..and we turn 5

In all the rush that has been my life the past one month, this little day got completely forgotten. Feel a trifle guilty, but I suppose it’s okay considering all.

So it’s FIVE full years since I opened a blog (started at blogger) and started pouring my thoughts out. The good, bad and everything in between.

It’s been a  journey, a cliche nevertheless, but an applicable one. Journeys are what happens when you start at a point and reach another point. It’s a changing course when you look back and the traveler as fundamentally unchanged, will and must adapt, morph and grow as they experience new territories, situations as they encounter new interactions.

My blog and all of the 581 posts within are testimonials to the person that I am and have been, the crusades I raged within and without, the joys and the pinnacles (however small) that I have scaled. It has been an interesting five years and I can attest looking back (and I don’t even have to read any archives) that this has been my most rapidly growing stage. Like those growth spurts that kids go through, and one Spring you see them in their shorts and geeky glasses and the Fall later they turn into these gorgeous elegant young ladies in pretty little dresses off to the prom. The analogy may seem off, as am talking more on the physical aspect of the change, but in my case it has been literally a phase in my life that I have grown as an adult the most.

As much as I enjoy being online, and have made some friends who mean a lot more to me than some of my family, it has also shown me that the world isn’t really all that a nice place. One does get beaten and tricked and used. Lessons are learned, some to be forgotten coz our (my) heart is incapable of becoming cynical, to want to believe that there is still goodness out there and that Karma exists. A hope that keeps us going. Some lessons will remain with me to my grave.

At the end of it all, am thankful for the fact that as much as I have changed and become hardened (comparatively) I have retained the zeal that defines me. It has not been easy, yet it hasn’t been all that conscious an effort. I suppose, there is truth to the saying that what we gather as we go along are layers we add to our real self, the one that we are born with and the one that shapes us before we become adults and are let loose into this world.

My writing.

I’ve always been a scribbler. Putting thoughts onto paper has come naturally to me since a kid. During those god-awful rough teen years, I remember writing to my father on various issues, from apologies to outbursts to explaining my actions. I was a shy, painfully shy introverted kid who had just a grand total of one friend through the school years. Speech and speaking up were drowned deep within, my lips sealed shut by an invisible block in my throat. The words formed in my head, they crowded me from within, and they struggled to be released, but nothing much happened to my own frustration and parents’ annoyance. Writing was my salvation. So I wrote. Plain, blunt, and spilling it all as quickly as possible. I didn’t think twice on what came out, but they did. I also imagine a teenager’s thoughts are most likely as clear as mud, considering the rules, restrictions and the society we lived in. I didn’t care and maybe just maybe writing down without inhibitions has made me radical in my thoughts translating to behavior. Coz I imagine when a thought is expressed (no matter the medium) it releases the person from the prison that holds the thought. It’s free, it takes shape and it forms a vision in all clarity for us to see. Whether anyone else sees it the way we do or not is really irrelevant at that point. So, we skip around happily, in the secure knowledge that the thought is what it is. At least I do.

I see that blogging’s different from writing. There was a time when I could open this page, start writing, publish it and go to bed. That’s personal blogging for you. There is no thought, no expectation, no planning, no vision. It’s words and they spill.

Writing is a lot sterner, even if you do humor. It forces one to sit up and read, edit and re-edit your lines. To make sure you crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s and that the subject agrees with the object and that there are no typos that the Word overlooked. Stuff like that simply occasionally kills the complete joy one gets in rambling. It’s a necessary evil. Just like social networks have become. Like the elephant in the room that no one concedes to being a pain, but have to squeeze around it and be careful not to ruffle it in fear of being crushed.

I best enjoyed 2008 and to an extent 2009. Those were the years when I grew for the words I typed here.

I can’t wait for 2010 to get over. It’s been a mess in a few different ways. Mess not in the “o crap I have a mess on my hands” kinda mess, but “gosh, my closet’s a mess” kind of mess. Tons to unravel, clear, unwind and untangle. Sort through, to discard and hold onto the ones that matter the most. The ones that my heart says and the ones that my mind says too. Coz, as much as I believe I should listen to my head, I am fond of my heart, and I can’t just ignore it.

Happy birthday to my blog, to the time we have spent together, and for being there for me. It’s been a cathartic and an eye-opening experience and if I had to do it all over again, I most certainly will.

Love,

Rads