There’s a bound and laminated booklet of around fifteen pages that lies in the bedroom cupboard of my grandparents’ house. The title page makes promise of a fantastical adventure in a distant fairyland and is subtitled with my name in a stylized font; the best book cover that a ten-year-old could design with the help of a desktop and an uncontainable imagination. That booklet currently remains the first and only novel I’ve ever written, born out of the restlessness that comes with summer vacation.
That was the same summer I started a blog, where I would churn out chapters and chapters of stories that took place in fictional worlds I had created; I would essentially daydream on paper. Writing was a natural impulse, and the high of storytelling became an integral aspect to my person. The endless possibilities of my imagination became more comfortable and captivating than the actuality that faltered in comparison. In hindsight, I view this rapacious storytelling as a manifestation of my hunger for adventure and experience, offering me a thrilling vicarious existence that didn’t challenge my immobilising fears and anxieties.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are at amusement parks, and they’re all largely negative; I was either crying at a mammoth Mickey Mouse or screaming because I was too scared to ride on a carousel. Just like my persistent storytelling, this peculiar fragility and timidity has been a substantial part of my personhood. So, when my family moved cities at the age of fourteen, and the adjustment and discomfort of the transition gave rise to my first experience with anxiety and depression, I shouldn’t have been as surprised. After all, I was still, in many ways, a fledgling terribly petrified of a world that was much bigger than what I had previously been exposed to.
For the first time in a while, I was a fish out of water. In a story this would be framed as an inciting incident, prompting an itch in my fingertips to type away vigorously at a keyboard till the plot reached a satisfying resolution. However, this was reality, not a magical fairyland of infinite possibility, and I was faced with a sort of overwhelming and paralysing emotion I’d never felt before. This dissonance between the conclusive and remarkable lives that played out in my head and the disappointing actuality of my inaction and self-doubt, created a disproportionate discontentment over the years that infected almost every avenue of my lifestyle. This also meant that I stopped writing as voraciously as I once did. Apart from an angsty poem every now and then, I faltered in expression because of my incapacitating insecurity. I was abandoning an impulse that was once so inseparable from my sense of self.
However, once I truly started tending to my mental health, I discovered journaling. Journaling allowed me to frame my experiences as narratives and identify where I was letting my fears eclipse my potential. It was a form of writing that required acknowledgement instead of escape. I began unloading years of unfair self-condemnation and processing emotions that had been simmering below the surface for too long. Over the past year, I’ve cultivated that familiar itch to voraciously put pen to paper and reach a resolution, except I myself am the protagonist worth rooting for. By treating my life with the same attention and confidence that fueled the plethora of stories I wrote as a child, I began finding the magic and adventure in my own reality.
That bound and laminated booklet in my grandparents’ cupboard is still a prized possession, one I fondly look back on every summer when I visit my hometown, and the numerous stories on my blog are still revisited occasionally when I experience bouts of nostalgia. However, journaling has helped me find a story that has given me an incomparable joy to write and revisit: the story of my own exciting, turbulent and adventurous life, one that has compelled me to document it for the rest of my days. The act of writing is no longer a medium of vicarious pleasure – it is now the delightful consequence of living an abundant and fulfilling reality.