I write because I'm messed up.

The small digital clock on the bedside showed that the time was 11.30 PM. I looked at the soft contours of my baby’s face as she slept blissfully in her cradle. Few more hours and she would be up and, it would take another hour to put her back to sleep. This was her schedule every night. I looked at the open laptop in front of me, the word document opened, fingers hovering over the keyboard, ready to type my blog post. 

A small, feeble voice inside me embodying the little sense that still prevails in me warned me, ‘You should probably sleep now, take rest before your baby gets up. The few hours of sleep that you get every day is not doing any good for your health.’

But then as I sighed resignedly another voice, strong and intense, prodded my guilty conscience, ‘You have not updated your blog from a long time. It’s high time you write something.’

Now I was in highly muddled state, I couldn’t decide-Sleep or write, write or sleep. As the two voices squabbled in my head, I gave up and started writing. All semblances of sleep were lost. I was in my elements now, typing at a speed that I dint know I possessed. 

With just 4 hours of sleep every day, with all the stress of work at office, with all the anxiety of being a mother to a 10 month old toddler, with all the hassle of being a woman, I still make time to write. Why? I can make use of the hours I spend to write to unwind, put up my feet and take it easy. But no, at every opportunity I get, I grab my laptop and write, write whatever thoughts that comes to my head. 

And my obsession of writing doesn’t end there. Whenever my mind is idle I think of story outlines, I think of interesting topics to write, I muse on how to develop the characters in my stories, I chew on how to end the story in a dramatic twist. It’s a constant process; writing to me has become a part and parcel of my life.

I started writing when I was around 10. Inspired by Nancy Drew and Hardy Boy tales, I wrote detective stories and sent it to children magazines. And I was disheartened when I dint receive a word back from those magazines. But still I wrote relentlessly and indefatigably, because I couldn’t stop the voices in my head, telling me the wonderful stories of love, the horrid stories of slaying where at the end, the good always triumphed over the bad, the touching stories of emotions between loved ones. I just couldn’t stop the voices in my head. 

I write because writing to me is therapy. The only time when I can I be what I want to be and more. 

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda