How It Started

There are certain things in life that, no matter how tightly you hold onto them, will never unfold the way you imagined.
And when they don’t, all that’s left is to sit with the aftermath—trying to find a reason, trying to blame something.
The universe.
Luck.
God.
Yourself.
That, I think, is where this journey really began.
For six years, I carried dreams I thought would shape my life.
A country I wanted to move to.
A college I wanted to get into.
A life I thought I would have by now.
And when those things didn’t happen, I kept collecting disappointments like proof that maybe life and I were moving in different directions.
But somewhere beneath all of those dreams was one I had buried quietly:
to publish a poetry book.
It was never the dream I spoke about the loudest, but it stayed.
Like most things that matter do.
On March 5th, 2024, I started an Instagram account called trying.living.
No expectations.
No plan.
Just the simple hope of putting my poems into the world.
I remember thinking—if I reached 100 followers by the end of the month, that would be enough.
Instead, by the end of that month, there were 10,000 people reading my words.
And by July, there were 45,000.
For the first time, a dream I had reserved for my thirties started feeling close.
Too close.
I started imagining it.
Holding my book in my hands.
Signing copies.
Seeing my name on something I made.
It became one of those thoughts you carry before sleep.
The kind that makes tomorrow feel worth waiting for.
And then I made a mistake.
I disappeared.
For a week, I stepped away from Instagram.
From posting.
From people.
From myself.
And when I came back, things had changed.
The numbers dropped.
45k became 40k.
And then over time, it kept falling.
By March 2026, I was at 28k.
More than 15,000 people gone.
And I know followers are just numbers.
But sometimes numbers hold dreams.
And losing them felt like watching something I built slowly slip through my hands.
There were moments of hope in between.
In June 2025, a literary agent reached out to me.
We got on a call.
We spoke about my manuscript, publishing, even advances.
And then he said something I haven’t forgotten:
“You just need a good following.”
It felt so close.
Like life had finally opened the door.
He told me to stay consistent for a week, and then we’d talk again.
But life happened.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
And nothing came of it.
And I won’t lie, there were days I felt like life had a strange way of giving me hope just to take it back.
Like showing me the door,
only to close it before I could reach it.
But what I didn’t realize was this:
even in all that darkness, there was still light around me.
I just wasn’t looking in the right direction.
My family saw it before I did.
Especially my cousin.
The one who kept telling me:
“If this is your talent, why not build something from it?”
And suddenly I remembered something I had done for years without thinking much of it—
I made personalized poem frames for people I loved.
As gifts.
As keepsakes.
As a way of saying things words alone couldn’t hold.
And maybe that was the answer all along.
Maybe my poems didn’t need to wait for shelves.
Maybe they could live on walls.
In rooms.
Beside beds.
In homes.
Maybe they could be gifted to a sister, a lover, a mother—
or to yourself.
So in April 2026, after years of trying to make one version of the dream work, I decided to stop chasing the path I had imagined—
and start building the one that was already waiting for me.
And that’s how this began.
Not as a business.
But as another way for poems to stay.
Welcome to the trying.living store.
A place for the words you never said.
A place to keep your feelings safe.