What it means to add value.

I pondered long and hard, what my first post in Medium should be. My thoughts were murkier than the streets of Dhaka at night and steeped in a potpourri of my own confused identities, from a doctor to a young researcher to a budding writer to an activist of sorts.

I realized the problem lay not in deciding what I wanted to write but who I wanted to be. It is the one question we always think we know until we attempt to write about it with clarity and purpose. It is one of the deep pits we undoubtedly face in our late 20s, when we look back at our relatively large (some unpublished and unshared) array of accomplishments, observe others in social media platforms like facebook and sigh with regret of how meagre we have achieved and how mediocre we are by comparison. The process supposedly repeats itself every decade. Some give up and become content at their fazed downtrodden state. Others resolve to grow and conquer. Yet others, seek to be somewhere in between; cherry pick their small accomplishments, possessing an inflated view of their selves, and becoming delusionally complacent. These folks are also the ones making everyone else feel small.

Hence I have decided to write. To write is to structure, to define, to confuse or clarify but with purpose and conviction. Our meddled thoughts when examined word for word appear bizarre, sometimes contradictory and often borderline delusional. Yet, writing is cathartic. Its therapeutic potential is evidence-based and has been used to treat post-traumatic stress.

The topic of this post appears completely unrelated to the content. I have written and posted this without revision. I wanted to write about how I wished to add value to the world by my work, but ended up saying how confused I am, how easily I am struck by inferiority complexes and having recently started to like writing because of how ‘evidence-based’ it is, although the truth of all these are perhaps a bit deeper than the narrow confines of my post.

Adding value to the world is easy. Defining yourself when you literally want to be everything is perhaps the most difficult. We struggle to become a doctor, a researcher, writer and what not. Perhaps Stephen Fry said it best when he quoted Oscar Wilde, “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing — an actor, a writer — I am a person who does things — I write, I act — and I never know what I am going to do next”

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