My Journey to a Thousand Began with One Article

100% satisfied with 100 pieces of content published

Congratulations Chetna! This is your 100th article on Medium!

When I started writing on Medium one year and four months ago, I had no idea if anyone would read my work. My goal was to improve as a writer and become more confident about sharing my thoughts. With those goals achieved, I achieved much more.

I’ve written 99 articles, poems, and short fiction pieces. I’ve learned a lot along the way, and I want to reflect and share that with you. Writing this takes me back — it feels like just yesterday, I was writing my first article on Medium.

Initially, I started by questioning who was I to write and then calling myself a writer.

My English teacher in High School always returned essays to the class from best to worst. Everyone would then be in a mad dash to read the top students’ papers. What did they write, how did they write to obtain top marks? I remember reading those papers and wondering, why can’t I write like that.

Practice makes Permanent

What I learned: Everyone can write like that. All it takes is being an avid reader and writing a lot. I don’t like to use the phrase ‘Practice makes perfect (I have kids, and I always tell them nothing is perfect nor meant to be) but rather ‘Practice makes permanent.’ So, after writing 99 pieces for Medium and even more for myself — in journals, I’ve found a voice, a writing style, and topics I enjoy.

We all have an idea about how good we are at something — a biased view. And I’m no different. But I give myself little credit. It’s not low confidence or self-esteem, just trying to keep it humble. And yes, it doesn’t do much as assurance. Receiving the first couple of rejections from publications already had me in a tailspin. But the truth is I was new to this. New to writing seriously and to the platform, its publications, requirements, and needs. But the more rejections I got, the more I saw them as motivation to continue.

Embrace Rejection

What I learned: My biggest lesson from this experience was the importance of having a good attitude towards your creative endeavors. Rejections are harsh, especially when no one has time to tell you why they outright rejected your article. For anyone who’s considering writing something regularly, understand that as hard as writing can sometimes be, you will continue to improve each time you sit down at your computer and put your fingers on the keyboard. As you get better, the rejections will get less and stop altogether.

“If you live for people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection.” — Lecrae

When I decided to write, I was going through a pivotal phase in my life, and naturally, I wanted to write about my observations, thoughts, and experiences. My reason, on Medium, was not to make money, not to write click-bait articles, but rather to write about the words that made an impact in my life and hopefully resonate with others.

Maya Angelou said, “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.”

Words Have Power

What I learned: My words could sound like any other writer’s words. But what made them different, what gave them more meaning than mere words, are my experiences and the results gained through those experiences — wisdom, enlightenment, insight, awareness, understanding, and acceptance.

Fear is not ingrained. It’s learned. We experience fear in some areas of our life, and they have a way of trickling over onto others. Fear made me question if I should even put myself out there with my writing. People would read about me and judge me. They would come to know the innermost intimate parts of my life.

Then I thought, “So what?” Do I really care what other people think?

NO!

I wanted to speak my truth. Be true to me, and the only way to do that was to overcome that fear and do it anyway. Bravery is not being fearless. It is conquering despite fear.

Fear Is a Tool

What I learned: Fear is an idea, not concrete. An idea instilled with apprehension, reluctance, nerves, and doubt that manifest as physical symptoms such as sweating, increased heart rate, changes in your breath, anxiety, and racing thoughts.

You can turn your fear into freedom by giving yourself the liberty to let go of every emotion and thought that doesn’t serve you. Ask yourself if the fear is justified? Most times it’s not — unless you’re a caveman running from a tiger.

Move towards your fears, and you’ll see it’s not as scary as you think.

At the onset of my writing journey, I decided what the measure of my success wasn’t going to be. It wasn’t going to be x number of claps, x number of views, or x amount of dollars earned.

All I wanted was to cover my $5 membership fee every month.

Today, I’ll consider — because truth be told, I don’t give a f*ck — what people might think of this, that my bar was set so low. Let me say to those people — my intention for writing was not to make money. Success came from honing my writing skills.

Success Is Anything You Want It to Be

What I learned: It’s easy to get sucked in climbing the success ladder, where people base their worth on salary, position, power. Success is what you want it to be. Success should be defined by your metric and no one else’s. It can be as simple as being better than you were yesterday. Be clear on what it means for you.

I started strong — had all these ideas about what I’d write. The momentum was there; then it wasn’t. I had many days when I didn’t feel like sitting down at my computer to put an article together. Like I’d been through everything there was to go through and wrote about everything I wanted to. What’s next?

The trick is knowing how to deal with those feelings, push through the rough patches, and find your way back to being productive and happy.

From Overthinking to Mindful Thinking

Lessons learned: They say — and it’s true — that adversity breeds many things, from resilience to courage to triumph to opportunity. And while I once felt my inner voice strong, it later was gone. But it didn’t disappear. My voice was still there — it just changed its speech.

The Journey Continues

Apart from reaching this milestone, the act of writing itself has been a transformative experience for me.

If you’re reading this, you may be like me (or not!) — a person who wants to share their thoughts with other people. You may think you’re not good enough to write an article because you don’t have an English degree or other special qualifications.

But anyone who has something interesting to say can write. You only need to find your voice and use it.