Most blogs have an enchanting founding story. Stories like:
A charming law graduate quit her job to travel and write; she is now eating her way around the world.
An industrial engineer and ex-employee of General Motors and Walt Disney World started a blog after having her first child and teaching other mums how to earn through blogging.
A depressed artist healed herself by teaching art through her blog.
The start of my blog wasn’t anything like that.
I have been writing since 2001 but didn’t have the courage to put my work out there. Not only that, I couldn’t even call myself a writer. Even though I had filled notebook after notebook in eighteen years of writing, I thought of myself as a failure.
My writing was not good enough. I had nothing to show for years of toil. I had published nothing. My name was not on the cover of any book. Not even at the top of a magazine article.
My writing buddies liked my stories, but I thought they were being polite and never considered entering my stories into any writing competition.
I kept on seeing myself as a failure and tortured myself mercilessly. I would set myself unrealistic writing goals and would beat myself for not meeting them.
My ‘job’ was taking up all my energy, and the rest was consumed in keeping the house and raising the family.
Something in me was dying, and I knew I have to do something. All I wanted to do was to write. Writing had become a compulsion for me. But I was too scared to put my work out there.
After weeks of agonizing, I bought my domain name. Something terrible happened on that day. My father passed away.
The next couple of weeks were full of confusion, numbness, guilt, and grief. In those days, I wrote madly, capturing every single thread of memory that came to the surface. Writing was my savior, as it was when my mother passed away three years earlier.
As I went through various stages of grief, I realized ‘writing’ was the only true tribute I could pay to my parents, who instilled in me a love for learning. They were both teachers. I felt compelled to tell their story, and through them, my story.
There was another powerful reaction. Their departure brought me face-to-face with my mortality.
How long was I going to live?
My time here is limited, and yet I was postponing my life. When will I live the life I really wanted to live? Was I prepared to die one day without even finding out what would have happened if I had followed my dream to become a full-time writer?
I wasn’t.
Hence this blog.
