I got into the habit of journaling about eight years ago. I may not be as consistent with it now as I was in my teenage years (or as melodramatic), but I still try to pen down my thoughts as much as I can. Unfortunately, the practice has been a double-edged sword. While it has helped me organise my thoughts more articulately, it has also made me sound like a wannabe columnist of a newspaper in The Big Apple in spaces where I'm expected to be vulnerable. My spectrum of girlhood has gone from sparkly stickers and pigtails to sounding like a stout man who likes suspenders and fedoras.

This realisation is encouraging me to go back to my roots. I am on a personal mission to embrace textspeak, emojis, and grammatically incorrect sentences. This may not be the best course of action for someone who works at a newspaper, but words are not always enough.

In the primordial soup of life, we only have each other and emoticons. If you ever see me, don't say a word. Just say colon three.