How my writing community changed my life as an artist

This is the second post of the five-part series about my tryst with a writing community and personal memoirs

“After years of being stuck in the background of my life, I will bring writing into the foreground. I will take this leap of faith”

I said this to my feeble heart in August 2023 as I enrolled for the Ochre Sky Writing Circle (OSC) by Natasha and Raju. Little did I know that the next three months would prove this to be one of the best decisions of my life. I was at the cusp of major life transitions. My writing community became a precious gift endowed upon me by the universe.

Fortnightly Fridays. 25 zoom boxes. Writing prompts on slack. Comments which ran longer than the essays. Bonding over human stories and creative aspirations. 3 hours of time slowing down with mindfulness and pacing up in productivity. Assigned writing activities, self-curated creative tasks and endless rounds of reading and writing. This was an artist’s paradise. 

For most of us OSC was about prioritising ourselves. It was self-care and catharsis. It was practice and accountability. It was creativity and discipline. It was about surrendering to writing and about savouring through reading. It was the warm hug of my co-writers who held my stories with empathy and the measured distance I created from my essays to objectively review the writings. It was about the art of expressing my inner stories for myself and the craft of articulating them skillfully for my readers. OSC was the order and the chaos that shaped the writer in me, empowering my heart to feel fully and enabling my mind to create deftly. It was a writing refuge where aspiring writers like me found a sense of belongingness.

The touch on my fingers of my endlessly moving pen on paper; the “khat-khat-khat” of the continuous typing on my laptop - my daily worship as a writer found prayers in my stories. What made them truly sacred was the OSC writing community which received my writings with compassion. Together, we found the vocabulary for everything that we experienced. Writers built a safe haven of creativity, humanity and solidarity. 

And then, something powerful happened to me. After years of calling myself an “aspiring writer”, I finally claimed my identity without waiting for external validation. “I am a writer. I am an artist. I am no longer aspiring. I accept with humility and confidence alike that I am one already.” I drew energy from the consistency and brilliance of my co-writers. I surprised myself in the stories I pour into words, often wondering if it was truly my own making or a divine intervention which chose me as the vessel for a given piece of art. I betrayed my fears and self-doubt. Instead, I forged a friendship with self-belief. I wrote with intentionality. I let myself write with abandon. 

I began to measure life one word at a time. Our screens were visceral spectacles where we amplified joy, endured grief, dismantled fear, built resilience, fought shame, battled sorrow, confronted rage, accepted jealousy, recognised anxiety and embraced gratitude. Together, with every word, the OSC writing community became a rousing celebration of any and every emotion through writings which meandered through myriad events and aspects of life. Everything ordinary found its extraordinariness through our writing tribe. It shaped the artist in me.    

The power of being a part of the writing community was not just about writing, I realised. One significant act of courage and discipline often seeps into the other aspects of life too, like a flowing river from a glacier traversing the mountains and plains to reach its ocean. The power of the collective made me a courageous artist, a confident professional and an authentic human. I began finding my voice as an artist and that in turn amplified my voice as an individual. No matter the upheavals of my personal life, never mind the ebbs and flows of my professional pursuits - I learnt to show up for the artist in me. I gave a one-way ticket to perfectionism and judgements, sending it away. I chose to honour the privilege of a community and the gift of writing. In fact, the reason I write this piece and share it with the world today is only because of my beautiful OSC writing community.

This was a gratitude post for the wonderful Ochre Sky Writing Circle by Natasha and Raju.

Tune in next Monday to find out about the power and perils of personal memoir writing.