This morning, staring at my computer screen, I was utterly dumbfounded.

Sometimes being a writer simply doesn’t add up. I love writing — fiercely. It excites me, frightens me a little, and still, the sheer illogic of it all catches me off guard.

Earlier, my wife and I went for a long run. It’s a quietly sacred thing, running — a space where the world falls away and your thoughts grow louder. We moved from one patch of shade to another, escaping the blazing sun, and it struck me how closely life resembles a run: inclines and declines, straight stretches, twists, turns, moments of effort, moments of ease.

My heart was pounding, breath thinning as we crested a hill few would willingly climb, when something finally loosened inside me.

This realisation always seems to arrive on a Sunday — the day before work begins again. I find myself drifting back to the years when I was my own boss, running a thriving computer business, and I ache for it. I lost that business during the drought. We all remember Day Zero — the warnings, the counting down of water, the quiet panic. And then, the loss.

It has been more than six years since I returned to the corporate world. And all this time, I have carried the feeling that something precious slipped through my hands.

I loved that business. I loved the smiles, the back pats, the small gratitude of customers whose problems I could solve. Passion was my currency — the reason it worked. It gave me freedom: to move, to think, to apply my skills in a hundred different places and situations. And while writing has always been my calling, the business became my companion — filling weekends, short holidays, long drives to quiet towns across the Western Cape.

Besides my wife, it was my great love. It steadied my restless mind. Letting go was brutal.

And truthfully, I never did.

This morning, music drifted toward us from a nearby event, loud and careless in the open air. And suddenly it struck me — sharp and undeniable.

Running races teaches you to live with uncertainty. You never truly know what lies ahead: the route, the weather, the wind that may cut through you sideways, the food you’ll be given, the bed you’ll collapse into afterward. Winter rain. Burning legs. Unexpected hills. You prepare, but you never control.

And my business had been exactly that.

Every day was a question mark. Who would call? Where would I go? What problem would need solving? It was faith disguised as routine. You moved forward anyway. You survived anyway. With holidays stitched between the chaos. With strangers becoming stories.

It was alive.

Writing is no different.

You pour yourself into words you are not certain anyone will hold gently. Your readers become your customers — and sometimes, they surprise you. An email. A message on Goodreads. A quiet rating. A review written at midnight by someone you will never meet.

They don’t have to do any of it.

And yet they do.

They speak of hugs and comfort. Of smiling. Of laughter. Of chills. This small miracle of connection — creator to reader — is not transactional. It is intimate. Invisible. Sacred. A currency that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with recognition.

A whisper that says: Your story landed. It mattered.

The outcome is always uncertain.

But the direction no longer is.

Leaving the past behind does not mean erasing it. It means carrying it differently.

Writing is my destiny. It always has been. I was only temporarily blinded by another love — a necessary detour to bring me here, to this quiet knowing.

To my readers: thank you for walking beside me. For choosing my stories. For giving them a home inside yourselves.

I cherish you.

At last,

I am free.