The Reader Was Never the Point
I read something today that quietly caught me out. A writer — Kritika — wrote about the particular silence of posting something into the world and watching it collect exactly zero reads. That weird, specific heaviness of it. And her conclusion stayed with me: that the reader was never really the point of writing at all. That the person who gains the most from a piece of writing is not whoever reads it — it's the one who wrote it. I sat with that, and then I looked back at the last few weeks of my own evenings, and I felt a little exposed. Because what have I been doing? Berlin. Ved. Light Yagami. One after another, these long late-night posts dressed up as "character analysis." And tonight it's obvious, almost embarrassingly so: none of them were ever about Berlin or Ved or Kira. They were about me. They were me, sitting alone in a city I don't like, taking the mess in my head and quietly bullying it into sentences until it made some kind of sense. Berlin was jus...