My Readers

I posted a blog that I truly enjoyed writing. It was about a book I read called The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise by Dan Gemeinhart. If you want you can read it here. After 2 hours only 4 people had read the blog. I was understandably disheartened but only for a while. I went to check notifications on my Facebook page to see if anyone had read my recent blog – liked it, left a comment. I saw a notification from my youngest cousin back in India. She left a comment on one of my earlier blogs. Her comment simply dissipated the fog of despair that my writing is not good enough. No one reads it. She wrote that she reads my blogs because it is so relatable. The blog she read was about finding happiness in everyday life and it spoke to her. I felt oddly gratified. Yes, the statistics in my blog post is truly abysmal but at least one person, a dear one at that, found the blog relatable. She perhaps did not realize the boost she gave me, but I stopped looking at blog hits and started thinking of what to write next. Write something that someone out there can relate.

I found this blog sitting in my draft folder. I wrote it in April of 2021, a month before both my parents died. Life is so unpredictable, isn’t it? I had no inkling when I penned this draft that my life will change irreversibly within a month. I will change as a person. And this blog will change too. I poured my grief onto this blog site and that is how I coped with my loss. The blog became my grief journal. I was too afraid to seek the help of a therapist, writing became my therapy. Gone was my desire to look at stats for the blog. I did not care if anyone read what I wrote. I had this yearning to pour my feelings in words.

As I read the draft today, I realized people have reached out to me saying they related with what I wrote. Some felt my grief journal helped them carry their own grief and some wrote that my blogs prepared them for their inevitable loss that they know is coming.

Words are powerful. Words can hurt, sure, but if used right, they can heal. Cliché perhaps, but so true.