My wish upon a star

Around New Year’s, I am usually calmer than people expect me to be. Calm may not be the right word. It is more like my mood has dimmed a shade or two. I have never been very good at making a fuss over the last day of the year or the first day of the next. It feels oddly unfair to all the ordinary days that came before. So when everyone counts down, waits for midnight, and shouts “Happy New Year!” as if on cue, I find myself feeling a little sorry for the year we are leaving behind. What about all the good work last year did? What about all the days that held us up? Why does no one say, “Happy Last Year”? Let’s call it one of my stranger forms of stubbornness. I just want the days that carried us through an entire year to feel a little less wronged.

In January, I went to Jecheon, a quiet lakeside city a few hours from Seoul, with friends. Once I left Seoul and found myself somewhere unfamiliar, the heaviness in me loosened almost immediately. The pressure to make some grand resolution for the new year melted away. I decided, instead, to enjoy this brief escape. I breathed in as much of the clear, white-cold air after snowfall as I could. Then, in the black hours before dawn, all of us pleasantly drunk and tingling, we ran out of our lodging and lay down in the snow, staring up at a sky absurdly full of stars. It was the first time in my life I had seen that many stars so clearly, so close.

Looking up at them, I wished for the one thing I wanted most at the time: the discipline to write every day. Not a dramatic bolt of inspiration. Not talent descending from the heavens. Just the ability to sit down, day after day, and write. For years, I had been telling people, almost as a habit, that I wanted to become a writer. But whenever someone asked what kind of writing I wanted to do, I would trail off with vague answers like memoir, travel writing, or poetry.

Somewhere along the way, I had heard that if you say out loud what you want to do, or what you want to become, it will somehow come true. So I went around chattering about my dream of becoming a writer, when in truth I was afraid and unsure of myself. The problem was that I was never satisfied with my half-ripe writing. I kept putting it off, or writing fragments only to decide they were terrible, deleting and rewriting the same lines over and over. I had read countless writers talk about the agony of revision. I understood, at least in my head, that no one gets better without writing consistently. Still, my hands would not move easily.

I have a weak habit of clinging to meaning, and in that sense, the year my age began with a new digit felt like as good a reason as any to turn writing into a daily practice. I made a promise to myself: short or long, regardless of genre, I would write one piece of something every day. Whether I was drunk on alcohol or drunk on stars, I was terribly serious that night, lying there in the snowfield of Jecheon. ‘Please let me become someone who writes every day.’ With my flushed cheeks cupped in both hands, I looked up at the stars and wished, earnestly, for that kind of steadiness to seep into my life.

About ten months have passed since that prayer in the snow. The result? Surprisingly, I have written every single day since then, and I am still keeping that promise. Maybe the snowfield in Jecheon was blessed ground. Or maybe, with a new digit at the front of my age, I simply did not want to become an adult who does not keep her promise. Whatever the reason, I have been writing something every day—rather admirably, if I may say so myself.

Sometimes I list the things I like. Sometimes I pour out private feelings as if into a diary. Sometimes I write difficult little poems. Sometimes I jot down thoughts on a film or a piece of music. A few months ago, I even began assigning a subject to each day of the week, training myself to move from shorter breaths into longer ones.

Whatever it is, I simply write every day. I do not think about what all this daily writing will become in the end. I only realize, now and then, that the things I write each day cannot always sparkle like stars in the sky—and they do not need to. What matters is that I keep moving quietly and steadily in the direction I have chosen. And I try not to forget that the process itself is where I shine the most.