I’ve always admired people who keep a blog. It requires a lot of discipline, to have much to say, or to be eager to share with the world what you think or what you do.

Although I work as a teacher and I am often in the position to have to speak to a group of listeners, in my private life I have always preferred to listen to what others have to say, instead of talking so others listen to me. In all groups of WhatsApp in which I participate I’m probably the one that least interacts. I have twitter and facebook  but barely use them. When it comes to share what I think or what happens to me, I’m better in small groups, when the interlocutors are few, the fewer the better. That’s why I’ve always thought that I wouldn’t be a good blogger.

What I might have is the discipline of bloggers. For example: I have never written a blog, but I write a letter every day –yes, an old fashioned letter: by hand, with pen and paper, envelope and stamp and there it goes, to the mailbox– and I send it to an artist friend of mine in Rotterdam. Since April 2nd 2001. Every day. It will soon be fifteen years. And we have no intention of stopping.

So I could have the discipline to write a blog. But what could I write? This has certainly been my main brake, so far, not to open the blog on my website.

But in recent months there are two issues that have touched my life and that I think are interesting enough to talk about them in the form of blog posts. They are very different, distant, but both very important issues for me. Two topics a lot of people will think they don’t matter at all. But for people who could be interested, I think it may be useful for me to share my experiences and ideas.

The first issue has a professional side but I have gradually discovered that it is much more than a theme of writers, it is an issue that affects everyone who writes, from the teenager who has to do a class project to the entrepreneur who wants to write a business plan, to any person who draws up emails, professional or private.

It’s about how we write, how we have always been taught that we must first think before we write and how I am totally convinced that this is not true. Not everyone needs to think before writing. There are people who know how to think before writing, and some that do not. And for the people who do not know, it doesn’t mean they can’t write, it means that they should do it differently: they should think while they write, or after writing. And how do you do this? This is what I want to share here.

The second issue is entirely personal, and comes in the wake of a traumatic event that I have lived this difficult year 2015 we are about to end. It’s about perinatal death. About losing a child before it is born. Because I lost my daughter Queralt on May 25th, 2015 at 18 weeks of pregnancy and since that day I am someone else. And because from that day I realized the world can be divided between people who know what it means to lose a child before birth and those who don’t. I didn’t know before. Now I know, and I am different. I wrote the first post in this blog just for myself, not knowing it would end up in a blog. But when the day came that Queralt should have been born I felt the urgent need to publish what I had written. For her and for all the other children who were not born and for all their mothers. And it is also for all of them that I want to write how I live through the loss of Queralt, what I have learned, and what I would have liked to do differently.

And today, after a few weeks of thinking, I finally decided to little by little write my thoughts on these two topics and publish them on my blog for all those who want to know more.