Looking Back

What a year, eh? When I was a kid, I really wanted to grow up to be a writer and a teacher. In the sixth grade, I spent a lot of time turning my weekly vocabulary words into an ongoing story about a kid who was also a Boy Scout and would get into the most random trouble and adventures. I really ought to turn that into a book series at some point, and maybe I will.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love to write. I watched Poetic Justice – the movie with Janet Jackson and Tupac Shakur and was so inspired by the poetry in the movie from Maya Angelou that I started my own poetry notebook and began writing poetry. I took a correspondence course from the Children’s Institute of Literature and wrote about a silly rabbit.

In the last few years, I’ve become hyperfocused on my freelancing work and, though I have written some poetry and worked on Nanowrimo projects, I feel like I’ve lost my creative writing mojo a bit. Part of that, I think is due to the nature of needing to write to make a living, but I also think part of it is that… as much as I hate to admit it… it’s triggering for me.

A lot of you may not know this, but I’m a survivor of domestic violence. One of the projects I really want to make progress on, but have been stuck on, is a collection of poetry called Shattered to Bits that I’ve been working on now for a decade. I haven’t made progress on it though.

In a few days, it will have been eleven years that I’ve been safe. Yet the struggle can still come up from time to time – particularly in this past year. I started freelancing while I was with that individual and started pursuing my writing career in earnest. I’m not sure why that would have any effect on my being a writer though – I was certainly a writer and a philosopher for years before that relationship even manifested.

Despite sometimes pondering my identity in the past few years, I’ve had significant accomplishments, including earning multiple awards for my volunteer work and publishing over 1500 articles in a wide variety of places. That’s not counting posts on my own blogs. It just sometimes feels odd to think about the differences in the ways I considered myself a writer as my identity in the past versus now.