It was like a staring competition, except my competitor didn’t have eyes. Nor the will or time. In reality, it was just me gazing into the flickering cursor on my laptop screen, hoping that the words would come to me, waiting for inspiration to strike as it does in TV shows. Like how successful young authors publish a bestselling novel, then try to escape their agents pestering them to submit their second because they were going through a rough patch of writer’s block; but on a visit to an isolated town somewhere far away, they abruptly meet someone, and suddenly, their beautiful minds are flooded with even better ideas. But me? I’m still struggling to string together a sentence that makes sense because all I’ve got is a distracted mind and irrelevant chores that shouldn’t, but end up taking my entire day.
Sounds a bit poetic, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. I can’t even complain about being burnt out or hustling, because my bosses are kind enough to give me all the time and freedom in the world to express my creativity.
So, I do the next best thing, and book my tickets to an exotic land, to get inspiration the same way fictional characters do, the same ones I scoff at. I pack my bags, making sure to include all the clothes I spend more than half my salary on and catch that flight. I go where the winds take me, where the voices call out to me; Goa.
The home away from home that everyone claims it to be, yelling “Goa isn’t ready for us”, as if Goa has never seen groups of immature 20-somethings in floral shirts getting wasted at 3:00 O’Clock in the afternoon.
But that’s the beauty of it. We become the very people we say we’re not going to be.
Somewhere in an isolated beach shack, amidst the stale scent of rotten fish, I find the ideas I wasn’t looking for. I find the calling I didn’t want to hear.
And it was up to me to answer.
It’s the things you least expect.
(Picture credits: Pexels)
