As far back as I can remember, I was obsessed with books. As a new immigrant to America, in Kindergarten, I was taught English at the same that my literacy skills were beginning to form. At that young age, a new world of stories came into my consciousness in one of the richest languages on our little planet.
I devoured all of the usual books they give to first, second, and third-graders before finding my groove with R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps. I devoured every copy of that series and its spinoffs, and started a Goosebumps book club in the fourth grade. I was obsessed.
By the time I reached high school, I had no problem reading any of the assigned classic literature books. It never felt like “work” to me, even if I didn’t particularly love some of the stories. I guess I mostly just assumed most people read books. Sadly, that isn’t the case anymore and it’s getting a lot worse.
Still, I can’t deny my own love of reading them and now, after many years of thinking “maybe I should” / “maybe I shouldn’t”, I’ve decided it’s time to not just read books, but to start writing them.
There’s a lot to unpack here, whether it be about the process of admitting to yourself that you are, in fact, an artist, or how to overcome social stigma, the learning curve of entering a new field, or the perceived shame of starting over in life. All of that will have to come in time. For this post, I want to briefly touch on what I hope to do here, with this site, via a quick background story.
I left the corporate world at the end of 2022 and decided to instead build a life around time freedom. I wanted to figure out how to be a creator, whatever that meant, build an audience, and mostly spend more time with my kids. I experimented with growing on X, writing on Substack, and eventually, around April 2024, I decided I wanted to write a book. A nonfiction book to be precise. I was reading a lot at the time about the field of consciousness research and landed on a specific angle that captured my imagination. I smelled an interesting story and decided I would be the one to write it.
After tracking down the relevant people for the story and convincing them to agree to let me interview them, I set about writing. Every day, at 4am, I would sneak out of bed, tiptoeing down the hall to avoid waking my wife or kids, heat up some water for a tea, and begin writing. I committed to writing 1,000 words every morning before the rest of the world woke up. After about 40,000 words, roughly halfway through, the project began to show cracks. Some of the people I’d interviewed began to get cold feet. Agents and editors told me that nonfiction basically requires a massive author platform to even be considered. And I started to lose the initial excitement I had for the project.
After all was said and done, the entire project took up almost a year of my life, only to end with nothing to show for it. By this point, I had stopped posting on social media, stopped emailing my newsletter subscribers (to all of you who stuck with me, thank you). In addition, my severance had long run out and we were now relying mostly on my wife’s income which didn’t make me feel good about any of it. It was a shame filled part of 2025 that felt like waking up from a bad dream.
To get my life back on track, I spent the last part of 2025 putting my head down and looking for consulting work. After a few different experiments I landed on something I both enjoy and had clear market need. And a software product I was involved in finally started to grow, adding to my personal cashflow. With a bank account that started to go up again I felt I could breathe. I asked myself what it was I truly wanted to do heading into the new year.
After wrestling with a few directions for a bit, I finally admitted that what I really loved was stories. And the way to tell stories with zero handcuffs was to write fiction. I just never had the balls to admit to myself that I could (A) be a good fiction writer, and (B) make a living at it.
Solving for those two things was incredibly simple in hindsight, but I had to get over a lot of internal B.S. to arrive at the answers. Those answers were, in order:
(A) Who says you have to be good? Good is something readers will decide, not you. Your job is to write.
(B) Who says you have to make any money at all doing it? If you love something, just do it. There are plenty of ways to make money to support the things you love. And many writers worked full-time jobs in completely different fields as they wrote their first few books.
Perhaps it’s the immigrant-scarcity-mentality that was drilled into me from a young age? Who knows. Maybe I’ll explore that at a different time.
What I do know is that once I solved for that, and let go of any status-seeking that previously plagued my creativity, everything felt lighter. As if a weight from my shoulders was removed and I could feel myself again, moving lightly through the world. I smiled again. I started meditating again. I became more present with the family. With my wife. I started to drop body fat and get back into shape. And with this renewed sense of enjoyment, creativity started flowing, uncontrollably, as if a firehose had been opened.
One particular day comes to mind where, as I drove my one-year old son to his daycare, I decided to not put any music or podcast on and just enjoy the sounds of traffic and the humming of the engine. In that space of stillness, the entire story for my first book came to me in a sudden flash. The entire thing, almost dangling above my head. I pulled over to the shoulder of the road, turned on the emergency blinkers, and pulled out my pocket notebook to write it all down before I would forget. And now, that’s the basis, or the skeleton if you will, for my first novel.
What I wanted to do here, in 2026, and moving forward, was to have fun documenting my process of becoming a writer. It’s so much fun to realize who you are meant to become and nothing would make me happier than for my work to find its way to the hands of eventual readers, and for this site to be a home where they (you) can binge my other writing and musings. Broadly, I will be writing about the three areas of my life where I’m most passionate: consciousness, creativity, and books. Since I love the freedom of being able to talk about whatever I want, whenever I want, and letting that authenticity be its own sort of measuring stick, expect diversions from those topics every now and then.
I’ll still be posting to Substack so sign up for my newsletter there, where I’ll be posting long-form essays, fleshed out short stories, and weekly roundups with links to any new posts that go live here on the blog. I’d love to have you join along for the ride.
Here’s to a fun 2026.