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I have to write great opening lines if I’m going to become the most famous writer in the world.

I don’t remember the exact moment I started calling myself a writer, but I do remember the night I decided to start a blog. I had only learned what a “blog” was a few months earlier, and suddenly it felt like my turn to have one. My now-17-year-old was a 6-week-old baby in my arms, and while rocking him to sleep, I was already planning how I’d become a blogess.

Back then, life was overflowing with beauty and absurd joy and I needed a place to store it all for my future self. Since then, my writing has evolved and more importantly, so has the way I gather material. I interrogate strangers and relatives with equal enthusiasm. I willingly place myself in strange, uncomfortable situations just to feel something raw enough to write about. Sadness, rejection, love, hate, whatever it is, I have to let my mind harvest it so I can put them into words.

Mostly, I write to keep a healthy emotional distance from my true feelings and my impulses to act on them. As Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel laureate, said, “Writers are the exorcists of their own demons.”

Of course, I want to live those feelings to truly write about them. It’s the oddest tightrope walk, to be able to stare at your feelings but from the safe distance of your words.

And when people ask why I’m so obsessed with writing, I tell them I’m simply trying to put into words what they themselves can’t. After all, a great writer should be able to give language to the quiet, and the unspoken.

I write to process my complex emotions, to pivot from pain to acceptance and to chase that ridiculous little dopamine rush every time I hit publish – that makes life worth living.

I understand I might be writing for myself, to make sure I don’t become invisible or irrelevant to this world. But I want you to know that I also write for you, so I can share my ideas and provide value for you. I also write to add my perspective to your understanding of your life and broaden your perception of the world. And hope you would be able to inspire me to think differently in case we differ in our opinion.

And if you tell me a story, trust me, I’ll find a way to repurpose it. It will show up somewhere, somehow, in some form.

You’ve been warned. 😉

Pablo Picasso’s Woman From Malaga

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When Life Happens, You Write

When you’re a writer-at-large, you let life happen to you. That way, you let your eyes steal everything that you see, put a spin on it and spill onto paper / machine some “stream of consciousness” kinda cool stuff. And if I am a true writer-at-large, it’s only fair that I must observe, muse and write about it.