A few days ago I received an email from Malaysia. Kamila was looking for information on the Japanese TV-Drama Nobuta wo Produce and she found my blog on google. She began her email with:

"Hello Thuan, I just came across your blog today and I felt very happy reading your entries."

I will never forget this email. Do you know why?

The Beginning and the End of my blogging career

Last year I began this blog by accident, I didn't know anything about blogging, I didn't even know why I started this blog, I simply enjoyed writing all these posts. Hardly anybody ever read what I wrote. If anybody ever did. I didn't care. I'm an introvert, I feel drained by social interaction, I often prefer to be on my own with a book, a film or my guitar. Writing has always been a way to express myself, to get my thoughts out of my head. If I didn't have my blog, I would have written some emails to friends, kept a diary, participated on a forum or wrote a story. In fact, I had to resort back to these tools in June 2006. I had problems with my blog that I couldn't solve. This was my first blog and some scripts didn't work the way I wanted them to. So I stopped blogging altogether. Blogging was just a means to resolve the need to communicate with myself and the world around me. After a mere two months my career as a blogger came to an end.

Stuck in the middle of nowhere

Nine months have passed since then. I forgot about my blog and just lived on. The state of being that I described in various entries, a state where I don't know where I am heading to, a state of constant emptiness - I never left that state. There are dreams that I've carried with me for a long time, and there is the life that I'm actually living right now. I couldn't solve the discrepancy, I lacked the energy to pursue my dreams, to move on. So I got stuck in nowhereland.

Two weeks ago I was reminded of this blog. I returned to a world that I left a year ago. Here I had a horrible blog with hardly any content. There was no clear structure, the design was horrible and the articles were too long and unfocused to be of any interest to persons other than me. But I really like this site. And the content on this site. I wrote more than I thought I did. Like so often I would often begin writing an article about something mundane, new thoughts come up, I follow new threads and end up at a totally different place in the end. That's the way life is. You never know where you will end up.

Rebirth

Reading this blog I realized that I have hardly changed since June 2006. I wrote that I wished to change my life, to pursue my dreams, to shoot movies, to make money, to study Japanese, to go to Japan,... With the exception of studying Japanese I did none of these. On May 27, 2006 I wrote about the main character of the J-Drama SLOW DANCE (played by Satoshi Tsumabuki)

"Slowly he realizes that he's spent the past three years living aimlessly because he has buried what meant the most to him."

Reading the old blogentries I felt that I have to change. There are so many things that I began, but never brought to an end. There are dreams that I wanted to pursue, but I never even got on my way. I have to continue blogging, time to move on. I found old posts where I wrote down my goals, time to do what I wrote down last year. No fear.

It's not about success it's about doing the things where your passion lies. Else you won't have the motivation and power to keep at it. Success is nothing that happens over night. He will shoot one movie. And he will shoot another movie afterwards. And another one, taking one step at a time. Everything takes some time. Life is just like a slow dance, at a leisurely pace you're moving around, forward and backward, but constantly in motion.

And then, I received an email through this blog, an email from the other side of the world (Malaysia) saying "Thank you". This was the first time that someone wrote me an email. I never received any emails or comments on this site. I sent a link to my blog to a few friends, but nobody ever even wrote a comment. So this was a very special email to me. Thank you, Kamila!

On February 22nd, 2007 someone wrote me an email saying "Thank you". Now I'll remember her all my life. If memories could be canned would they also have expiry dates? If so, I hope that they last for a thousand years.