In 2014 I was a 20-year-old, confused, useless kid. I had not done well in my final exams at school, and had consequently lost the opportunity to study in a government university. (In Sri Lanka, this earns you the distinction ‘Useless Child.’) I was looking for something interesting to do.
I had always had a knack for writing. When I heard about the concept of ‘blogging’ for the first time, even though I did not fully understand why anyone would produce essentially free content at end and put them up on a website, the thought fascinated me. To me, blogging seemed like a perfect medium to let myself be discovered — if I may — and express freely (I was never really good at talking anyway.)
So, I started a blog.
Now, to give you some context, I grew up in a middle class household that had very little money to spend on fancy things. I got my first mobile phone (a Nokia C5 — oh, the good old days) only when I turned 17, and I didn’t have a proper internet connection at home until after I finished schooling at 19. So, in 2014, the internet was still a new thing to me.
In my innocent ignorance, I had signed up for a Blogger profile, hoping that things would magically happen and people would discover my blog instantly. I also started a Facebook page — it was a full on virtual ego fest. But I didn’t know better.
My first post went live on the 20th March, 2014. It was a motley concoction of a post about Flight MH370 which went missing, the Russian annexation of Crimea, and a bold statement at the end about how the Cold War never really ended. Needless to say, I immediately felt like an expert in the trade.
The feedback was hearteningly positive.
For several months after that, I kept writing one blog post a week. They were almost always focused on some international political issue. I picked something I was interested in, did my research, and tried to deconstruct the finer points the best way I could. Now when I look back to those early write-ups, I can’t help but think there must have been unhealthy amounts of pseudo-intellectualism involved. But I was on a mission to make a name for myself, so the blogging went on.
In May 2014, I accidentally saw a post from UNICEF, calling for applications for their Voices of Youth Blogging Internship. I applied. And to my genuine surprise, I got selected along with 20 other young bloggers from around the world. The terms of the internship were simple: we had to write a blog post about a youth-related topic every week.
I was feeling rather good about myself at this point. I had scored my first victory in the blogging game.
Again in May I was approached on Twitter by an Indian media outlet named IndiaPost Live. For some reason, they had chosen me to represent Sri Lanka in a panel discussed that would be streamed live on their online TV channel. I accepted.
On the program I found myself talking about policy matters that I had never even give any serious thought to. I was faking it like a champ.
There, another victory.
All this exposure (it seemed like a lot back then) meant that I had been doing something right with my blog. I liked writing, so I kept at it for some more time.
Along the way, I lost interest of international politics and my writing suffered as a result. I couldn’t write down anything worth sharing, so I had to abandon my one-post-a-week routine.
Blogging for me was never really a consistent habit after that. Even though I had lofty ambitions at the very outset, it turned out to be temporary high that I enjoyed, simply because I had little else to do. I’ve barely written anything in 2015 and 2016, save for the one article or two that were the result of some trigger event — eg: the Presidential Election in January 2015 and the Independence Day Celebrations in February 2016.
Because of all this, in these 3 years of blogging, I have only published about 50 articles in total, which is a dismal number given the span of time.
A different approach
In December 2017 I told myself that I should get back to writing. This time I had a different approach in mind. This time, there were no illusions of grandeur. After all, writing could only ever be a hobby for me, so I was going to enjoy it.
I was going to do two kinds of writing. (a) Deconstructing and trying to understand things I was fascinated by, and (b) Documenting various aspects of my life.
Things I wanted to understand
As do many of you, I come across all kinds of fascinating things in books, movies, and on the internet. I end up not giving any second thoughts to and forgetting many of these. I wanted to to change this, and the solution for me was to write them down.
Instead of simply documenting the things I was intrigued by, I decided to dig deeper in to each topic, and deconstruct them in the hope of understanding those concepts better, much like I did with international politics back when I started to blog. In this vein, the Stanford Prison Experiment became the basis of my post What Does a Prison and a University have in Common?, and the movie Arrival took me down a deep rabbit hole that manifested itself in the post The Perils of Determinism.
There is a fair bit of further reading and thinking that goes into a post like this, so they don’t get written all that often. When they do, they’re quite fun to indulge in.
Documenting my life
This has been particularly insightful, to say the least. I started documenting with a simple post that listed all the podcasts I was listening to at the time and what I liked about them. Since then I’ve written about my first job and the new company I started recently.
After 3 years of blogging (on and off) I haven’t had my ‘big break’ yet, nor do I expect one, and you can probably say why. I don’t force myself to write regularly either, as I did in the beginning. I simply write when I feel like doing it, and when I do I quite enjoy it. I’m writing for myself, and no one else.
But in all honesty, because I still am an egotistical human being, the occasional like and comment helps me keep going.
Leave a Reply