I am sitting on the living room couch, nervously tapping the keyboard staring at the blank white screen, thoughts running in every possible direction. In the last 15 minutes, I have setup a blog, named it, created a Pinterest board for it, called my sister asking her to design a cover page and declared that this is going to be ‘the’ thing. I have planned it all!

Now that the adrenaline has subsided and it is time to write – I wonder where to begin? What do I do with this? What do I want to write?

So have I really planned it all? Clearly not.

As these thoughts spiral, my mind goes back to a distant memory – the sweet summer of 2009.

When I was young [under 10 years], I started to get into reading – something I love to this day. Back then it was a combination of my English textbooks, Harry Potter and Readers Digest. When we were in English class, the teacher – Rehana Ma’am (who I looked upto, had a girl crush on – not important!) would always select me to answer the end of the chapter questions and applaud my answers. Coincidentally, she was my teacher from 3rd Std to 10th Std so we formed this long relationship of her praising me always and me adoring her always. Over the course of these years, a lot of my friends started approaching me to help them answer questions for their homework. Weirdly so, this gave me some kick, some confidence that I was good at something. The confidence really took off when I won an Inter-school or Intra-school English writing competition along with some other competitions in a year (don’t remember which ones!) where I won first places.

It was gratifying to know that there was something I was good at and more than that I found something I really enjoyed doing. And since that day I harboured a quiet desire to be a writer.

As it was, life had different plans. A lot of things transpired between the sweet summer of 2009 and today where this old dream of mine was left behind – like a carefully saved letter in a box sitting at the bottom of your cupboard. Occasionally I would open the box, stare and close the lid back again. I tried to dust this box a couple of times – in the shape of some freelance work, toying with the idea of a blog but ultimately this box of mine went back into the cupboard.

Enter rtCamp. I started working here a year back and among a lot of other things I got introduced to this unique writing platform -WordPress and slowly it dawned on me – that little old dream of mine didn’t seem so far away.

So here I am 20 odd years later, picking up the pieces of a childhood summer dream and seeing where it goes. I am not sure if I can make something of this (consistency hasn’t been a strong suit lately) but I need this check. I need to write without fear, hesitation, without any filters to see if that writer in me is still there.

-Bareen.