Unsent – #8: To the Person I Was

Categories: Blog · Writing & Literature · My Journey · Lessons from Life Experiences

A version of me existed before the writing.

Before the books. Before the blog, the letters to strangers that somehow reached exactly the right people at exactly the right time. Before Ink and Ideas Publication House, the authors whose voices I now help carry into the world. Before any of it.

She was quieter than I am now. Not in a peaceful way. In the way of someone who has things to say and no belief that they are allowed to say them. She had opinions she swallowed. Sentences she formed and then abandoned. Stories she began in the dark of a quiet evening and then filed away under not yet, not yet, not yet.

This is the letter I would send her.

Dear the version of me who was reading instead of writing, who was listening instead of speaking, who was storing instead of releasing:

I want to begin by telling you something you did not believe at the time: the things you had to say were worth saying. Not because they were extraordinary, not because they were perfect, but because they were true. And truth, written down in your own voice, has a way of finding exactly the person who needs to hear it. You thought your voice was ordinary. You thought the world had enough words and did not need yours.

You were wrong. Beautifully, completely wrong.

I want to tell you about the fear, because you never let yourself name it.

It was not really a fear of being bad at writing. What you were actually afraid of was being seen. Of putting something true and personal on a page, having someone read it, and finding it insufficient. That is a very specific fear. And it almost stopped everything.

The fear never fully went away. I published a book, and it was still there. I published four books, and it was still there, quieter, more manageable, but present. The writing did not cure the fear. What it did was prove that you could be afraid and write anyway. That the thing on the other side of the fear was worth the crossing.

I want to tell you about the first reader who wrote to you.

You were not prepared for this. You had not imagined someone writing back. Someone saying: this reached me. This was exactly what I needed. I did not know anyone else felt this way.

That message changed something fundamental. It told you that when you were honest enough, brave enough to put the most particular truths on the page, those truths somehow became universal. The most personal thing is, often, the most relatable thing.

You became a writer to say things. You became a published author because those things mattered to someone else.

I want to tell you what the writing gave you that nothing else could.

It gave you a record of who you were at each stage of becoming. The journals no one reads, the blog posts written at midnight: all of it is an archive of a person in motion. You can trace the places where your thinking shifted, where you stopped being afraid of a particular truth and began to own it.

It gave you clarity. Writing is thinking made visible. The things you could not understand about yourself began to clarify on the page. It did not give you answers. But it gave you better questions.

And it gave you a community. People who found you through words and stayed because of them. People who see in your writing something they recognise in themselves. That is one of the most extraordinary things a person can build.

To anyone reading this who has something to say and has not yet said it: I see you.

Here is what I know now, from four books and hundreds of blog posts and one publishing house later: the permission does not arrive before the first word. It arrives inside it.

Begin. Imperfectly, nervously, with no certainty of where it is going. Begin. The rest follows.

With love for every version of you that was not yet writing — Lamiya Siraj