I have recently written a blog post on my professional site about where my Executive Assistant career began: as a little girl, meeting the woman who got to spend all day with my Dad! That had to be the best job, didn't it?
So why did I not follow the plan my Dad actually spoke over me: that his avaricious little reader would be a writer one day? It was a great idea. Except I didn't figure I needed to participate in it to make it happen.
I'm no sports person, but I'm going to use the idea of hurdling to figure it out. That's a writer's prerogative.
Hurdle 1: No time to write
Until I was 16, the opportunities came via school. Compositions during English language lessons. RE where the nuns, for reasons God must know but I can't fathom, had us transcribing every verse of the book of Luke, one by one, into our own words. Drama even saw me writing a play about pirates. When all that disappeared out of my timetable, I didn't make new time to write. I read instead, nurtured myriad relationships, worked 40 hour weeks, participated in my church community, did the chores, watched TV.
Hurdle 2: Discouragement
The writing for school earned ticks for proper use of language and no comment for creativity. My one attempt to carry on beyond 16 was dropped when I allowed a friend to read the first 2 pages of a planned romance and saw that within seconds she was staring into space. "Is it boring?" I asked. She nodded, embarrassed. It went in the bin. I didn't pick up pen and paper again.
Hurdle 3: Lack of self-belief
This is what made me so vulnerable to discouragement, intended or not. I was cripplingly short of self-confidence and paralysed by perfectionism. If I couldn't get it right first time, it was just another way in which I was no good and there was no point trying again. As for writing, I needed to write something no-one had ever written before. It took me a long time to realise every writer starts out comfortable in the knowledge there's nothing new under the sun.
Hurdle 4: Lack of a dream
I only knew what I did not want to be. Disapproved of. Scorned. Laughed at. Most of all - someone who let others down. I could not help but be me, but I spread myself too thin and wore myself out trying to be someone people could bear to be with because I did not believe I could be lovable in and of myself. I didn't have the energy or courage to aspire to more.
Leap 1: Writing by stealth
Friends during my University years will remember fat letters dropping through their letter-box, up to eight pastel pages of illegible scrawl, peppered with exclamation marks and ellipses, requiring a deep breath and a coffee in hand to read. Later at work, I drafted reports and letters to go out in someone else's name, conveying the intended message, telling the story that would persuade customers to buy and board members to make the decisions the executive needed. I became the go-to person for proof reading and editing. And I learnt to cope when it didn't go quite right.
Leap 2: Collecting other people's flowers
I learnt to hear encouragements, to believe them and to hold on to them. I learnt to hear admonishments without going into crisis and to use them to grow. And then, there were the stories I gathered - from friends over coffee and cake, afternoon teas, and supper-times, while walking or shopping or sightseeing together; from strangers on trains and buses and aeroplanes, in queues and at shop counters. I took their stories, snipped them, arranged them into bouquets, and offered them out to entertain, to encourage, to philosophise, to empathise. .
Leap 3: Learning to be me
I stood on the brink of ending it all and Jesus stood by me and said, "You go through whatever you need to go through, but don't forget, I am here and I shall hold you fast." I got help for depression and started to get to know the only person I will ever see in the mirror and to befriend her. I've listened when God has called me "Beloved" and whispered to me my name, and let his love sink into my heart. And then I have, I hope, got over myself a bit. Not that you'd know it reading this "all about me" piece, but it's my blog, so you'll have to take my word for it.
Leap 4: Waking up the dormant dream
Sleepless at 2 o'clock in the morning after losing a friend to a brain haemorrhage decades before her time, I got up and wrote down how it felt, this heavy, dark cat that had squeezed into my heart, painfully stretching it and settling down to sleep, starting awake at unexpected moments, eyes wrapped wide around its head, to lash out with claws extended and unleash searing pain. My pen wrote on, unbidden: one day the night would have passed, and the cat would wake and stretch and pad away through one of the ribbon cuts in my heart into the wild garden that had grown around it, and keep walking until it was lost in the light of the early sun. It would not look back, not once. And the heart it left behind would be expansive and unfurled, blooming in memory of my friend.
Just a few weeks later, I was at a slimming class of all places, and found myself next to someone I'd not met before. Within minutes, I discovered she was a colleague, a Christian, a poet, a writer, a stand-up comic. She gave me her number and invited me to the Association of Christian Writers. At the first get-together, I read out a piece I had written; there was a stunned silence and warm acceptance. My new friend smiled. "You are a writer," she said.
The finish line?
Well, it's a long way off yet, God's plans aside. Some of those hurdles are still there in slightly altered forms, some of the leaps are careful steps I'm still making. But you've just read the result of my trying to run the race, even if it is at a slow walking pace. I hope there will be more words to come, and that you will be there to read them.
