While I was a happy, super confident chirpy girl in my childhood, I changed into a clumsy, quiet and unsure young adult as soon as I entered college. I had big trouble lifting my head and looking up at others. A huge blanket of shyness fell on me with such heaviness that I was convinced I must be the most stupid,incapable and unattractive person on the planet.

Compliments, if they came, made me cringe and want to hide. A part of me did see this anomaly in a person who loved the sky and dreamed of fierce independence and took to scooter riding at a time when there were few girls riding a scooter in a quaint town like Palakkad. (Well! that was the height of adventure, I could think of)

Yet, I swung between extreme feelings of inadequacies and my unsure attempts at breaking the shell somehow did not bear fruit, perhaps due to my own lack of conviction.

So, it went on and I agreed with great reluctance to settle for marriage partly because I knew I was quite unworthy of anything better and also due to the fact that I was afraid of hurting my parents.

Well, the marriage gifted me a beautiful daughter whose presence reinforced my desire to claim the more carefree, happy part of me which I did in slow steady measures.

While I still quivered at home in response to loud words and angry expressions, I easily found joy at work and in the company of my daughter. I had no complaints. I sensed a certain freeing of my soul out of the bond of self shaming, inadequacies and other such thoughts. The fact that I was a teacher, helped me too as it pushed me to put the interest of my students, because how does a shy teacher help anyone? Like everything, confidence grew quickly, the fiercer aspects of my personality slowly gaining an upper hand and creating more areas to express myself.

Yet, I was ashamed of my writing, which is ironical because even as a child, I had dreamed and believed that one day I will be a writer and that the world will read what I have to say. So my fence sitting and bafflement went on till I discovered blogging and decided to keep aside my doubts and write, just write and that’s what I did.

I knew that writing was a vent, a practice in healing, an affirmation of self, so much so that I felt compelled to share, just share, almost everyday.

When I look at how far I have come as a person, how I am reclaiming parts of me that belonged to my childhood, I am impressed and grateful for the universe having taken me through a long winded journey which was sometimes arduous to get me here.

I breathe freer now, smile more, and express my self more, and this fuels my spirit somehow.

So, I decided to bring out my writings in print. I agonized over the decision yet stuck to it somehow and asked myself, ‘if not now, then when?’

I knew the answer.

So there it is print, my first book- An Azure World, Selected poems and prose- and it does look organic to me now, more than ever.

All things happen in good time. At wordpress, my good friend and fellow wordpresser- Albert at Albits urged me to do this a few years ago. I loved the fact that he said it to me, Thank you Albert!

https://notionpress.com/read/an-azure-world