“Being lonely is one of the most underestimated forms of suffering a person can face. I was only 13 when I had to drop out of school back in Tandur. My parents were both suffering from serious ailments- my dad with cancer and my mother with various stomach infections that refused to be cured. Being an outgoing, popular and bubbly girl that was always surrounded by friends and activity, it was an enormous shift for me to have to stay home all day, nursing my parents and being home schooled. A year later my father passed away, and my world came crashing down.

We had moved to Hyderabad by that point, there were better medical facilities here. I was in a new city, with no friends and no father anymore. I was too young to understand how to express my feelings, lost, lonely and confused. My brother noticed this and got me an electronic tablet so I had some form of entertainment, and that was the first milestone on my writing journey. It began with simple reading on Wattpad, then to blogging, and then attempting to write my own poetry and stories. It can be quite daunting, putting your feelings out for the world to see, but it began to heal me. I no longer craved an escape, I was creating my own.

Now when I look back at it, my life seems like a cliched writer’s story. Lonely, depressed, yearning and scared- I can relate to all of it. Flashbacks from my past came back to me as my thoughts flowed onto paper- the sexual abuse I faced at no older than 9, the understanding that came with the acceptance, the suicidal tendencies, the support I received from my readers, losing my friends, gaining new ones online, losing my father, gaining strength from my family.

However, things began to get better the more I penned down my feelings. I published my first book at 15, and I’m working on my 7th right now at 22. I’ve had people younger and older than me message me telling me their stories, telling me how I had inspired them to be stronger. There is no better feeling in the world than to know that you have impacted someone’s life in a good way. Every piece of writing out there has a message hidden in it somewhere, it is for the reader to decide what to take from it, and I personally know that I have grown both from reading other people’s stories and writing my own.”