Could writing be my Ikigai for this moment in my life?

Writing has been a lifelong companion that no one ever directly suggested to me to do. I just started. It was fun and liberating. 

I remember it all started at age nine (sorry, I have a classical music tendency to count since how young I started doing things) when I started my first diary with all seriousness. From that moment, I later delighted myself writing short tales, an ever-changing novel, long letters to my friends, and random thoughts that came to mind, to calm my constant need to understand our world. 

I’ve been writing since that moment in the most pure, free, and fun way: no judges, no competitions, no public presentations, no homework; intuitively improving at my own pace, with some inspiration from the books I read. Fun would be the word for this process.

It’s just until this moment that I’m writing this text when I realize how obvious it is that maybe, I could be/ I am a writer. I’ve already been writing for such a long time! I just haven’t done it consistently publicly. But every time I doubt myself about my non-writing profession or work life, I end up writing a complete essay about how complicated it is to figure it out. 

A couple of weeks ago, I started reading an inspiring book called “On Becoming an Artist: reinventing yourself through mindful creativity”  (Translated into Spanish as “La creatividad consciente”), by Ellen J. Langer.

In the beginning pages, the author tells how she just started painting. With no school, no teacher, no rules, and no intention to learn anything before she could start. Just free experimentation with paint, untreated canvas, and no sketching at all. 

She freely painted horses, people, dogs, and whatever came from her soul. In one of her paintings, she realized very late that there would be no space for painting the heads of the characters because she painted the lower parts of the bodies too large. So the final result was a painting of people from their feet to their necks. I found this hilariously genius. 

I felt so inspired by this idea: just starting to do something creatively. I wrote about it, thinking about what I could do in that way: what I could learn by doing. Sculpture? Gardening? Watercolor? 

Then, me cayó el veinte (I realized). I’ve already been doing that with writing. Just writing and improving on the go, with no set intention to learn all the rules with a given instruction. Just reading, living things, writing about it, and then repeating all steps in no particular order. Freely making mistakes and learning from them. 

Blogging

Blogging and creating websites have appealed to me since I first discovered it, like ten years ago. WordPress.com was one of the first platforms I used, in its free version. I had a blog where I wrote about anecdotes from my daily life, in a storytelling approach. I don’t even remember its name, nor why I deleted it. I just needed to share my stuff and put it out there, somewhere. 

Then I tried Medium and posted once in a while when I needed to express things and make sense of the things that were happening in my life. 

Some years later on, I discovered that one could make money by blogging, so I spent (way too much) time learning how to do that. I became aware of SEO, niches, monetization possibilities, WordPress.org (and its infinite possibilities), how to name blogs, and so on. 

I created a niche blog using WordPress.org. I spent months thinking about the perfect name, which I thought I had successfully found.  After almost a year of being public, the name gave me a lot of cringy feelings to the point I needed to rethink the project. So I went back to square one with the niche thing. 

Some months passed, and I found a great name and concept for the niche I chose, which was related to music. By that time, I had learned more about SEO and content strategy, so I felt more prepared to launch a powerful blog. 

But then I got stuck with so many “rules”. I was unnecessarily stressed out and didn’t like my writing tone. In the aim of being helpful, for Google's sake, I felt my voice was not really me. I felt trapped in writing about something I didn’t really want to write about but that seemed right because I have extensive experience with the subject. 

Then I read that Google had changed its rules, and there was some chaos going on. In that moment, I dropped the imaginary expectations of my readers (yes, you can imagine a microphone falling), and decided I would write from my heart and intuition, using SEO just occasionally. 

So here I am, starting another path in the blogging scene. This time, I'm more willing to write about a wider variety of topics, and worry less about the niche argument. With a renewed curiosity to just see what happens if I write from within, and the joyous spirit to experiment and learn things by doing.

Theoretically speaking, I’m a blogger who writes about her life experiences, who sometimes gives tips, and other times teaches what she’s learned. It’s too vague, I know, but only time will tell us what this project evolves into. If this resonates with you, you already know what to do ;)

Blog post originally published on dypinto.blog