Inside thoughts

Some time during early 2023, I started writing movies reviews on letterboxd and posting them to my Instagram stories. I was inspired by a friend who'd post her reviews on movies online, following a bullet point format of pros and cons for the movie, and an overall rating. Since I'm a writer by trade, I thought I should explore some outlets for creativity, and that movie reviews were the best place the start.

I started putting these reviews out with moderate success, and by sucess I mean I would get a ego-pleasing number of likes my Instagram stories, to the point that I started a Substack where I'd make longer-form content as opposed to bullet points that I can fit into a story. I started reading works of professional critics and tried to emulate the style of thhose whose work I liked. I wrote two posts on my Substack that had pictures and words. My writing was structrually sound - like essays that I could turn in to a film class get a B+.

However, this habit of creation did not last long. After a couple of months, it started to feel like work. I became less likely to write immediately after a movie, less inspired to have a unique thesis. Also, I stopeed being happy with what I was producing. Everything I could come up with seemed to have already been said by more talented people. To use the worlds of my own high-brow and mean-spirited critic persona, my writing became derivaitve. A couple more weeks later, I stopped writing somewhere in later in the same year.

Fast forward to 2024, jolted by a devastating breakup, I started writing poems in my notes app to help me get through the pain of heartbreak (very basic, I know). But the act of listening to my own pain and using words to nurse it was so fulfilling, it made me want to start writing again. So I started again, this time, I no longer tried to sound like a professional critic. I ditched any template, and really tried as hard as I could to forget about having any strcuture. Honestly, I just started crashing out on main, letting out all my inside thoughts about the things I was watched, and it turned out to be the most liberating thing I've ever done with words.

Words are such magical things. If you let them, they can carry your deepest fears and insecurities, and then you can hold them in front of yourself, and marvel at how funny they are. And when you choose to, others can join in the fun. Yes, watching Final Destination Bloodlines made my recall the time I left a posthumous note to my middles school crush whilst riding in a car that I was certain was going to crash. Yes, I was upset to not have been able to see Paul Mescal's ass in Gladiator 2. In every review I throw a little piece of myself out into a little corner of the universe.

It's funny that I started talking about other people reading them, because this time I really did not care as much if people read them or not. It was satisfying enough that I was able to be more aware of myself, to externalize what these stories remind me of and how they made me feel. But it also felt leagues better when someone tells me they read me reviews than before. I

Anyway, I rambled on all of this to say, I am trying to create another space where I am airing out my inside thoughts and I'm going to start here. Movies make me things and I'm glad that I'm more in tune with these thoughts through writing movie reivews, but I have a lot of thoughts going on in my head at all times when I'm not watching a movie too. Sometimes I feel like I don't really have access to them because when I try to write them down, the words end to escape me.

These thoughts will be messy, unhinged, controversial, and sometimes, maybe even a majority of the time, morally questionable. Not all of them are going to be a blog post. Actually probbaly very few of them will be, but the first of them is here because this leaflet platform is simple, pretty, and erganomically very familiar because it looks a lot like my VS code markdown editor.

Not really anyone is readying this stuff I'm writing right now, and maybe it will stay that way for a long time. But in the event someone eventually does, I hope these inside thoughts of mine will drive them breifly insane, just like how I felt having them in my head, and they then can return to their life feeling a little better, and less alone.