Shayan Afzal

Lately, I have become a little disillusioned with writing.

The change did not arrive dramatically. There was no final rejection, no torn manuscript, no solemn decision to abandon the page. It entered quietly, almost politely, like evening light withdrawing from a room while I remained too occupied to notice that I had begun to sit in darkness.

I still write. I still arrange one word beside another and listen for that small interior music that once seemed to promise an undiscovered country. Yet now, when I look at the sentences before me, I find myself asking a question that grows louder with every passing day.

What am I trying to achieve here?

Perhaps every writer eventually confronts this question. At first, writing feels like an opening. Each blank page appears to contain a secret passage leading beyond the visible boundaries of our lives. We write because experience seems unfinished until it has been given language. Joy disappears too quickly, sorrow refuses to disappear at all, and memory demands a form in which it may survive us.

But somewhere along the way, the pure desire to express becomes entangled with the desire to be read.

A page is published. Numbers appear. Views, rankings, shares, comments, subscribers. Small signals blinking in the night, each pretending to measure whether our words have mattered. Without realizing it, we begin writing beneath the gaze of an invisible audience. We consider titles before truths, traction before tenderness, and whether an intimate thought contains the correct words to be discovered by strangers.

This is where my disillusionment with writing begins.

It is not that I no longer love language. Perhaps the problem is that I love it too much to watch it become merely another instrument of performance. I do not want every private revelation to become content, every wound a headline, or every fragile memory an opportunity to increase engagement.

And yet I want readers. I cannot pretend otherwise.

To write entirely for oneself may be freedom, but to write for no one can sometimes resemble calling into an empty house and waiting for a voice that never answers. Writing has always contained this contradiction. The writer seeks solitude in order to create something capable of escaping it.

So I question what I am trying to achieve through writing.

Am I trying to be understood? To be admired? To preserve something that time would otherwise erase? Am I searching for community, recognition, meaning, or merely evidence that I have been here?

The uncomfortable truth is that I do not know.

Perhaps my recent lack of motivation to write is not evidence that I have lost my way. Perhaps it is the necessary silence between two ways of seeing. There are moments when the mind must become quiet enough to distinguish its own voice from the noise surrounding it.

Maybe writer’s block is not always an absence of words. Sometimes it is the soul refusing to continue speaking in a language it no longer believes.

For now, I am trying to accept this uncertainty. I am trying to return to writing without demanding that every sentence justify its existence. I want to remember the earlier, simpler pleasure of following a thought, not because it is searchable, useful, or certain to gain traction, but because something within it trembles with life.

I may not yet know what I am trying to achieve here.

But perhaps writing has never been about arriving at an answer. Perhaps it is the patient act of remaining beside the question, describing how the light falls across it, and trusting that someone, somewhere, has been living inside the same uncertainty.

If that person finds these words and feels less alone, perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps, for today, it is more than enough.