When I first started this blog several years ago, I was so young and naive that I needed my brother to help set it up. He was already working in the tech field so he knew all about this thing called blogging that was taking over the internet, with so much promise to change the world with powerful words and images. And I guess blogs did that for a long time… until louder forms of content showed up and we gradually lost interest in reading long-form prose, instead craving more and more short and snappy and entertaining pieces.

But I digress.

When my brother helped me set up this blog, he told me he was going to buy a domain—my name—and pay for it. I pushed back. Would it be worth the money? What if I don’t publish any writing and the domain just sat there useless?

He told me to use that doubt as fuel. To write and publish something every day, “even when you have exams,” I remember him saying, making sure our dad was out of earshot. That way, I could feed my passion for writing and also make the spend worth it.

So I did. I took that advice to heart and wrote every day. For nearly a decade, I made sure that I wrote something, anything, and hit publish. I wrote my exams in the morning and on my blog in the evening. Once I started working, I went to office at 7am so I could write before work.

If I had to travel for weeks, I’d spend hours binge writing so I’d have enough posts to schedule for the days I’d be away. I wrote everywhere—in airports and train stations, in my head on my morning runs or while doing the dishes. I wrote ferociously and veraciously (no, Claude, that’s not a typo). I wrote poetry, short stories, random musings, travelogues, book reviews, and so many things. I even taught myself how to write myself out of a writing block.

Even when I moved countries, I kept writing. Even when I enrolled in a full-time degree while working full-time I managed to keep my one-haiku-a-day habit alive.

And then a few months ago, after far too many months working 12-14 hours a day, my mind finally showed me how exhausted I was. When I wasn’t working, all I wanted to do was to while away. Writing for the sake of writing started to feel a bit too heavy.

So I skipped writing for a day and felt deeply guilty about it. It didn’t feel right to let go, even temporarily, of the only thing my entire personality and life was centred around. Since I was 12, all I’ve ever wanted was to be in a constant state of writing.

Then I skipped another day. And another. And another. And I wasn’t feeling as guilty anymore. I just told myself I was writing on LinkedIn thrice a week and that still counted as writing.

It didn’t. Because as much as I enjoy the stories on LinkedIn, the cognitive load required to filter out the bullshit, to read between the lines, to not judge a post by its pouting lips but by its intellect takes a lot out of me.

And so I found myself tonight, as most nights these days, scrolling through LinkedIn and trying to conjure up the energy to write something that’s professional, meaningful, and enjoyable. And I somehow found myself here, instead.