Spiels of a Quill

National Poetry Writing Month ( #NaPoWriMo ) is a creative writing project held annually in April in which participants write a poem each day for one month. For the first time ever, I tried committing to this challenge in 2020 because I needed something to keep me busy amidst the lockdown that has been driving me crazy for the past few months. I feared that someday I might just give up and let go, just like the many resolutions I made at the start of this new decade. There were days when the prompts drove me crazy, and I was so close to giving up. But motivation and encouragement from friends and family kept me going, and... Voila! I wrote 30 poems in April 2020 to successfully complete the NaPoWriMo challenge. Here's a list of NaPoWriMo prompts by  Terribly Tiny Tales ( @ttt_official ). Each prompt links to the poem that I wrote for that particular prompt. Hope you like it! Please drop a comment below to let me know what you think about it! 🙂 Confessio...

This is the first time that I experimented with something that I had been wanting to do for so long - writing a blog series. It just felt like the perfect topic to start with. My first blog series is about my first ever half marathon. It was a long journey, so I thought that it deserved to be told in parts so that I could be as thorough as I wanted to be in my narration. So hop on to the train, and read along while I relive one of the most exciting journeys in my life. Part 1: The easiest part of the job is done - signing up for a half marathon Part 2:  You don't realize your strengths until you face your greatest weaknesses Part 3: Tick-tock, tick-tock... The count down to the race day begins Part 4:  The ups and downs on race day - literally and figuratively Part 5: Ubuntu - a runner's thank you note I was nowhere close to setting a PR, but I know I can never get worse than this. Because you'll always be better at something if you have the cou...

Dear diary, It’s been a while (I guess not really, it’s been almost a year) since I have written something. All this time, I’ve always felt hollow, like I’m missing a part of myself because writing meant so much to me. I’ve wondered what happened to that girl who penned down poems and wrote up blogposts. But since my university kept me busy with all the course load and the struggle for an internship in a foreign land, I never gave it much thought. I used to believe that writing was my way of expressing myself. However I noticed that I hardly ever wrote when I was happy, because I am generally too busy living the moment to capture it in words, and that is something I’ve never regretted. I then thought that it maybe is an escape I find from reality during times I can’t handle the stress in my life. Many a time in the last one year, I’ve wondered why I never felt like I had to write something, in spite of having gone through so much stress. The stress was more tha...

I turned 20 a week ago. But somehow, this year everything was different. Right from having to write an exam on my birthday, to having my friends over for my birthday party, from surprise gifts to heart-touching poems; it was a short but memorable celebration. But to me, this birthday held more meaning than blowing candles on the cake or partying hard like it was the last day of my life. To me, this birthday was more about celebrating myself. It was about the self-acceptance that I never had before. It took 20 years and 19 birthdays before I learnt to embrace myself, my life and my choices. I know not what brought about this sudden wave of realization. Maybe it was the result of the ripples, the ripples that are formed when people throw stones at you, when they mock you and break you, when they guffaw at your plight, when you see them rejoicing about your failures. I made mistakes, tons of them. But the biggest one, I think, was to fall prey to the world around. They kep...