I used to write.

I used to consider myself a writer. It was a part of my identity.

I always wrote things when I was younger. Poems. Stories. The Next Best-Selling Young Adult Novel. For a while it turned to letters. Elaborate letters home when I was living abroad. Whatever it was, I was always writing.

I went to the teen writing workshops. The youth zine collaborations. And, of course, the school magazines.

At university (Round 1) I’d carry a notebook with me and jot down thoughts, ideas, descriptions – anything. I still have the notebooks somewhere, I think, in a plastic tub in the shed. Fending off the silverfish and cockroaches.

But somewhere, at some time, I just stopped.
I don’t know why.
I think the time got away. Then the ideas got away.

It was as if adulting had no time for it.
And I stopped.

I got older. I got self-conscious. I wrote for work and forgot how to write for myself.

So, it’s time to start again.

And it’s going to take practice. And it’s going to be scratchy and it’s going to be rough but it has to start somewhere.

It’s going to be embarrassing, seeing cobwebs as they’re dusted off. Having other people see the spiders as they scuttle away. I’ll feel the shame of the rust being scrubbed off in view of whoever stumbles across this blog.

But it has to be done. Otherwise, I won’t do it at all.

Which is why I’ve started.