Ramblings of Me (AKA The Unnecessarily Long Explanation)

Hello

So that's why I wasn't ok when I left home even though I was in a safe environment and around friends. Why I couldn't continue writing? I probably subconsciously associated it with that toxic environment and any time I would try I would have a trauma response and immediately stop. But that's my theory, maybe I'm wrong and I just stopped enjoying it because adulthood, who knows.

Anyway, that brings us to me moving around, publishing that god awful 30 Days of Writing thing I did at one point when I still deluded myself into believing that I just had really bad writer's block and if I did these dumbass writing exercises I could magically cure myself. All I did was make myself feel worse and probably confuse a lot of people. Then I decided to give up, at least until I was back in a more stable environment, or so I told myself.

Well, I moved to Kansas from California and what do you know? I still couldn't write. Of course at the time my fiance was going through boot camp and training and schooling and I was in Kansas with his parents. Clearly I just needed to be living with my now husband and once things settled down I would get back to writing.

By December of 2018 I was 20, and had just landed in Japan. Well that was a lot; flying in a plane for the first time of my life and I was alone, I had only gotten 3 months out the first year we were married to see him in person, I just left my country, left my family and went to Japan. It was stressful, so obviously I wouldn't be able to write. Ahaha, do you see where this is going? Cause I sure as hell didn't when I convinced myself that after a few months of settling in I'd be able to write again.

No.

No, I was not.

I gave it a good try. I would sit down, I'd try, annnnnd I'd have that voice telling me I suck.

This is wrong

That's boring

No one is going to like that

That isn't politically correct

That doesn't feel good

I don't like it

Why am I doing this?

And I would stop. I realized that writing teenagers in relationships with older men is creepy, not cute. I learned that having "smut" up for teenagers and potentially kids under 12 to read feels creepy to me. I realized that I didn't want to be writing about petty teen drama anymore because although I used to yearn to be a "normal" teen with "normal" teen problems, I don't anymore.

I realized that I'm in my early 20s, and I no longer can connect to my character's, their problems, their mindset. I'm not a good enough writer to write believable YA anymore, and I wouldn't want to even if I could. I realized that I grew up, I gained more knowledge about the world, I gained more knowledge about myself, I became increasingly aware of how problematic what I would write was. Essentially, I didn't enjoy writing what I was writing anymore on top of realizing how bad (in all the ways) it was.

I no longer am proud in any sense for anything I wrote, when I used to be very proud of it. Now I just look at everything I've written and I just feel sick and sad. I don't like it, and I can't keep all of it up just because taking it down would upset people.

Before, during, and after I was writing on Wattpad I would read stories here. To this day I still think about Rotty's (rotXinXpieces) The Underworld Chronicles constantly even though I never finished the series (maybe one day). So I know the feeling when they suddenly disappear, without a trace and no explanation, or an explanation I don't find satisfactory. This is probably that.

I tend to over explain things and I don't get to the point, which is a problem, because now this is fifteen hundred words longer than it ought to have been. Could have easily just said, "yo, so I'm leaving, love ya'll, peace... and I'm also removing a lot of my stories."

But I'm me and here we are. I'm now 24 years old, up past my bedtime, I'm cold because I'm a stubborn person who keeps the AC at 18c constantly even when I'm freezing my ass off writing an overexplained piece of garbage about me leaving Wattpad.

This really is just a stream of consciousness, basically. So if you got this far, kudos. Also I may be coming of condescending but I'm trying to keep this light and funny but I mean, I suck at that so I do apologize.

What all that was getting at though is that I don't love writing anymore and maybe I will some day but that's not today and not in the foreseeable future. Even if in some ironic twist of fate me writing this reminds me of how much I miss writing, I won't be writing my old stories. I don't want to and I most definitely won't want to in the future. So I want them gone, because they're embarrassing, they're not good, and a lot of them make me uncomfortable knowing the audience that will read them.

Please respect my decision to remove the stories I remove. Seriously. Please. I know it sucks but there's so many better stories on this platform and so many incredible books out there already that are a million times better than anything I have ever produced.

I'm incredibly grateful for the readers, for my followers, for Wattpad in general. It gave me an outlet, I met a lot of interesting people, I got to be an ambassador for a very small amount of time, I got to interact with readers, with followers. It was wild and I truly don't think my life would have gone in this direction without Wattpad. So thank you all, and thank you Wattpad.

-Ash