Continuing my letters to past versions of myself, this one actually didn’t start as a letter to myself, and it was pure coincidence that I found myself writing this as one of those exercises I like to do sometimes, where I just write whatever thoughts enter my brain. But as I was writing, I realised that this was pretty much what I needed to say to a past version of me; the one that just wanted to write.
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t have stories running around inside my brain. I remember always being attached to a laptop, a notebook, an encyclopaedia, or absorbing books.
Writing stories has always been a huge part of who I am, and yet somewhere between this photo being taken and today, I feel like I have traded that part of myself in for something else and I’m actually quite sad about it.
I’m going to be a lot more honest than I expected to be, but not for a minute do I regret going to university and studying Creative Writing, however I do often regret turning my passion into a career choice. I feel that writing for a living has slowly chipped away at the pure joy I once had for telling stories and creating characters. Instead, I have spent more years that I want to focus on, describing products, spinning marketing words that meant nothing to me, trying to persuade people to buy things that weren’t my stories. And in doing so, I sacrificed – rather unceremoniously – the part of me that found so much joy in other worlds that were so far removed from my own.
It’s not that the stories have disappeared from my brain, because they are most definitely still here with me, either running around in circles inside my head, or collecting dust in binders, or in Google Drive, my phone, my laptop, random notebooks or even forgotten emails. A lifetime of characters, plots, worlds, all interconnected by one common denominator: me. And yet, not a single one of them is finished.
I so desperately want to get into writing, but at the age of 42, I feel like I have amassed so many unfinished stories with varying levels of potential, I don’t even know which direction to go in anymore. I’m drawn to so many of them, for so many different reasons; sometimes there is a character that shines through, in other cases the plot intrigues me, even if I have no idea where I had ever intended to go with it. Instead, each of them just dances around, swirling, teasing, calling out my name, almost begging me to bring them back to life, to finish telling their story, and here I am, unable to write anything.
It’s not that I have lost my ability to write, but rather that I am overwhelmed and pulled in so many different directions all at once.
I want to write for myself again, not because I want to have anything published – I feel like I gave up on that dream a long time ago, but more because I miss the journey that happens when you sit and work on creating people and a world that is so disconnected from my own.
Every year I find myself back here, craving that need to write and every year I end up in the exact same place…not writing anything for myself. Will this year be different? Honestly, I have no idea.