My First Blog :)

Not mine but had it on my fav pin for so long.

Hello all,

First of all I feel excited and embarrassed because as much as I love writing, I’m notoriously shy about my work. It’s because of a thought that I might be wrong or end up being the butt of the joke which would break my heart.

Writing is such a fun process for me. The more I write, the more words pour out of me seamlessly forming sentences, paragraphs and emotions.

It’s not just writing that I adore. It’s reading, comprehending, wording, understanding and learning. It’s the whole of English. Languages have heart. This one has mine.

Growing Up With English

English isn’t my first language. I haven’t even thought of English up until grade 2. When my whole life was uprooted from a state to another state. From a city so familiar to a city so foreign. Suddenly everyone spoke a different language and came from different cultures. The only thing that held us together was English language.

Growing up I never gave much importance to it as much as I spent for Science or Mathematics. English was merely a subject which I needed to pass and an exam in which I always ran out of time. Sometimes it was even frustrating having to put so much effort into a subject and never getting perfect scores. My vocabulary was minuscule and my handwriting was a pile of hot mess. My mom used to deadpan the words looked like ants.

New Budding Romance

Start of high school — fresh after the pandamic — English was considered the most scoring and an easy subject to ace. I went with the crowd and focused on more “important” and “relevant” subjects. Studied my butt off for Mathematics, Sciences, and even Hindi (my third language). English was a one-night-before-exam ritual. The drawback was, it’s all that was needed. From parents to teachers including our English teacher pushed us to do the exact same thing. My scores weren’t bad. If anything they were exactly how I needed it to be.

Then there was Payal ma’am. My grade 10 teacher. She was like a tall lighthouse to a person who didn’t know they were drowning in a big, black ocean. Her teaching was so immaculate I would lose myself in those fictional stories and melancholic poems. Then there was Bhawna ma’am, my 11th-12th grade teacher, who fueled my desires more. These powerful ladies taught me that anything, especially English, don’t need to be taught in straight lines and perfect squares. There’s fun in jumping around from topic to topic and some werid soothe in not following the pattern.

Then I got into books. A whole new escape from a stressful and cynical world. I remember being so into books that I used to rile up my parents because I couldn’t keep my nose out of books and totally forgot about academic books.

My peers always complained about reading English and “handwriting” letters when no one simply uses that mode of communication anymore. Everyone — each and every single one — firmly believe that this subject is underneath them. They still solved math equations or calculated the magnetic charge of an electron or balanced a chemical equation. That’s when I realised I’ve changed. And I loved it. So very much. It felt good when everyone praised me about my handwriting or my essays or stories. However, it’s a horrible experience when no one can understand how much I love this subject. Some people say they do but I don’t truly think they did. I truly never did. It didn’t dawn upon me how much I cherish this.

The Cost Of Taking Things For Granted

Now that the time has arrived, it looks like I’m standing at a crossroad where I have to bid farewell to this one thing I hold deep in my heart. Now that time has come, I seem to realise how hard it is for me to leave this behind. Technically I’m not completely leaving it behind. I’ll read and communicate in this language but leaving behind writing and learning is like losing a part of myself. I can read countless essays and write pages of handwritten notes. It gives me a specific kind of rush I can’t put into words even if that’s all I love.

However, I don’t want to leave it behind. I’ll stick to it like a chewy taffy even if it wants rid of me. Thus, I’ve decided to write my feelings down so people would understand, empathise and relate to me.

I hope everyone likes reading my writing journey — if anyone reads, that is — and love this with me. If you don’t, well, I’m doing this for myself anyways. I feel like I missed a few points I wanted to put down on this but that’s okay we still have a lot of blogs ahead of us.

Thanks for reading.

Love,

S.