Thanking You, Yours Faithfully.

 Number Ten! A tiny milestone indeed. I can’t believe I stuck to it for so long, to be honest. Writing a blog has been one of my New Year resolutions for multiple New Years now, but I somehow never got around to actually completing a draft…if you don’t count the one I abandoned halfway around three years ago. This is why the starting date of this blog says July 2020 (I was on a since-forgotten mission to document my COVID experience). I want to take this opportunity to thank my professor for coming up with the ‘One Month Blogging Challenge’, as, much like most people my age, the word “challenge’’ is one of the few things that inspire me to do something concrete. 

When I think about it, it feels like I’ve spent my whole life with an internal monologue describing every waking moment of my existence. 

However, call it starting trouble or whatever, it never seemed like The Right Time. Moreover, consistency has never been my strong suit. Nevertheless, I’ll be the first to admit that sitting down every night to pen down my random thoughts in a public forum is indeed a fun pastime. Getting y’all to read five hundred or so words of said random thoughts is even more fun. When I think about this time last year when I used to fill my time complaining into the void (or writing a journal, as some people call it), I feel very proud indeed to have graduated to complaining on an official blogging website. 

Even then, it was my professor who came to my rescue with a diary he’d gifted me at the beginning of the year. I hope he will be pleased to know that I have covered around eight of the twelve months of its pages with my quotidian worries, petty grievances, and juvenile complaints. Seated at the wobbly steel desk in my dingy hall room, feeling the entire weight of the world upon my shoulders during a time I can only describe as “testing”, my only refuge was these daily written vents addressed to “Dear Diary”.  I cringe now, thinking of my poor roommate who came into the room countless times in the middle of the night to find me scribbling away furiously while wiping teardrops from the page. How pathetic she must have thought me.  

I’m happy to report that this year has been exponentially better, in terms of emotional well-being. My diary has stayed safely within the confines of my bag, untouched except for the days – far and in between – when the going got too rough to bear. This is not to say it has outlived its use, of course, as I know there will be days in the future when it probably won’t leave my sight for weeks on end (especially after I graduate and leave my cocoon of friends). But for now, the diary remains out of sight, a dear old friend resting after a year of being at my beck and call. And now I have this blog, you, dear reader, and a whole lot of happy things to say as I sit in my brightly lit non-hall apartment. All things considered, I guess what I’m saying is that I’m really glad Sir came up with this challenge which forced me, if you will excuse the language, to get my ass up and work. 

Yours in grateful contemplation, 

Sneha.