An Unstoppable Pen – Shivam Vinayak’s story of Chasing Dreams after a Bounce Back
It was a rainy evening in the summers of 2012. I was depressed to be bed-ridden for over a month and a half after my surgery with a plastered leg. The only source of positivity in my life back then was my feelings for someone special. I was madly in love with this girl, but we hadn’t seen each other since then. Amidst the hollowness that evening, I almost accidentally discovered a poet in me. If my guiding star had not appreciated me for every write-up in the initial days, I would’ve never taken it seriously.
At that time, I never knew these feelings of being depressed would lead to actual depression in less than a year. It was the year of the 12th board exams and having already dealt with hollowness a short time ago. I couldn’t cope up with the momentum change. I remember I took five tuitions a day in the month brazen heat June. My day would begin at one center, and I returned home drained up of the energy in the evening.
The phase lasted longer than I could predict. All the while, I felt alone, empty, and non-existent. Nothing could be shared with someone to forget about looking for the right person to share with. It was one of the worst phases of my life. Never having secured below 75% before, I had failed in my Math prelims five times in a row, not performing satisfactorily in the rest of the subjects as well.
All through these times, I felt like disappearing forever, as every other pair of eyes seemed to be mocking at or feeling pity for me. It was when poetry came to my rescue. As a quote says, and if I may paraphrase it, “Writing is how you say out everything to everyone without having to utter a word or engage with anyone at all.”
After the end of the board exams, competitive exams were round the corner. More hard work for another month, and I was done with the academics until college commenced. I did manage to crack JEE Main and secured a rank of 137 in the SEE. When I thought I was living my dream, some new demons set up a plan to take me down and out again.
The results of the second-semester exams brought the demons of failure back once again. It was a disastrous result. On the night of the result declaration, I was staring at my laptop screen after typing “10 easiest ways to commit suicide” in Google’s search tab. I couldn’t click on the first link shown on the results page.
“No person and not a single sheet of paper can ever rule my life. I and my life are much bigger than this failure, and I’ll grow out of it,” I said to myself and slammed the laptop shut. I took a shower at 3 in the morning to rinse off the negative energies around me and dozed off to sleep.
I was yet to tell my parents about it, and there was no chance they would take it easy. I couldn’t even expect them to be chilled out, given that I hadn’t been able to accept my failure myself. The following day, I was faced with verbal thrashings from my father that didn’t help except fill me with more guilt.
Had my father not cooled down a couple of days later, I really would’ve drowned in the negativity and guilt I was filled with. I took a re-exam in a month but just for the sake of it. I had nearly lost interest in studies, so much so that opening the same books again haunted me. Somehow I cleared the logs and moved on with it. The next few months were yet futile by all means.
I had been to wrongdoings all through that year. So much so that I had done everything wrong in that one year except for committing a heinous crime. I was nothing more than a hopeless failure in academics and relationships, and there seemed to be the end to the dark tunnel.
It was only in February 2016 that I diverted my energies in a different direction. I got more serious about my poetry, and somehow, even my grades got better. When I read the book ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne, it changed the way I had looked at things. It talks about the law of attraction. To experiment which, I manifested about it and got results for real. I had further doubts that it worked.
Another year down, I decided chasing dreams. A career in writing which to every other person around me was an absurd thought. I had been called names by my friends and family just for the idea of it. But there was a fire in my belly, and their mocking just added fuel to the fire. I gave in all my time and energy to learn the skills of writing poetry and prose across four languages, along with learning the Gurumukhi script. (Thanks to my junior in college for helping me with it) I found a Hindi story writing platform to showcase my work somewhere along with social media, and I was overwhelmed by the response I got from it.
At the end of my graduation, I was all set to put my works out in public, but time wasn’t just right yet as there were still many things to figure out. Ultimately, amid teaching Chemistry, and a bit of writing from home, I put myself out on YouTube towards the end of 2019 to begin a journey towards my dreams. Before which I had over 200000 reads on my works across a couple of writing platforms. My debut book launch is around the corner, and I can’t wait to see my name on the cover!
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