Building Courage to Call Myself a Writer & Publishing My First Book

I’ve been a writer ever since I was a little kid – and yet as an adult, I always hesitated to call myself one. 

I remember bringing a notepad to school field trips and filling it up with notes and observations – not because the teacher asked, but because I wanted to. I remember the feeling when my first article was published in the school newspaper – a piece about animals at risk of extinction that I wrote when I was 8. I remember creating stories about my sister, my cousins and I where we had superpowers and fought the bad guys together – and reading it to them during family dinners. 

I’ve been writing all my life, but at some point I stopped sharing it with others. I never really understood why, until watching Reshma Saujani’s “Teach girls bravery, not perfection” TED talk some years ago. She says many women gravitate towards careers they know they will excel at, after a lifetime being taught to aim for stability and to avoid failure and risk. We’ve all heard about the report that says men apply for a job when they meet 60% of the requirements, while women don’t apply unless they meet 100%. 

I had been waiting to call myself a writer until I felt I met 100% of the impossibly high standards I set for myself. Even the thought of saying it out loud made me blush and swallow my words. It was the fear of others’ reactions, yes – but mostly of my own. If I allowed my secret to take shape, to be out there in the real world – there would be no turning back. It was too intimate, too weird, too much to be shared, I thought. Better to keep it sheltered within, safe from risk, failure, and judgment. Free, to some extent, within the confines of my own mind. But still bound. 

It took a little breakdown for a breakthrough to set me free. Last year I had health issues that forced me to slow down – and before I understood that what I was going through was bigger than just the physical symptoms, liberation came in the form of art. I wrote ‘HOMECOMING: A Quest for Homefulness’ with no intention of it being a full story – it was just one page at first, a watercolor doodle loosely inspired by a tarot reading I did for myself. I had never painted with watercolor before, nor did I have a deep knowledge of tarot (far from it). It was meant to mean nothing. But before I knew it, a story formed so clearly in my mind, I had no choice but to write it. It came to me through dreams. It came to me when I was cycling home from work. It came to me when I was showering, eating, even when I didn’t want to be thinking about it. It was as insistent as it was inescapable, as intimate as it was imperfect. 

And despite all of its imperfections, I suddenly found myself taken by this fierce desire to follow through, to be reckless about the high standards I’d set for myself as a writer and just put it out there, just for fun. It’s been 3 months since ‘HOMECOMING’ was published and, to my surprise, its intimate weirdness is apparently what resonated most with readers. I never even expected to receive comments or reviews, but the ones I did so far felt like an embrace to the unhealed parts of me that kept my inner writer restrained. Thank you, with all my heart, to everyone who bought a copy and supported me on this first step of my journey. 

I wrote on the introduction of my book that “it takes a gentle type of courage to let everything crumble while embracing one’s beautiful imperfections”. I hope you can embrace yours.