It is amazing how one person can make such a difference to how you ‘see’ yourself and what you believe you can accomplish. That person can either build you up or break you down – if you allow them to.

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to write, to tell stories, to find out and share information. The path I landed up taking was into librarianship and so I found myself surrounded by books and information, unfortunately not written by me. But I found happiness.

In 2002, I started working in a financial institution where one of my tasks was to write a monthly report. From day one, I struggled. I was not used to working with Word and I was constantly beaten down by my manager. Even after attending a course on report writing, I was still not getting it right and up to ‘her’ standards.

I still remember her words to me, “I made a mistake in hiring you because I thought you could write. But you can’t. Perhaps you should just focus on research instead.”  Ironically, this is what I did. Fast forward 10 years and through friends who believed in me, I started a blog. I’ve loved every single minute of it. The feedback is not so much about my writing skills, but about what I’ve been writing about.

No one criticizes the occasional spelling mistake. No one tells me I don’t know how to use styles properly. I don’t get red pen scratches all over my posts. The comments and feedback are always positive and always telling me how my posts have hit a mark or touched people in a certain way.

That’s powerful and humbling at the same time.

I was chatting to a friend recently and he was expressing concern that in life, majority of people can not articulate what the want to do. People just don’t know. He went on to explain that it’s not about what ‘job’ you want to do as much as a simple ‘thing’ you want to accomplish in life. It’s up to each one of us to know what that ‘thing’ is.

It’s then that it hit me. I know what I’ve been enjoying in the last couple of months. I know what has made me happy, what has overtaken my time and fuels my thoughts all day long. I know what I want to do.

I want to write…