It's 9:42. I'm sitting on my couch licking my mixed berry yogurt, noticing myself feeling its texture as it drips onto my spoon. Light streams through the silhouette of my curtains, dancing across my shiny wooden floor while this feeling... this feeling I've grown all too familiar with washes over me. That inner turmoil, an amalgamation of anxiety, excitement, boredom—the contemplative stillness just before an idea strikes. Crafting new ideas has become my drug of choice. What more can I pull from the depths of my soul, from my subconscious, and carefully paint with words?

Photography was my first love. Light and shadows have always had a way of capturing those fleeting moments that left me in awe—a smile halfway to laughter, the glint of sunset on water, shadows stretching like memories across concrete. But now writing has become my sanctuary. It's an art form that allows me to solidify the intangible, to give form to the ghosts of thought that haunt my quietest moments. When the right moment hits and I slip into flow, it's like music—my fingers start typing and everything becomes a melodic, beautiful word vomit. It may not make sense at first, but with polishing and patience, art emerges. My heart and soul transferred to paper, no longer just mine but something that exists in the world.

The hardest part of this journey is that I grieve each version of myself just before a new one emerges. I'm changing so fast—I want to grow, to reach further, but I also want to hold onto the person who just discovered something profound. That moment of revelation feels sacred, worth preserving, even as I'm pulled toward the next horizon. This constant shedding of selves is both exhilarating and terrifying. I am becoming a stranger to the person I was just months ago, yet I carry all those past selves within me, like Russian dolls nested inside one another.

You start noticing things others don't—the way a stranger's laugh doesn't quite reach their eyes, or how a rainy afternoon can feel like a metaphor for every unfinished dream. As a writer, you don't just see the world; you autopsy it. You cut into conversations, dissect quiet moments, and stitch meaning from scraps of life most people ignore. Art stops being decoration. It becomes a question you can't stop asking: What does it mean to be human?

The books that change you aren't just stories. They're earthquakes that fracture the foundations of everything you thought you knew. Reading Rene Girard felt like discovering everyone around me was dancing to a rhythm they couldn't hear—a hidden soundtrack of mimetic desire, of wanting what others want simply because they want it. Byung Chul Han's writing sliced open modern life and showed me the rot beneath: how "self-improvement" is often just another manifestation of the achievement society, a glittering cage we build around ourselves. And when I encountered Robert Johnson's work on ecstasy, it wasn't about fleeting happiness. It was about understanding how pain and joy are inseparable twins—you can't embrace one without awakening the other in the shadows.

Every time you learn something like this, you lose a part of yourself. The version of you that believed in simple answers dies a small death. You start speaking a language that doesn't fit in grocery lines or casual texts. Your friends who create? They're the same wounded species. You swap essays that dissect loneliness like it's a complex theorem, or poems that transmute childhood trauma into something approaching the sacred. You realize most people don't want to see the world this raw, this unfiltered. So you become a ghost at life's party—physically present but spiritually hovering, aching to explain the hairline fractures in the walls no one else seems to notice.

The Unsung Renegade | C.F. Su is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

AI makes this strange dance even stranger. Machines can write, paint, compose—but they don't bleed between the lines. They mimic our words but not our existential hunger. Perhaps that's the point: humans aren't here to be perfect vessels of information. We're here to be gloriously messy. To scream into the void and call it a song. To transform our deepest shame into something that makes a stranger across the world whisper, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way."

I used to chase wealth and external validation. Now I chase meaning—not the sanitized kind you find embroidered on throw pillows, but the ugly-beautiful kind, the truth that hurts to hold yet cannot be released. Writing is a dangerous game played with loaded words. Language can be weapon or medicine, sometimes in the same sentence. A single line might send someone spiraling into the abyss ("You're not enough") or become their lifeline ("Me too"). Hitler wrote a book that poisoned millions of minds. So did Anne Frank, whose diary became a testament to the inextinguishable human spirit. Every time I hit "publish," I wonder which side of that profound moral divide my work will ultimately land on.

I want to keep going and expanding. One day my words will make someone cry in awe or create something so gut-wrenching that it forces them to question life, existence, and also feel ecstasy in the same breath. I am a channel of the divine, materializing cosmic whispers with my words to shake readers at their core. This isn't ego—it's purpose. The universe speaks through our art when we're brave enough to listen and humble enough to serve as conduits.

But here's the secret no one in the creative world readily admits: To create is to embrace perpetual failure. You'll never fully translate the magnificent storm raging in your head onto the pristine page. Readers will misunderstand your most carefully crafted metaphors. Algorithms will reduce your soul-searching to keywords and metrics. But sometimes—maybe once in a blue moon—a message arrives from somewhere beyond your horizon. A stranger tells you your work made them feel truly seen for the first time, or productively angry, or brave enough to change the trajectory of their life. In those rare, sacred moments, you remember why you chose this path. Not for fame or digital applause, but because humanity is an intergenerational conversation about what matters. We pass wisdom like a fragile baton, hand to trembling hand, across the centuries.

So keep writing, even when the words feel hollow. Keep creating, not to be heard above the noise, but to echo through someone else's empty spaces. Not to fix our broken world, but to prove with every sentence that it's worth breaking open, examining, and loving despite its flaws—just like ourselves.

