiting instruction.

In the before times, I would’ve already reached for my pack of HOPE, the blue ones I switched to when I convinced myself they were somehow healthier. Grazing my fingers on the carton alone was enough to arouse my mind: the soft crinkle of cellophane, the snap of the lighter, the gurgle in my bronchioles as smoke singes the cilia. And then, I’d take a sip of whatever I was drinking—usually wine— something to lubricate the machinery of thought. It made me feel like what I was writing might actually be good, or at least good enough.

Now, I sit here, fingers motionless, staring at this blank document.

00:47:31

The cursor has been blinking at me for forty-seven minutes. Forty-eight now. I can feel everything. The slight ache in my lower back. The sound of the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. The slight shift in room temperature as the sun settles above the flat. I sense everything, yet cannot find the words to make sense of anything.

01:00:00

I read somewhere that orgasms can open portals, that it transports you to the Cosmic Womb, Hiranyagarbha/हिरण्यगर्भ, the primordial waters where all seeds of creation live. So I touch myself, imagining that with each stroke I was sinking into this infinite well, expanding and imploding simultaneously, relinquishing my flesh to the whim of the cosmos.

I burst. I sigh.

02:03:00

It didn’t work.

I've written three sentences and deleted two of them. I caught a glimpse of the promised land, a rich field overflowing with cosmically anointed ideas and plucked as many as I could. But I missed the root. The moment I planted the orphaned seedlings onto the page, it wilted. The sentence that remains is puny, but it’ll have to do.

I get up to make tea—the new ritual that's supposed to replace the old ones: boil, steep, pour instead of fire, drag, exhale. The ashtray beside my laptop is empty. A reminder that I’ve done nothing but sit on my ass, masturbate and drink tea in the last two hours.

When I cared less about longevity and about expediting the creative process by any means possible, I’d measure my progress with the height of the cigarette buds in the ashtray. The higher the pile, the higher the word count. Each drag punctuated time, creating natural pauses in the flow of thought. Ten minutes of typing, one cigarette. Twenty more minutes, another cigarette. They were periods, rest stops, goal posts.

05:00:31

I see it now: the cursor is a guillotine, the blank digital page a graveyard. I’ve killed every sentence.

The apartment was suffocating me. I’ve escaped to a busy cafe. Perhaps the pressure of having to justify the 1,200 yen matcha latte I just paid for, compounded by the dozens of productive-looking, laptop-wielding people around me will get me back on track.

The man next to me, a burly freckled individual with a ginger beard, has got a chilled bottle next to him. Is that a stout? Maybe a porter? He’s been typing non-stop for thirty minutes. I envy his productivity (a cursed word).

It's been a year of sobriety, and the only time I genuinely miss drinking is when I need to write. Not at parties (surprisingly), not during dinner with friends, not even on days when the world seems to conspire against me. Just here, in front of this eerie, glowing rectangle of possibility, this void that demands to be filled with something resembling insight.

Day Three

I haven't opened the document since that day. Each time I sit at my desk, I find reasons to do something else: sharpen every colour pencil and bundle them by hue, wipe and wax down the wooden varnish, rearrange the songs in my playlists by BPM.

Maybe I don’t need to write. Maybe I’ve fooled myself into thinking I’m a person that writes. Perhaps I wrote because being able to opt into the identity of a writer allowed me to opt out of the perceived responsibilities of an “orderly life.”

Perhaps I could only write because I was not myself. Perhaps the inebriation triggered a temporary suspension of judgment. It muffled the venomous voices in my head, as though speaking from the next room rather than directly into my ear. Time would elongate, stretching so thin that it would create pockets of nothingness where thoughts could drift in sideways, untethered by the need to be immediately useful or profound.

Perhaps, without the unencumbered indulgence decorating an otherwise laborious act, writing has become dull and tedious to me.

Two Weeks

A writer-friend of mine had her essay published. Another friend directed his second short film in two months. An essayist I’ve followed for years now has 10,000 subscribers on Substack.

I bought a new notebook in hopes that the blank pages would coax out some writing. I told another person that “I’m not interested in putting my work out in the world right now because I’m disinterested in the public performance of creativity that has become normalised by social media.” I watched three documentaries, five Agnes Varda films, and read seven essays on the creative processes of famous writers. I have 30,000 yen in my bank account.

I’ve written one script and agreed to do another, but everything I write feels like a mummified corpse — adorned with amulets and jewellery but gutless, its cavity filled with resin-soaked cloth.

Three Months

Someone asks me if I’m working on any new scripts. They say they watched the project I worked on a few years back. I tell them there are a few in the works, that there are many pipelines and conversations occurring. How wonderful, they say. How lucky you are to be able to do what you love.

Do I love writing? Is it love if I find it cumbersome? Painful, even? Is it love if I've hated every word I’ve written, if I feel I’ve got to choose between sobriety and unencumbered creativity?

