Day 156

How has writing affected your life?

…

When I was much younger and life was very difficult, my imagination needed to take my mind off that dark world around me, and fired up and fueled a great many stories.

The pre-teen years were not those that I wrote anything beyond those school assignments, but i remember the desire to read and, in doing so, imagine it could inhabit those idyllic worlds.

When I was old enough and in the first years of secondary school, the subjects we learned helped expand that imagination, some wanting to be someone different, to be somewhere else, anywhere but home.

I remember reading books about boarding school in England and somehow thought that would be better than what I had here.  That notion of self-sufficiency and navigating those younger years in such an environment would be fun.

Of course, later on, I realised the reality of that sort of life, and it was just as horrible as I had already.

It didn’t stop me from wanting to be in a rich family living in a large house and having a whole estate to play in.  It didn’t matter that it might not be the truth, just that it was different.

As I transitioned out of school, now having discovered I could write and translate those dreams into stories, I embarked on a university degree that majored in Narrative, which was writing, and journalism, which, in combining the two, provided three years of writing experience.

In other words, from an early age, I used writing as a means of survival and later as a channel for my creative whim.  I never expected that I would write a book, not in those early years, just that the scribbles on paper would eventually become something.

Yes, I wanted to have a perfect relationship, but I soon realised that there really isn’t one. Writing about it and trying to create perfection, I discovered a lot of interesting lessons and everything that can go wrong, as usual.

Yes, I wanted to be a spy, and watched, ready and studied as much as I could, and discovered that Spies don’t live a charmed life, they are always teetering on the edge of life and death.

Yes, I wanted to be a billionaire and live a charmed and successful life, but it mostly doesn’t happen, and the newspaper pages are littered with the death and ruination of a great many privileged souls.

Others struggle.  My father always said life wasn’t meant to be easy.  I soon learned that in my imagination and my stories, it could.