Chinmayee Manjunath

For more than a decade now, I’ve helped people write. Magazine stories. Instagram captions. Blog posts. Newsletters. Books. And more books. As an editor, your day job is in  the business of other people’s communication – you spend all your time understanding their thoughts, feelings and experiences,  and then translating them into text. Or, content, as we call it now.

Along the way, I lost the ability to write for myself. I’ve tried multiple times over the years to maintain a blog, a newsletter, several diaries. I have about four book ideas in my head. I send pitches to friends at magazines and websites and sometimes write them. It’s all very pathetic, this business of having a writer struggle inside of your editor self.

But. I have now decided to take the advice I offer clients, and start with baby steps. I have assigned myself the task of posting every day on this blog. It could be 50 words, or a 1000. That does not matter. I just have to write every single day.

What sparked this is a thought I had the other day. Much of our life will not be as we want it to be. I don’t say this negatively. I state it as fact. I turned 40 this year and if there is one lesson I can share, it is this one.

Life will shock us, surprise us, throw things at us we never expected, take us up and down, give us gifts we never thought we deserve, deny us what we always thought we deserve, and just test us, test us, test us. And this is life. It is what our souls chose. Living it is the only task we have here on earth.

The choice then is – are you going to play big or stay small? And I do not mean that in terms of achievement and accomplishment of material or visible value. All you need to do is inhabit your reality fully – the mess, the beauty, the falls, the wins. All of it.

And with this blog, I want to at least start playing.