A few weeks back, when I decided to do the 30 day blogging challenge alongside my friends Hiten, Michael and Toni, I was trying to get back into blogging. I was hoping to rediscover a rhythm of writing daily, writing often and writing irreverently — three things that drew me to blogging. Not writing, not reporting, but blogging — or what I call writing about things I care about, things that allow me to scratch my itch.

I spent most of my working life writing around 1200 words pretty much everyday — except in 2014, when after growing really tired of constantly, I tried to step away from the computer. Instead, I picked up the pen and paper and trying to quietly make sense of it all. And all along, I knew the words had gone awol, the sentences were unfinished and the mind could never really compose what it wanted to say. I was scratching words on paper, not really writing.

Things started to change in July when I went to Italy and forced myself off the Internet — and trying to capture every moment I enjoyed and every experience I had by just writing about it. I wrote a lot. I used up all the notebooks I could find. I begged a friend to bring me some more notebooks from Florence. I wrote and wrote. It was like taking batting practice. I was going over those notebooks earlier today and I saw a lot of unfinished sentences, paragraphs that didn’t go anywhere. A raw script of my summer!

The blogging challenge, however has brought a rigor and discipline that was missing for most of the year. Almost three weeks into the challenge, I feel like a slugger in the middle of slump who is finally starting to recover his swing — connecting, but still missing the power. The desire to blog is back, writing longer pieces will come next and perhaps finally I will get the enthusiasm to write a book I eventually want to write!