When I was a child, I had a dream of becoming an author. My parents had instilled a love for reading from young and would never begrudge the buying of books. I lapped up The Archie Comics series, even reading and re-reading dog-eared copies during a meal. I also devoured R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series and developed an interest in writing ghost stories of my own. There is a blue file, started when I was 9, which holds some of these stories and ideas that were never brought to life. I would print out these stories and share them with my friends in school. Over the next few years, I moved on to newsletters, writing about friends, things that were of interest to me, adding in a comic strip like you'd find in a newspaper. This too was printed out and placed in a file that was shared around.
When I was in secondary school, I discovered the joy of poetry. I started writing poems at 15 and this continued for quite some time. I just wrote because I felt like it. As an adult, I would write here and there but these are far and few. When I was polytechnic, I started blogging via Livejournal then moving to Blogspot, with a brief time on Wordpress. Soon after, I discovered playwrighting and wrote a few plays for the school Drama Club and later, for my community theatre group and then I stopped. My late-teens and early-twenties saw a proliferation of my writing.
I'm not sure when exactly but I eventually stopped doing it.
Some of my close friends know of my fear of writing more openly and freely on Facebook or LinkedIn. These platforms are more public in a way than the early days of blogging. There was an audience then but you kind of have at least a somewhat close relationship with the people in your blogging community. Musings on Facebook have been met with defensive posts by people who were the posts weren't even intended for and I believe there are many who write much better about the things I like and about the industry I'm in.
It has pierced my confidence in recent years and there have been many times when I question if anyone should care about my words and thoughts. When the pandemic first hit, I had actually written a response about the pandemic that I had only shared with a grand total 2 people who kindly gave me feedback but I ended up not posting it and I don't think I will.
However, recently I've been thinking more about writing again and I'm just going to do it. So, here I am. If you don't like anything I've written, tell me in private? Haha.
And maybe, I'll share some of the pandemic reflections in parts now that I've had some distance from it. I guess this is a return to blogging then?
\\\Shai