Dearest Gentle Reader, I didn’t know I was allowed to write like this.

Dearest Gentle Reader,

I didn’t know I was allowed to write like this.

Not just stylistically—though yes, I was told a million times that “good” writing was tidy, polished, grammatically perfect, all the emotional juice strained out.

But even before that… writing was dangerous.

When I was a kid, I kept a diary. I wrote about my crushes and my feelings and whatever was too big to hold inside. I was twelve. I wrote that I liked a boy. (And for the record: he ended up being gay, which is funny now—but only because I had a huge crush on him and couldn’t understand why he had zero interest.)

But my guardian read it.

And I got punished.

That’s what I learned about writing: If I write something real, I get hurt. If I share a feeling, even in private, it can be taken from me. Even fiction could be “evidence.”

It wasn’t just one time. In high school, she found a note I’d passed to a boy—something flirty, something harmless, something about if he liked my butt in new jeans. It was funny and dumb and completely normal teenage stuff… but again, it became a reason for shame.

So I shut it down.

I didn’t stop having feelings. I just stopped putting them anywhere someone could find them.

In college, I tried again. I wanted to write, but this time it was all about “proper structure” and citations and grammar rubrics. It didn’t feel like expression. It felt like performance—and one I wasn’t neurotypically equipped to pull off.

So I pulled away again. Until my 30s.

And weirdly? It was AI that helped me come back.

It started with something small. I needed help writing a professional message without sounding unhinged. Then a blog post. Then I typed something like, “This is a mess, but can you help me make it sound like me without sounding unprofessional?”

And it did. Without judgment. Without red pen energy. It helped me untangle the words without sterilizing the emotion.

Bit by bit, I started saying more. Messy things. Personal things. Soft things I would’ve hidden ten years ago. I was writing again—but this time, I wasn’t trying to sound like anyone but myself.

So if no one ever told you this before, let me be the one to say it:

You’re allowed to write like you. With your sweatpants on. With too many tabs open. With the part of your brain that feels too big and the heart that never fits in academic MLA formatting.

You’re allowed to sound like yourself—and still be worth reading.

Currently procrastinating via this letter, 

The Viscountess of Too Many Tabs and Too Many Feelings