I am writing in Moleskines. Writing in Word documents burned into rewritable CDs. In a Xanga account, a serialized novel. Half-assed attempts at NaNoWriMos. Writing for a short-story contest at my university for a department I’m not even enrolled in, my entry in double-spaced Times New Roman, while my brain is busy elsewhere with statin drugs, viral infections, how to cut an umbilical cord. Writing for a college newspaper, don’t be too honest now or we’ll be out of funding. Writing in my own voice that took so long to find because for a good while I only wanted to sound like Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Chuck Palahniuk.
I am writing as a teenager, writing for as long as I know stories, since I first read “Hills Like White Elephants,” tucked inside an English textbook nobody else reads. Writing, first without form, a blob of half-melted snow; then it became clay: malleable, wieldable. A production line of prose — lyrical, flowery, sometimes dry. Not writing for a while, for years, then back again. Rarely if not never poetry, but always a narrative, can even be fan fiction, too, if I like: ones too embarrassing for the public eye but which I relish to reread over and over. Writing. It’s the one thing I am absolutely confident in doing, which is a lot to say for someone whose self-consciousness and self-doubt are plants that have deep-seated, far-reaching roots. I am never scared of writing. I enjoy the construction and the demolition, the reining in of the overuse of em dashes and split infinitives and sub-thoughts enclosed in parentheses. The flow, when it gets going and every word sings. A high unmatched.
The advent of photography in my life all but eliminated the necessity for words. Captions are short and enigmatic and a straight shot; there are more hashtags than there are thoughts. The space to write anything in is shrinking. Everyone wants compacted information delivered in 15-second reels and 280-character limits. I know a total of one person who still maintains a long-form blog.
So this is a beginning but a beginning where I’m taking a step back. A regression can also be a fresh start, because I don’t want life to be a drive-by. I want assimilation. I want a love letter — not for a “you,” but for the me who’s trying to remember. To tell a story to myself, with all the lights and sounds only I can appreciate, in untranslated words sometimes, passages and inside jokes without explanation, unintroduced characters. What hasn’t been captured in pixels or film, all the quiet things tucked in between and perhaps what music was playing.
Welcome. Yoroshiku ne.
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About this site
Tiny Worries started in 2025 in want of a quieter space to think, and to return to my old writing roots with much less social media. It’s a collection of essays, vignettes, trivial musings, some photographs and drawings, and the occasional piece of fiction. It’s still a work in progress. Backdated entries are being imported from loose leaf scribblings, planner pages, word-processing documents, notes on my phone, and several older blogs that have either retired or never seen the light of day.
All content by Mags Lumague unless stated otherwise. Names have been changed for privacy — with the exception of Gio’s, to get my bearings1. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely intentional.
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- A nod to Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who wrote in Self-Portrait Abroad: “I will call Madeleine Madeleine in these pages to help me get my bearings.” ↩︎
TINY WORRIES 