Seven Months

I’ve become the thing I feared. I now work a full-time job. I tell people it’s a “long term project” because I don’t want anyone to find out I’ve lost sight of the ship.

I am now a salaried zombie. All I’ve got is my sobriety, which is beginning to feel useless if it doesn’t yield anything meaningful for my writing.

Eight Months

The weekend has become a container for whatever remains of my creative life. I write for others now—script consultations, translations, corporate copywriting. The words flow easily enough when they're not mine.

Nine Months

My partner has left to Gstaad. He will work there for four months. I am now alone, in my apartment. I wake up, eat my eggs, listen to the same songs (Juice Webster’s “In The Zone” and Phoebe Go’s “7 Up”), work, pick up/put down weights at the gym, and sleep. The air is lukewarm. Sometimes insipid. Tolerable, at best.

Boredom, and her dramatic sister, ennui, follow me everywhere. They envelop me, walling me inside their infinity room, jeering: look at you.

Look at who you’ve become. Look at the rust underneath the mask. Look at how desperate you are, staring at that blank computer screen, twiddling your thumbs as you naively hope for entheos — the godly inspiration — to wash over you.

There’s no escape. I cover every surface of the room with a veil — books, screens, scrolls, music, images, films, conversations, gossip, work. But there is no silencing the moans of the grinding machinery underneath, with all its rusty gears and cogs. I can hear every squeaky wheel, every grinding gear, every failed circuit.

Three weeks ago

On the day I celebrated one year of sobriety, I started smoking again. Instead of HOPE, I picked up a pack of Bohemian Cigars — the brand I smoked when I wrote my first script. Perhaps through ritual, I might be able to resurrect that version of myself.

Two weeks ago

The cigarettes did nothing for my writing. I'd step out onto the balcony at 11 PM and blow smoke up into the sky, wondering if ritual alone could resurrect creativity.

When that failed, I turned to Julia Cameron's 'The Artist's Way'—a natural progression of remedies. Creative recovery, she calls it. I tried it years ago, only to abandon it halfway. Maybe this time I’ll be able see what lies past week six.

But I can barely make it through the morning pages. Most days, I end up doing it at night. I hate it. The pen feels heavy in my hand. I bought a fountain pen, hoping its weight might anchor my drifting thoughts to the page. All that did was leave my fingers bruised with ink for days: a reminder of how long I had gripped it while, words in stasis.

I fear I'm beyond saving.

A week and a half ago

Hypothesis: Boredom is rehabilitation for the distracted soul. It feels so excruciatingly painful because it forces us to reckon with the ambient anxieties humming within our spirit. It’s a redirection of attention, of energy.

The stillness removes stimulation. It clears the land. It asks us to be present — to resist the urge to rage against its perceived tonelessness. We describe boredom as an opaque dullness, when it is one of the clearest, most reflective states of mind.

That fiery, tetchy longing for strong emotions and sensations might be instinct. But more often than not, it’s fear of what one might discover when forced to pay attention, disguised with the language of impulse.

What I'm slowly realising—painfully, reluctantly—is that boredom is a doorway. If I want to walk through the door, I’ve got to learn to sit in the discomfort of unclaimed time. To stare at the blinking cursor without flinching. To let the clarity of boredom wash over me until it transforms from irritant to invitation.

A week ago

I’ve started to practice deliberately boring myself. I sit at my desk without opening my laptop. I stare at the tatami mat until the weft-faced weave begins to resemble faces and stories, and sometimes, there is nothing. Nothing but my body and the unadorned present. It's excruciating at first, like an itch at the cellular level.

And then, a crack. Small but perceptible, and through it, a different quality of attention emerges, more receptive than grasping. An idea reaches out. An invitation. I ask her if she’d like to stay for a conversation. She agrees and takes root, stretching laterally under the soil, before reaching upwards towards the sun.

I reach for my notebook. My pen moves slowly, guided by a more sustainable force. I let myself sink into the long pauses, allowing my body to transmute, rather than excavate.

Three days ago

I wrote for seven hours. Three hours downstairs, at the dining room table, while my grandfather naps on the couch. Two hours at my sister’s desk, while listening to The Blue Nile. And two hours in the futon, under the dim orange bedroom light, while my mother sleeps in the futon next to me.

Two days ago

I finished my first essay in nearly a year. It is not what I set out to write. I am still impossibly behind on my other deadlines.

But I wrote through the strange geography of boredom, and have arrived at a new terrain. The words didn’t come easily, but they came from me. The writing was harder but better. More precise. More true. I felt every bump in the road. I chose each word deliberately. I interrogated every space, comma, and full stop.

00:00:00

An idea whispers into my ear. She is grounded, fertile with possibility. She is not mine, she is a visitor. I make us a cup of tea. We sit in silence. And then, I reach for my laptop, fingers ready to be guided.

The cursor blinks. I place my hands on the keyboard. I write.

All of my essays are free, but if you’d like to support me and my writing, you can consider buying me cup of coffee :)