The Making of I Wanted to Live
I didn’t sit down to write a book.
I started writing because something in me wouldn’t stay quiet.
At first, it wasn’t even a story. It was just fragments. Thoughts I couldn’t shake. Lines that felt heavier than they should. I wasn’t trying to build a plot or structure anything. I was trying to understand a feeling I couldn’t explain properly.
The more I wrote, the more I realized this wasn’t about death.
It was about something worse.
The idea that a person can go through life without actually living it.
That was the core of I Wanted to Live.
It Changed While I Was Writing It
The book you’re reading now is not the book I started with.
In the beginning, I was trying to shape it into something more “traditional.” A clearer story, more structure, more direction. But every time I tried to control it, it lost something real.
So I stopped trying to control it.
I let it become what it needed to be.
A voice. A confession. A series of realizations that don’t arrive all at once, but slowly — the way they do in real life.
That’s when the book started to feel honest.
Why It Feels Personal
Because it is.
Not in a literal way, but in a truthful one.
There are thoughts in this book that don’t come from imagination. They come from recognition. From moments where you stop and realize something about your life that you can’t unsee.
That you’ve been waiting.
That you’ve been postponing things.
That you’ve been calling it “later” for longer than you should.
And the uncomfortable part is realizing that nothing was actually stopping you.
The Idea of “Breathing”
At some point, everything came back to one thing: breathing.
Something so basic, you never think about it — until you have to.
In the book, breathing becomes more than physical. It becomes a way of understanding life itself. How present you are. How much space you allow yourself. How much you’re holding in without realizing it.
It became a way to talk about relationships, too.
Because sometimes, you can be next to someone and still feel like you can’t breathe.
What I Didn’t Want This Book to Be
I didn’t want it to be motivational.
I didn’t want to tell people what to do, or how to live, or how to fix anything.
That’s not what this is.
This book doesn’t try to save anyone. It just shows something clearly and lets you sit with it.
If there’s anything it does, it’s this:
It makes you pause.
What It’s Really About
If I had to say it simply:
It’s about realizing too late that you were waiting for your life to begin.
And understanding that life was already happening the whole time.
Why I Wrote It
Because I didn’t want that realization to stay unspoken.
Because I think more people feel this than they admit.
And because sometimes, the only thing you can do with a truth like that is write it down and let it exist outside of you.
That’s how I Wanted to Live was made.
Not as a plan.
But as something that needed to be said.
