My creative journey started when, at the tender age of nine, I sat down at the family computer and wrote what would become the first paragraph of the only novel I have ever finished. It was a fantasy story, heavily inspired by the Harry Potter series. Its main character, obviously, was a thinly veiled version of myself. Even then, I somehow managed to inject wit and humor into my writing—qualities I didn’t remember having at that age until this post brought the memory back.
When the paragraph was finished, it dawned on me what I’d done—I wrote my first piece that wasn’t just a child’s gibberish destined for her mother’s sentimentally preserved archives. This was news worth sharing. Bursting with pride and excitement, I leapt off the rotating office chair and ran to another room to deliver the announcement to my mum: I was going to be a writer. She smiled indulgently, encouragingly. She’s been a quiet fan of my writing ever since.
I can’t think of a single explanation of what led me to write that paragraph, except maybe the fact that I’d enjoyed reading immensely since an early age and, perhaps, was curious if telling stories would bring me as much joy as reading them. Now that I look back at this childhood memory of my first intentionally written piece, it feels as though writing called to me rather than I chose it.
In spite of how young I was, that instance of writing—with intention and conviction—was the beginning of my creative journey that would become a lifelong thread.
Writing For Self-Discovery
It wasn’t until a few years later that I started my first personal journal. There seemed to be no need for it during the pure and carefree childhood days, but entering my early teenage years introduced an unprecedented spectrum of emotions that demanded a medium through which they could be processed and released. Journaling became that medium.
I don’t have my first journal anymore—perhaps my mum does?—but I vividly remember how creative I used to get with narrating personal experiences. It wasn’t just listing events, one after another. It was the kind of creative writing where storytelling and self-expression would take center stage, with dialogues incorporated into descriptive and deeply emotional personal narratives. During the day, I was plunged into the unpredictability and chaos of the outside world, facing—at different stages of my life—bullying, the rise and fall of friendships, peer pressure, and my first romantic feelings. In the evenings, I would take refuge in my room, reliving that day’s experiences on paper, trying to make sense of life, other people, and most importantly, of where I stood in the midst of all that.
Journaling as part of my journey wasn’t just a teenage girl’s mainstream hobby—it was a private world-building tool. It offered me a world I could control, shape, and retreat into.
Nurturing an Inner Writer’s Ambition
After that fateful first paragraph, I continued on my path of writing fiction. While my journals contained unedited personal narratives of my life, the “Rita” folder on the family computer contained drafts of novels, essays, and short stories through which I honed and polished my writing craft. Those were meant to be read by others, so I worked on them with twice the enthusiasm, agonizing over every comma, revising draft after draft after draft. Most importantly, though, I had so much fun writing them.
The joy of writing was the most powerful incentive to stick to the craft that I’ve ever known. Even before my writing found its audience outside of the family circle, I remember how effortless it was to take pride in what I wrote. The happier I was with the results of my creative efforts, the more I wanted to keep creating—and even venturing into uncharted territories like novellas and, eventually, poetry. It didn’t hurt that I received high grades from my teachers for my writing assignments and high praise from my peers for the poems that I’d started sharing online.
Those were the times when writing felt natural and joyful—as if I had given myself permission to play and experiment, trusting that, as long as I put my heart and soul into it, the result would be sure to touch, to stir something in whoever read it. In spite of putting a lot of effort into my writing, somehow, it always felt so effortless. I hadn’t heard of the impostor syndrome yet. Self-doubt hadn’t yet crept into my creative world.
Creative Hibernation
If many children believe adulthood will never change them, I was certainly one of them, but change came unceremoniously as I moved abroad to start university. Alone in a foreign country for the first time, I was stretching myself as much as I could to get acclimatized, do well at school, and soon enough, fit a part-time job into my schedule.
Mounting stress and exhaustion were taking their toll, and I sat down to write less and less often. There always seemed to be something more urgent to do, and amid the growing list of responsibilities, not only did writing start to feel as though it could wait—it started to feel unserious. A child’s ambition. The lack of practice introduced and then reinforced the idea that what humble talent there was in me was wasting away, because who even has the time to write these days?
For years, I didn’t write anything that wasn’t a university assignment, and the stagnation of this writing break kept reinforcing the internal barriers that made it harder and harder to return to writing. There was also a new kind of pressure—the pressure for my stories to “mean something.” The innocent joy of writing as a creative outlet had gone. It felt as though I had no story worth sharing, and I refused to write unless I was convinced my stories truly mattered. The impostor syndrome had found its way into my writing journey at last.
Reclaiming the Page
If that was it, how come we’re here?
Because in recent years, I’ve explored different creative (and not-so-creative) paths, changed several jobs, considered various careers—and nothing has ever come even close to writing in importance and resonance.
The return to writing after a heaven-only-knows-how-long break came gradually—I started a new journal and stuck to it, however irregularly. Occasionally, I’d get an itch to sit down and write a few pages that would end up lost on my computer, never to see the light of day. One of such pieces—written at a cafe incidentally called Tom’s Diner and rediscovered by accident as I was cleaning my archives—inspired the very first post I ever published here. That piece was a page-long personal essay on how I’d never wanted to do anything more than write. It started with, “In the end, I do want to be a writer.”
Starting a blog wasn’t a decision I made on the spur of the moment either—the idea first visited me in the beginning of 2020. I dismissed it—”Don’t be absurd”—and went on with my corporate job.
Five years lie between the moment I thought of writing publicly for the first time and the year I actually did it, and in these five years, my impostor syndrome hasn’t gone anywhere. I’m overcoming it by returning to writing after a break—in spite of there having been a break. Every time I hit “Publish,” I take a step further in battling my writing insecurities. And I do it for one simple reason: nothing has ever felt more true to my heart than this. In my moments of frustration at the world, writing is both the medium for stomping my feet and a comforting hug for when my tantrum is over. When I feel lost, confused, or uncertain, writing is the only thing that makes sense.
And sharing this journey on a platform dedicated to writing is, I think, a promising symptom of me working towards reclaiming that inner child who wrote without shame or second-guessing, and who would probably laugh at the idea that her stories weren’t worth sharing.
Writing as My Creative Journey
From age nine to now, writing has been a constant—even when it was dormant, even when it was waiting, it had never left. It survived my being busy with university, stressed with work, overwhelmed with moving abroad, convinced I had nothing important to share, and determined to find a “proper” job that would feel fulfilling. Having waited through all that, it’s still here, the driving force behind me sharing my voice.
It’s clear, then, that I didn’t really choose writing by typing up that first paragraph on the family computer. I didn’t choose writing by starting my first private notebook or even by launching No Wrong Words. It chose me. And it keeps choosing me after all this time.
Questions to Sit With
- When did I first feel creatively alive—and what was I doing at the time?
- What stories or forms of expression have I abandoned that might be waiting for me to return?
- How do I know when something feels “true” to who I am?
- What internal or external voices have made me doubt the value of my creative work?
- What would it look like to create just for myself—for joy, not approval?
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