30 DAYS OF GRATITUDE
Embracing the Creative Path
My writing journey
Did I want to become a writer when I was a kid? No. Honestly, I didn’t know that becoming a writer was an option. Maybe I thought I couldn’t be a writer because of two main reasons:
- The options I was given when asked what I wanted to become when I grew up were limited to a doctor, an engineer, a teacher, or a banker. That was about it.
- I believed that becoming a writer was something reserved for truly special individuals, and I didn’t consider myself special enough to become one.
So, I never even harbored a secret wish to become a writer. But I loved to write. The act of putting pen to paper in a notebook was what I truly loved. I preferred pens over pencils; they made me feel like a grown-up. Those were the moments when I wanted to be a “big girl.”
All my school notebooks bore traces of my love for writing. I’d often scribble down random words and thoughts on the last pages of my notebooks, not realizing that I could dream of becoming a writer.
I wrote my first poem when I was around 11 or 12 years old, and I was incredibly proud of what I had penned.
Somewhere around the age of 15, I began writing more poems, but they remained hidden in my notebooks. As the years passed, my poetry started to emerge from the last pages of my notebooks and into the world. It was around that time I started to dream of becoming a writer. It felt somewhat absurd, a dream I never dared to share with anyone because, me, a writer?
When I was working as a software developer, I didn’t write a single word during those two years. It’s weird because, during my four years of engineering college, I wrote many poems, even with the relentless pressure of internal exams and university exams that felt suffocating at times.
In 2014, I created a blog and started to write and share my creations with the world. It took a lot of courage to take that first step, and I’m glad I did. Although it took years, today, I have started calling myself a writer simply because I write.
My mind is filled with gratitude for all those moments when I scribbled words in my books. My writing journey began with those words. Today, I am immensely grateful for everything I’ve written so far. Every mistake, every seemingly senseless word, every mark I made when I knew nothing, has led me to this point. I have a long way to go, and I may not be close to resembling the writers I admire, but this place I’m in now, is not a bad place to be.
Now, I aspire to become a good writer, and I always have the support of words to express my thoughts. Words alone are not enough to describe how grateful I am for this journey.
Vinitha Dileep is a lover of words who found solace in writing and rewriting software codes until life took a turn and laid the path to writing poems every day.
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