Who? Me?

Today, well not exactly today I guess I can never start my work without procrastinating at least a little bit, when our teacher for the course called Idea Development asked us to maintain a journal, my immediate thought was that it'd be an extremely easy thing to do, what with my past experience of working as a freelance writer and more importantly writing being one of the few things that made me feel like I could make a difference. However, my relief and smugness was cut short soon enough when he furthered about how we'd expected to write about who we think we are, and where are we coming from... "Serious shit" he called it.

Serious shit indeed. And when you actually got down to writing about it, whoa there's no right way to begin is there? But that's one of the thing that makes me enjoy a love and hate relationship with writing. In fact, it is one of the "beauties" of writing if I may add. You could start writing from where the story ends, have multiple flashbacks, decide it's only a dream when it's only starting to make sense or have no beginning or end altogether, just clusters and clusters of random thoughts intervowen together in a stream of words to make it appear as they ought to make sense to the reader. And even though you might have guessed to which category does this blog post belong to, just stick for a little bit longer if you have read till here.

To actually get down to business, I have always been an implusive person. Very impulsive. And it's very easy to steer me even though my dad would like to believe otherwise. Just tell me something that I cannot do. Or even better, shouldn't do. And I'd go do exactly that. That's the trick. The only trick.  When I was in O levels, giving the final bunch of papers, my mom came up to me and said "You can't take commerce and science subjects together" and voila, I had registered for all the subjects my school was ready to offer at the time, both science and commerce and otherwise. While preparing for my A levels, all the tutors that I had kept saying that I can't do it in a year - that I should take my time with it and indeed, the very next day, I had registered for my AS and A2 papers altogether for the same year. In ACCA ... ah well, you get the drift.

Later on, however, I began to realize that I wanted to do things for me. Not because someone said that I cannot do them. This does not mean that I stopped being who I was earlier. I just sort of learnt to combine the two. Call it Media Science, Arts, Journalism, Music, or whatever, this was something I had been yearning for all my life. To find out who I am or to at least know that I am trying to was the feeling that I had wanted to experience. Working 9 to 5 provided me with ample opportunities to buy lots of shoes but left me with a sense of direction and meaning that was hazy at best.

I'd come home feeling disillusioned and distraught with a heavy sense of feeling that something is wrong. My mom, my sole confidante at the time failed to realize how could I be sad when I was so "financially empowered". The thing was even I didn't know what I was missing because I had never experienced what was it like to have what I wanted before. I had never earlier tried to be in sync with what I was feeling or tried to give it a medium of expression. It was something that was only confined to a few words here and there that would get published in Young Times but elsewhere, they were non existent.

It was 25th April, 2010 - exactly a year after I had started working at a semi-governmental organization as basically a content manager. I sat there working at my desk. I was writing a press release for the event that was about to happen two days later. And I was writing about how it went. That's how press releases normally work - something which had surprised me when I was told what was to be done. Anyways, my co worker sat across me munching biscuits and having tea (not to imply that I was the only employee that worked in the organization) and asked "So what are you going to do after your ACCA?"

I replied "CFA I guess. Though sometimes I wish I had the time to do a full fledged program on Journalism."

She shots me a disbelieving look and laughing slightly says "Yeah... but you can't leave your job to do that!"

This is my story, albeit badly written. This is how I got here.