Why I want to write

If you’ve spent a chunk of your life being told that you’re good at a certain something you could choose to do one of two things about that, first: (the fixed mindset approach*) treat it as your god-given natural ability, milk it for as long as you can and watch it fizzle away as you continue to do nothing to hone it, second: HONE IT by working on it consistently over the years and trying your best to see it cultivate into something worthwhile. Now worthwhile could mean different things to different people, to some it could refer to professional or academic achievement, and to others it could mean mere satisfaction, the feeling of being content with the time and effort you gave the activity, sheer fulfillment of having invested in something, as simple as that.
I happened to take the former route, owing to my deep rooted *fixed mindset that I’ve recently discovered while reading the book Mindset (a topic for another day for it’s a book I’ve spent 11 months “absorbing”), because of which I want to give writing a fair try, a growth mindset try, if you will.

So before I set out and give myself a completely unachievable writing target I want to write this roughly collated list of reasons to write, for days when I forget why I started.

1. For as long as I can remember, I’ve only ever written for others: from school essays, to the school newsletter, to my college club publication, I’ve always had a writing prompt to depend on that I never “passionately” resonated with, but could always find a ray of inspiration to get me to write and submit it, admittedly with a hint of inhibition and never before the absolute last deadline. When I write this time around, I want it to be for ME, about things that I WANT to write about, without any stakes, without a filter, without owing anyone any explanations. I want my own space to blab, plain and simple.
2. At any given point of the day my Internet Explorer browser brain has a minimum of 13 tabs open, 5 of which have stopped responding. I owe it to the bazillion thoughts racing in my head, to show them the light of day, and to discover if at least one of these thoughts would make me want to spring out of bed in the morning. A friend of mine once gave a 7 minute speech about the worth of shower thoughts, I like to believe I think million dollar shower thoughts that I forget as soon as my foot touches the mat outside the bathroom door every day, so I’m here to test her theories.
3. There’s so many things I want to do and learn: I want to learn how to make kick-ass butter chicken, I want to become a professional bhangra dancer, I want to start a podcast, I want to start learning the piano from scratch, learn graphic design, machine learning, I want to read a book a week, but all of these things need me to start at the very bottom, and that’s an intimidating thought. With writing there’s this comfort of familiarity, of not having to face immediate failure, a (albeit false) sense of accomplishment, which makes it somewhat easier to be consistent, and keep at it.
4. As a homage to my journalistic aspirations, and as something I can show to my children when I tell them I had a penchant for writing and the only pieces of writing to my name they find are “How to Placements” or an emo poem named “Valerie”.
5. Everyday I read articles people write and wonder how they spend less than 2 braincells writing an article on Medium and call themselves writers, my immediate thoughts are “I can write so much better than that”, so my growth-mindset inner mummy challenged me “to write so much better than that”. I’m teaching myself to not disparage someone else’s work that I didn’t even TRY to do. So here I am, TRYING.

Be kind, internet.