The Beginning of it All

So after years of back and forth, some intense bouts of self-doubt, and a lot of much needed therapy, here we are. I’ve finally built up the courage to launch a blog, this blog. Why so much trepidation over this, you may ask? Well, you see, the idea of failure can sometimes be so overwhelmingly scary that it becomes much easier to just think of the many reasons not to do something. To overcome this problem, I had to come up with an answer (solution? retort? you decide) to every fear that kept stopping me.

This is how it went:

Scared little ol’ me: What if no one reads it? (My closest friends don’t count, those poor, forever supportive suckers would probably read my weekly grocery list if I posted it, bless them.)

My bad-ass alter ego: Well, who cares? The fewer people that read it, the fewer people there are privy to the random musings and ridiculous rants that you will no doubt regret in ten years.

Scared little ol’ me: What if I can’t keep it up? After all, I did start a baking Instagram for a few months – and then I moved to a tiny dorm room in London and realized storing baking equipment wasn’t an option. RIP @bakingmywayout.

My bad-ass alter ego: Listen, I promise you, not one person will sue you if you one day just stop posting. In fact, some may heave sighs of relief that you’ve finally decided to keep your nonsense to yourself.

Scared little ol’ me, now even more terrified: But… what if I am actually just writing nonsense?

My bad-ass alter ego: Well baby, one man’s trash is another’s treasure. Not everyone will like you, but if you’re true to yourself and you put out there what you would want to see, some other like-minded weirdo will get what you’re trying to say, and they just might appreciate it.

Scared little ol’ me, slightly mollified now: True…but do I really want to put my thoughts and feelings out in the open like that? Won’t people judge me?

My bad-ass alter ego: I hate it to break it to you honey, but as a brown woman, a Bangladeshi twenty-something girl in this world and society right now, there’s not much you can do that won’t lead to judgement of some kind from somebody. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t, so you might as well do.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how this little blog came to be. A little corner of my own on the Internet to store the contents of my restless mind. I hope to write about all the things that I obsess about, which range from my quarter life crisis to brown girl life to mental health to the blessed genre of YA literature to Timothee Chalamet’s perfect hair. Let’s do this.