A book had encouraged me to write.

I remember when I was younger, I wanted to write a book. But I had no idea what to write about.

As a kid, I remembered rewriting a story of part of a cartoon I had watched, and extended the plot even more with whatever I could embellish the story with. I gathered the handwritten pages and glued them together to form a book, covering it with some basket-weave cloth to make it look like a real bound book.

When I was part of the school library club at 10 years old (yes, I was a nerd), I learned how to make comic books out of our favorite stories. (I can still remember that mine was about a Bobbsey Twins mystery.)

In college, when I started online blogging, there was a time when I want to print all my entries and compile them into a book. But then I thought, who would be interested in all these boring posts about my daily rants and raves about college life?

I remember reading one of Brother Bo Sanchez's books for the first time in college. It was a delightful read. Brother Bo, in writing, was inspiring, brilliant, and witty all at the same time.

I got hooked on reading his books a couple of years ago, when my mentor lent us her copies of his books. When I started attending the Feast in PICC, I noticed that Brother Bo sounded exactly the same as he did in his books.

It wasn't until last year when I had read another book published by Shepherd's Voice that I got inspired to write again, as I had completely stopped for quite a long while. As I read my copy of Cherry Camille Depano's #Hugot, the author sounded like she was a friend that you were just sitting next to, talking over coffee. She sounded like someone that you were just confiding in, and who was ready to deck you so you will come to your senses (because of your flighty and dramatic thoughts on unrequited love), but also ready to comfort you when you're about to lose it.

I then thought to myself, "Hey, I want to write like that. Maybe I could write like that."

Then that thought was immediately pushed back in the dark corners of my mind, dismissed.

Just recently, the same thoughts started crawling back to resurface again.

I used to write in my blog just for myself, to document things that had happened in my life. I didn't even care whether I had an audience or not. I was just using the blog as an outlet for my thoughts. It was therapeutic for me.

I hadn't blogged in months, and as I got inspired to write my last recent entry (from last month) before this, I thought of writing differently. I wanted to write to inspire.

But once again, who the heck am I anyway? I'm not an accomplished person. I'm not that interesting. I may even be boring. I'm not as smart as the others, as experienced as most inspiring people are.

Then again, what if that's what people need? Someone simple, someone relatable.

Whenever I share with my friends the insights brought about by my past experiences, I realized I was sharing things I had learned, be it from my mentors, or from the experiences themselves.

It felt good to share these things with others because it inspired them to do better. They learn as I had from my mistakes and my experiences. But I'm not at all confident in speaking as myself to a crowd. Unlike some people, I wasn't born with the gift of gab. But I do enjoy writing though. I love the written word.

That's when I started thinking again. Should I at least try to write a book about all of this? I once shared this thought to my friend Meg. She kept trying to encourage me, but I still feel so hesitant.

Maybe I'll just write a few anecdotes here and there. A collection of learnings that I have scribbled in so many different notebooks and scraps of paper that I had lost track of where I wrote about what.

We'll see how this writing thing goes.

We'll see.

For now, I'm just exercising my writing skills again. Getting my feet wet.