To make any sense of it, I’d have to start with traumas! Especially the untamed ones that grow you from childhood! These ones are sneaky, you see. They don’t just show up unannounced or suddenly torment you in your dreams. They take their own sweet time. They shape your neural pathways over years, over decades, like a river shifting its boundaries. You wouldn’t notice it until it’s too late.
Neurons that fire together, wire together! Right?
Well in my case, it all wired together to create spectacular minefields. It made every step in my life fraught with anxiety. Around 2014, it was already too late for me, but I just hadn’t noticed it yet. So I had this ‘it is what it is’ kind of attitude to life and was ‘happy’ with whatever that was going on in my life. But in reality, I was silently ticking towards a critical mass (literally and figuratively speaking).
It was only when my mum and dad asked me if I was okay, my brain cranked up like a century old diesel engine to make sense of it all. The mundane grey days, the procrastinations, the boredom in music, the chore of workout, gaming, product, and the messed up sleep cycles. I was numb! I wasn’t able to feel anything!
I was not okay!
The stranger
That night, I couldn’t do anything but contemplate this realisation. I was more focused on the root cause. Was it my school trauma? Was it because I miss my friends? I couldn’t pin point on a single event or moment in my life and it bugged me even more.
Well my immediate solution, I took a photo of myself with my camera and asked myself, looking at it.
And the answer wasn’t there either. But I noticed that the spark in my eyes had gone. Something has taken away my smile. I couldn’t even find a semblance of that good old ‘me’ everyone knew.
I was a complete stranger to myself!
Dischafer was born
And in those bleary eyes, there was something more. An ache. A story that he needed to tell me.
I followed my intuition (I didn’t have anything better to do anyway), accepted my state, and indulged this thought of becoming that stranger. I donned the same tee and I opened up an empty page.
With my blue filter ON, it felt like I was staring at an arid lonely road that went nowhere. And that’s when Dischafer was born. Once I took the first step, the words fluently found their places and a world started manifesting.
Those five days I spent in his shoes were incredibly therapeutic. By the time I’d finished the first draft, I’d explored the depths of my own traumas, fears, and processed as much as emotions that I hadn’t in the past decade or so.
The story, in the end, turned out to be my repressed emotions wanting a conversation with me.
Publishing Dishafer
To that honour and intimate nature of the story, I initially wanted it to be something just for myself, but the excitement of writing my first novel and the catharsis it gave me, pushed me towards showing it to my friends.
For about four months, I worked on nothing but the story’s revision. And when I gave my best friend the third draft of my first edition, he read, and then shared with me that he cried after a long time.
It was profound to experience that a ‘stranger’, an imaginary person, just like that, has significantly touched two souls. From then on it only felt right and honourable to push the story to the whole world.
Clicking that ‘Publish’ button was a life changing moment for me and it felt like opening a wormhole into a new world. One of the happiest days ever!