Before it comes true...

It took me more than 10 years before I realized that I've transformed from someone who could write reasonably well to someone who seemingly likes to write, then slowly to someone who can hardly write, and finally someone who used to write, even though its still one of my dreams to become a professional writer one day.

This blogsite was created half a year ago, when I was setting my new year's resolutions for year 2010 in December last year. Without much surprise, 'being able to write again' had easily become one of the things that I wanted to achieve by end of the year, and this blogsite was created at that moment when my enthusiasm for writing was still at its peak.

However, what happened between now and then was, I had been through a MASSIVE struggle before the first post was able to be produced...

Upon the creation of this blogsite, I spent a few days just to come up with this 'great theme' for the blogsite - Dare Dreaming, in an attempt to introduce some other crazy dreams I have besides becoming a writer, such as saving some money that is sufficient for me to quit my job and travel around the world for at least two years, without having to worry about family not being supported financially when I'm away; come back enlightened and able to figure out what exactly I want to achieve in my life; then finally make a living out of something I'm passionate about...or simply anything I do that takes me through the path to realization of my dreams.

Once the theme was set, however, yet again I spent a few days just to decide which language to use. Well, there is a good reason for such hesitation actually. Though I was chinese educated until I completed my high school education in 1997, and even won a few writing competitions in Mandarin back then, I haven't been practising it frequently enough to keep some of the beautiful words and idioms I learned before. I even have difficulty to form a complete Mandarin sentence without mixing it with another dialect or language sometimes, let alone making sure its grammar mistake-free, which is quite a shame for someone who has received chinese education for ELEVEN years.

Anyway, I'd then decided to use English instead, simply because I'm more exposed to it nowadays because of work, compared to other languages. All the emails are written in English for example, and its also widely spoken at my workplace due to the great variety of nationalities we have there.

And then I finally got my hands on the actual writing. I tried to bring up those dreams in a way which I insisted must be different from how people normally do when they talk about dreams, hoping to impress the readers with my 'innovativeness' right from the beginning, as I always thought the opening of a potential blockbuster must be unique and magnificent.

So there I was successfully gotten myself trapped by a mindset of trying to come out a MASTERPIECE, after more than a decade of NOT writing.

As you could easily imagine, I spent perhaps 95% of the time to just edit whatever I'd written so far, over and over again, compared to anything else while constructing my first post.

The struggle continued until it came to a point where I'd finally run out of patience, then decided to stop writing again as a result of failing to create such an 'earth-shaking' masterpiece, and hence this site has been totally empty since then.

Well, it might seem quite obvious now what had been the major cause that stopped me from writing again back then, now that I described it in a more readable manner, but the fact is I never really saw the problem myself until much later, after some long analytical conversations with friends who have always been concerned about my progression in 'being able to write again', and never failed to enlighten me more every time we met.

I finally learned that in order to start writing again the first thing I should do is simply to abandon all the (perhaps way too) logical thoughts I had in mind all this while with a sheer intention to build a perfect blogsite - the theme, language, rhetoric, target audience, and so on - and just start writing something!

Well, not necessarily it has to be something that talks about my dreams, or something that inspires others to achieve their dreams but simply ANYTHING under the sun that I feel like putting into words or even pictures, doesn't matter. As long as I'm doing it for my pleasure and keep it going, like any other habits that can be picked up in 21 days if you keep doing the same, I believe one day it will become something very natural for me to do again, and my dream too will be realized before long.

So here I am, with my logical brain tightly shut this time, awaiting the exciting moment to come.

Cheers!