Writing is a mosaic of whispers and dreams and blood-red feelings that pour out of you.
My sole purpose of registering for Pulse, in the beginning, was to get more opportunities to write. I remember we were asked to write about a college event in the recruitment process. I initiated the write-up to be about our college fests. It took a turn pretty soon and I ended up writing about something that was a bit more personal than I had expected it to be. I wondered the following days if I would even get selected because what I wrote wasn’t exactly what was asked of me.
I did get in, no surprises there. A question was raised – would you like to have the role of a journalist as well?
I realised I had things to say, so I thought – why not?
Articles were brand new liquor that I did not know the taste of.
I wrote poetry with a sprinkle of prose. Anything too far away from that was way out of my comfort zone. Poetry came naturally to me.
Words inside my head
Travel in arbitrary clusters;
Sentences broken down,
Until they fit the rhythm in my head.
Articles? I was horrible at them. It was a struggle. It still is. I pondered the question of how I could ever get better at this neutral and emotionless state of writing. It felt like I was tearing away the soul of the piece, ripping it apart.
After I was done with my first ever article and it had become a completely different version of what I had originally written, I did not expect anybody to be happy about it. Because I wasn’t happy about it.
But then I got unanticipated appreciation from a couple of people.
I realised, sometimes stories need to be told as they are. The soul exists in the facts and the emotions are expressed in statements without any details told about the speaker’s eyes or the wind rushing by or the sun setting across the horizon. It was a weird feeling.
I wrote articles about various things in the past year – from a cyclone and bioluminescence to Gradbook and Pride Month celebration. One article quite close to my heart was about Campus Safety. It was a PulseCheck based on a survey addressing harassment in and around college as well as online. The toughest job was to put me far away from the article and write it from a perspective that is emotionless and yet, wishes for the goodwill of everybody in college. I was not a female student. I was a leaf on a tree staring at all possible people affected by this problem and all possible ways it could be worked upon. I read through the final article, again and again, looking for that one mistake or flaw that could make all my other sentences invalid. It was the most anxious and the most alive any article has ever made me feel.
As I write down the final letters of this article at 2:00 AM, there is nothing but a sense of tranquillity – of knowing that I ushered a wave or two in the direction opposite to the flow every once in a while, and of knowing that I will continuously keep trying to do so as I move forward.
All stories do have a soul,
Whether written like this;
Or like this. They will forever be enriched by the anxious thoughts of a hopeless writer that has often wondered if they can write at all.
