Begin again.

Something happens to you in your mid 30s. You come to the realisation that one, you are very close to being called middle-aged and two, 40 year olds are no longer “uncles” or “aunties”; they are you in 5 years’ time. And with that realisation comes regret. Regret about the dreams that you let go of, the very things that defined who you are as a person, all in the name of “growing up”. I rummaged through my closet at home during the last week of December, looking for nothing in particular when I chanced upon the yearbook of my MBA class, printed back in 2014, the year I graduated from b-school. I remembered that I had written the foreword for our yearbook, and wanted to see just how naive I was back then. After reading the piece (and the testimonials that my batch-mates and I wrote for each other) though, I ended up discovering that it was not naïveté that I had back then, what I had was courage. Courage to say things that I felt, to dream, to be audacious enough to think that I could change the world.

Circling back to the regret part of my 30s, of all the things that I feel badly about, one of the biggest things I rue is the fact that I stopped writing. Barring a one-off entry in my journal or a long rant over WhatsApp about the unfairness of life to my best friend (yes this is what life has come to, WhatsApp drama is now being equated to “writing”, whattodo!) or churning out User stories (if you couldn’t tell, I am a Business Analyst), I don’t think I have really sat down and put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard 😋) and let my thoughts flow.

Now I wonder if I went looking through the closet because I was subconsciously trying to find something to inspire me at the end of one of the worst years in human history, 2021. For some comfort to fall back upon before entering the new year, and cliched as it may sound, to try and “find myself” from a few years ago. Because the 2014 version of me was a big proponent of the adage, ‘Hope floats’. Today, forget about floating, hope does not even so much as put up a fight, it just silently drowns to the bottom of the pond and peacefully settles on a non-slippery rock, because that is better than trying to co-exist with the scum of the world which is all that really seems to float anymore anyway.

That said, in the spirit of at least trying to do things that truly make me happy after a long, long time, I have decided that this is as opportune a moment as any to get back to writing. Because I owe it to the 25-ish-year-old-me to keep the dream alive. And the first step that I am going to take towards this is to revive this blog and strive to publish at least a respectable number of posts this year.

And what better way to start than with a snapshot of that foreword I’d written, as a reminder to myself that I should write more often, without fear of judgement or mockery. Because to me, writing has been the highest form of catharsis and that has to be the order of the day in this mind numbing loop that we all seem to be stuck in, thanks to the C word!