It’s quite funny really. I spend all day every day writing for work and I make make my diary notes each morning over coffee… and yet the empty blog can seem so intimidating.
But here we are – a not quite entirely blank page thanks to that lovely little paragraph above. I actually secured my own domain a year ago with the solid intention to bring the ghost of my humble blog back from literary purgatory (got to be careful not to write ‘literal’ there), but it turns out that a pandemic wasn’t the opportune moment to get back to the online writing game that it at first seemed.
How about as it comes closer to an end? Ends always are new beginnings after all.
I think laying down the scene may be in order. Even for those who have read my blog before, it’s been oh so long with oh so many changes. Sure, there have been a few analytical pieces along the way, but no personal heartfelt writing for years.
From flicking through my last few posts (that stretch over years for a mere handful), I think the best place to begin is with leaving Japan.
Since I was very small, I had always wanted to see Japan. After graduating from uni, I finally got my chance not only to see it, but live there. It is indeed as beautiful – if not more so – than the imagination paints it. The plan was to live and learn Japan, then go to tackle my long term goal of becoming a professional writer. However, after half a year there it was clear that, at least at that moment, it wasn’t the beautiful land I was supposed to be in. I left after only eight months, quite a bit shorter than the three years I had envisioned.
With my eyes set on finally settling in Germany and becoming a journalist, I failed and ended up in China instead. I could go into the details, but it’ll have to suffice for now to say with a degree in German and Chinese you’ve got a fair chance of working in and with those two countries. Geographically extremely far from each other, but neither are far from my thoughts.
I arrived in Beijing nearly two years ago as a copyeditor. Having studied here before, it felt very much like a homecoming – the strange and uncertain kind of homecoming you get from intending to live a few hundred kilometres away from your home country but accidentally ending up 5000 away instead.
But hey, I had that writing job I wanted. After two years I’m so much more than a copyeditor – I’m an editor, researcher and analyst all rolled into one. This very blog marked the beginning of my writing path. Though not quite in the form I had originally imagined, moving back to China marked another new beginning – that of the professional writer.
It’s just hit me as I write this that I set out to become a writer a whole decade ago. For the last two years here in Beijing, that’s precisely what I’ve been doing and never did I take a moment to think – you got there, Tim. All because I saw myself as a creative writer or a journalist, and not the analytic writer I currently am in a professional setting.
But that doesn’t stop me loading up my website and tapping away at my laptop’s keys until something more personal appears on the page. I had just forgotten the value of it – forgotten that writers don’t become writers for a job, but we write to write. We write to feel, to express, to understand, to be honest with ourselves, to create.
Over the last few years I became the professional writer I aimed to become. Now it’s time to remember what it was like to write for the joy of writing and sharing.