As soon as my hands grasped the handlebars and my feet touched the pedals, it was as if I had never stopped riding. When you haven't done something for a while and you are able to pick it up again, you might say that it's like riding a bicycle. I never understood that saying when I was a child, until I rode my bicycle after not having ridden for quite some time. It wasn't something that I had to completely relearn. Everything seemed to just come back.
That's how it is with writing. No matter how long it's been, picking up a pen or touching the keys on my keyboard just feels right. My brain knows that it's time to write and the words just come. Now this doesn't mean that I have some super ability to write perfectly or that what I write is anything spectacular. It's just my way of knowing that writing is something that I was made to do.
Growing up I used to envy my younger sister's ability to pick up on mathematical equations and learn foreign languages, because I thought that would make my life easier. But acing chemistry and speaking three languages fluently just wasn't in the cards for me. Instead I was dissecting the words of Shakespeare and F. Scott Fitzgerald and spending free time filling up pages of journals and notebooks.
And though writing classes and journalism classes in particular taught me to avoid cliches like the plague, hindsight truly is 20/20. Looking back at my time in high school and college and all of the pivotal moments when choosing a major and a path were considered, I'm thankful for the way that my path was laid out. Step by step and turn by turn writing became clearer and clearer as my destination.
There have been times, many times, when doubt has plagued me; times when money was tight and when obtaining a writing position seemed impossible. But through it all one truth has stuck with me. I am a writer.
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