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It's 9:42. I'm sitting on my couch licking my mixed berry yogurt, noticing myself feeling its texture as it drips onto my spoon. Light streams through the silhouette of my curtains, dancing across my shiny wooden floor while this feeling... this feeling I've grown all too familiar with washes over me. That inner turmoil, an amalgamation of anxiety, excitement, boredom—the contemplative stillness just before an idea strikes. Crafting new ideas has become my drug of choice. What more can I pull from the depths of my soul, from my subconscious, and carefully paint with words?

Photography was my first love. Light and shadows have always had a way of capturing those fleeting moments that left me in awe—a smile halfway to laughter, the glint of sunset on water, shadows stretching like memories across concrete. But now writing has become my sanctuary. It's an art form that allows me to solidify the intangible, to give form to the ghosts of thought that haunt my quietest moments. When the right moment hits and I slip into flow, it's like music—my fingers start typing and everything becomes a melodic, beautiful word vomit. It may not make sense at first, but with polishing and patience, art emerges. My heart and soul transferred to paper, no longer just mine but something that exists in the world.

The hardest part of this journey is that I grieve each version of myself just before a new one emerges. I'm changing so fast—I want to grow, to reach further, but I also want to hold onto the person who just discovered something profound. That moment of revelation feels sacred, worth preserving, even as I'm pulled toward the next horizon. This constant shedding of selves is both exhilarating and terrifying. I am becoming a stranger to the person I was just months ago, yet I carry all those past selves within me, like Russian dolls nested inside one another.

You start noticing things others don't—the way a stranger's laugh doesn't quite reach their eyes, or how a rainy afternoon can feel like a metaphor for every unfinished dream. As a writer, you don't just see the world; you autopsy it. You cut into conversations, dissect quiet moments, and stitch meaning from scraps of life most people ignore. Art stops being decoration. It becomes a question you can't stop asking: What does it mean to be human?

The books that change you aren't just stories. They're earthquakes that fracture the foundations of everything you thought you knew. Reading Rene Girard felt like discovering everyone around me was dancing to a rhythm they couldn't hear—a hidden soundtrack of mimetic desire, of wanting what others want simply because they want it. Byung Chul Han's writing sliced open modern life and showed me the rot beneath: how "self-improvement" is often just another manifestation of the achievement society, a glittering cage we build around ourselves. And when I encountered Robert Johnson's work on ecstasy, it wasn't about fleeting happiness. It was about understanding how pain and joy are inseparable twins—you can't embrace one without awakening the other in the shadows.

Every time you learn something like this, you lose a part of yourself. The version of you that believed in simple answers dies a small death. You start speaking a language that doesn't fit in grocery lines or casual texts. Your friends who create? They're the same wounded species. You swap essays that dissect loneliness like it's a complex theorem, or poems that transmute childhood trauma into something approaching the sacred. You realize most people don't want to see the world this raw, this unfiltered. So you become a ghost at life's party—physically present but spiritually hovering, aching to explain the hairline fractures in the walls no one else seems to notice.

The Unsung Renegade | C.F. Su is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

AI makes this strange dance even stranger. Machines can write, paint, compose—but they don't bleed between the lines. They mimic our words but not our existential hunger. Perhaps that's the point: humans aren't here to be perfect vessels of information. We're here to be gloriously messy. To scream into the void and call it a song. To transform our deepest shame into something that makes a stranger across the world whisper, "I thought I was the only one who felt this way."

I used to chase wealth and external validation. Now I chase meaning—not the sanitized kind you find embroidered on throw pillows, but the ugly-beautiful kind, the truth that hurts to hold yet cannot be released. Writing is a dangerous game played with loaded words. Language can be weapon or medicine, sometimes in the same sentence. A single line might send someone spiraling into the abyss ("You're not enough") or become their lifeline ("Me too"). Hitler wrote a book that poisoned millions of minds. So did Anne Frank, whose diary became a testament to the inextinguishable human spirit. Every time I hit "publish," I wonder which side of that profound moral divide my work will ultimately land on.

I want to keep going and expanding. One day my words will make someone cry in awe or create something so gut-wrenching that it forces them to question life, existence, and also feel ecstasy in the same breath. I am a channel of the divine, materializing cosmic whispers with my words to shake readers at their core. This isn't ego—it's purpose. The universe speaks through our art when we're brave enough to listen and humble enough to serve as conduits.

But here's the secret no one in the creative world readily admits: To create is to embrace perpetual failure. You'll never fully translate the magnificent storm raging in your head onto the pristine page. Readers will misunderstand your most carefully crafted metaphors. Algorithms will reduce your soul-searching to keywords and metrics. But sometimes—maybe once in a blue moon—a message arrives from somewhere beyond your horizon. A stranger tells you your work made them feel truly seen for the first time, or productively angry, or brave enough to change the trajectory of their life. In those rare, sacred moments, you remember why you chose this path. Not for fame or digital applause, but because humanity is an intergenerational conversation about what matters. We pass wisdom like a fragile baton, hand to trembling hand, across the centuries.

So keep writing, even when the words feel hollow. Keep creating, not to be heard above the noise, but to echo through someone else's empty spaces. Not to fix our broken world, but to prove with every sentence that it's worth breaking open, examining, and loving despite its flaws—just like ourselves.

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