Who do you write it for?

I haven't written anything in months.

Not because I ran out of things to say. My Notes app is full of half-thoughts — three lines here, a title there, one conversation I keep meaning to turn into a post. They just sit there.

A couple of days back, I asked my mentor Deepak Singh why he had stopped writing so frequently.

He said he is spending most of his time building things with AI these days. Fair enough.

Then he turned it around. "And you? Why have you stopped?"

I gave him the honest answer. Or what I thought was the honest answer.

"My LinkedIn feed is full of posts now. Impressions per post have gone down."

He replied with one line.

"Who do you write it for?"

I paused.

"You write for yourself, right? Then how does it matter? Whether it's Medium or LinkedIn or anywhere else."

---

That question took me back to a Sunday morning in November 2017.

If I have to pick one regret from my 12+ years of working, it is this — I should have written more. Much more, and much earlier.

I always enjoyed telling stories. But through college and the first few years of my job, I wrote almost nothing in public.

The reason, if I am being honest with myself, was imposter syndrome. And plain self-doubt.

What do I write about? Who is going to read it? What if it is a stupid take? What if someone from office reads it?

So I didn't.

Then on 5th November 2017, at 8:29 in the morning, I finally messaged Karthik Rajan — a writer whose storytelling I had been following for a while.

I still have the screenshot. This is exactly what I typed:

Three hours later, he replied.

Karthik: Just write!

That was it. Two words and an exclamation mark.

I didn't reply that day. I think I was a little let down — I was expecting a framework. A content calendar. Some list of "10 things to do before you publish your first blog post."

Nine years later, I still haven't received better advice on writing.

---

I started writing. Medium short stories. LinkedIn posts. Long articles. Tiny tales that I wrote in ten minutes on a Sunday.

Some of it went nowhere. Four likes, two of them from people I had personally messaged.

Some of it crossed 100k+ impressions, which honestly surprised me more than it surprised anyone else.

And somewhere in between, without noticing it, something shifted.

I stopped asking "what is on my mind today?"

I started asking "what kind of post do people like?"

"Is this hook strong enough?"

"Should I post at 9 AM or 6 PM?"

I want to be clear — I don't think any of that is wrong. If you write to build an audience, all of it matters and there are people who do it very well.

But that was never my reason.

My reason was much smaller than that. I feel better after writing. A thought that has been rolling around in my head for a week finally sits still once I put it on a page.

And then something I hadn't planned for started happening. People replied.

Someone would message saying a story reminded them of their own father. A junior PM would tell me a post that helped him in an interview. Someone would disagree with me in the comments and be right.

That is how I learnt that the second paragraph is usually where people leave. That one specific detail — a rickshaw, a soundbox, a switchboard in a village — does more work than a well-constructed argument. That the line I am proudest of often goes unnoticed, and the sentence I almost deleted is the one people quote back to me.

None of that would have happened in a private diary.

---

I write because it makes me feel better. I share because it makes me better. Those two have always gone together, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I lost somewhere was the difference between a reader and a number.

A comment teaches me something. An impressions count teaches me nothing — it tells me how the feed behaved that morning, not whether the story worked.

One makes me a better writer. The other only makes me anxious.

And slowly, without noticing, I started keeping score with the one that can't teach me anything.

So when that number went down, I stopped writing. Not because I had run out of stories.

All that writing, and I had ended up exactly where I started — not writing. Earlier it was "who will read this?" Now it was "not enough people will read this."

Same fear. Better vocabulary.

---

So, Deepak's question.

Who do I write it for?

I've been sitting with it for two days now and I think the honest answer is: I write it for the guy who typed "Karthik Sir, I want to start writing blogs" at 8:29 on a Sunday morning and then waited three hours, hoping someone would give him permission.

And I share it for everyone who has ever replied, argued, corrected me, or sent a DM saying "read your post" — because that is what turned writing into storytelling.

The starting point has to be mine. Getting better comes from you.

The number was never either of those things. I just let it sit in between and pretend to be both.

This post has no framework in it. No 5 lessons. No carousel version coming.

It is just me, finally taking the advice I called "great" years ago and then quietly stopped following somewhere along the way.

Just write!

Two thank you(s).

Karthik Rajan — you probably typed those two words in ten seconds and forgot about it by lunch. I didn't.

Deepak Singh — thank you for asking a question instead of handing me an answer. It is the harder thing to do, and it works much better.

One told me to start. The other reminded me why. Almost a decade apart, and I needed both.

And if you're sitting on a draft you haven't published — consider this your version of that message. Just write. If you do publish it, send it to me. I'd genuinely like to read it.

(Disc : Written by me, with Claude's help to proof read, criticise and correct the grammar/flow)