If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I like to write—a lot.

I don’t quite know who I inherited the urge to write from (some say it was from my grandfather as he was the only other writer in our family) but I do remember when I developed the urge to write. And ironically, it was when I was in engineering school.

Somewhere between all the logic and numbers, I yearned for creativity and words.

Which was how this blog was concieved. On a random Friday evening after one too many glasses of red and a binge watching session of Sex and the City.

Maybe I wanted to be like Carrie (but the bootleg version because lord knows I did not have 2K to drop on Manolo Blanics). Regardless of the unhinged thought process, my love for writing was born.

Since then, I started one book and never completed it. But my urge to get a book into the world never stopped. So I wrote another book. A book of poems, called 3 AM Musings by Upasana Desai:

While that book was being published, I was quietly working in the background on another book of semi-personal essays that spoke around some pivotal points in the South-Asian community whilst using my experiences as a vessel to convey those messages. With a sense of humour of cource because it is never that serious.

However despite the odds stacked against me, I became a second-time published author and on this journey I realised something.

Writing is a very lonely route. While you may meet other writers along the way through meetups and creative writing sessions. Ultimately a large portion of the time is spent with your laptop or notebook and copious amounts of caffiene.

So in the event that no one told you this today. I will.

Whether you are a blogger or an author. Writing takes courage. It takes courage to put your words out there for the world to love or criticise. It takes patience to proofread those edits until they make sense. It takes persistence to push past all the ‘writer’s blocks’ that will inevitably come your way. So if no one has told you yet. I am proud of you and I see you. In those moments where you will want to throw your draft into the trash (and trust me those moments will happen) because it does not seem to be in alignment with what you thought it would be at that point. I want you to take a deep breath, take a step away from your art and come back to it at a later time. But always come back to it, because if you don’t that feeling of ‘what could be’ will always gnaw at you.

So in those moments when you feel like giving up, just know that I (and hundreds of other writers) have been where you are and we (as a collective) are proud of you. After all, it is easy for people to mock you for what you are doing or criticise you for your work, but ultimately you dared to do something they did not. And that takes guts.