The Boy Who carried Fire: Trekking Back To Ourselves

A few weeks ago, I published a book.
It was a goal I’ve carried quietly for most of my life. But after the launch, once the dust settled and the congratulations faded, I felt something I didn’t expect: the need to find proof that I once dreamed this.

I remembered that when I was fourteen, I wrote in a journal that I wanted to become an author one day.
So I went looking for it. Not for content. But because I felt this ache to go back and meet the version of me, the boy, who started all this.

I searched everywhere, drawers, weathered storage boxes, dusty containers that still carried a faint smell of teenage years. I didn’t know why it mattered so much. But it did.

When I finally found the old journal, I thought I’d feel proud. But I felt quiet. Like I had just opened the door to a nostalgic room in myself I hadn’t visited in years.

As I read his writing, I couldn’t be murmur in awe. The boy was so full of fire. So fierce in his hope. So optimistic in his stride. So passionate in his words. He didn’t just want to do things in his life. He wanted them to mean something someday.

And I realised, I’ve done so many things since then. Achieved many things. But I don’t know if I’ve always lived with that kind of fire since I left that room.

Not because I gave up. But because life teaches you how to carry yourself rather than your fire. To fit in. To quiet the parts of yourself that feel too much. To extinguish.

If I hadn’t written it down, I think I would’ve forgotten he ever existed. And maybe that’s the point of writing, of reflecting. Not to share, or post, or publish. But to remember. Because as we grow older, so much slips away unnoticed. But the page holds what we no longer do.

That night, I sat with the journal open on my lap. I just read. Slowly. Softly. And glanced at my recently published book, next to my old journal.

I thought to myself what Albert Camus once said:

“A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
And somewhere through this reflection, I saw the boy again, the boy who carried fire, and he looked at me with a smile.