A Complicated Affair of Words

For as long as I can remember, I have hesitated to formally acknowledge my writing. I’m not saying I wasn’t writing, because I often was, but rather that the relationship between me and my writing was, well, an aloof one.

We have been like two strangers sharing a space but never interacting with one another except in brief, passing acknowledgements when encountering each other…never pausing to examine the crux of why we are even together at all!

There’s this Urdu word which I really love for the way it sounds and resonates :‘ajnabi. It means ‘stranger/alien’. This word comes to my mind when I think of how my writing and I have co-existed, side by side and yet the distance and gulf between us as wide as we could manage while still being in each other’s orbits.

And that’s just it. It didn’t matter where I was with my writing, or where it was with me, we were always circling each other in a mysterious dance of a shared fate that was decreed before I was even born.

This complicated state of affairs has been the status quo for so long, I almost let myself cave to a life where my writing was the roommate I wanted no one to acknowledge was anything more than a barely rent-paying annoyance.

But things are changing, thank God. I’d been so good at planting word seeds in hidden corners that I stopped believing I could make a garden of words that others might want to take a stroll in, one that my heart could be proud of—until now.

While new possibilities for my writing have emerged (and this has been mostly delightful), there are days that involve the painful unlearning of patterns long-established and detrimental to my writing health. And still, nothing is more painful than the regret of having ignored my writing for so many years—it makes this new pain of growth a good kind. The kind that has a releasing effect, inspires seedlings to thrive in sunnier spots and the kind that makes it possible to hope for a full blooming garden one day.

Until that day, patient reader, you’ll find me here, planting language in little clay pots.

I welcome you, whole-heartedly to this, the sunny windowsill of my writing hopes, where the array of clay pots, full of tiny expressive sprouts and word-seedlings, are being nurtured with the sun and water of my attention and love…

That’s what I needed, and my writing too!

How about you?

Love & Peace always,

Tabassum