Dancing with ghouls
I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with writing. I blame my bilingualism. It’s a known fact that bilingual children develop their language skills at a slower pace than monolingual children and I wish someone had told me this as a child.
Hours would’ve not been wasted in feelings of inadequacy every time I was tasked to write a story, poem or any other type of homework that consisted putting pen to paper. I can’t say that I was terrible at it but I was nowhere near good. Grammar mystified me. Sentence structure was a puzzle that brought no fun. Punctuation was a nuisance. In all honesty, despite not being a child anymore, I still find the subject dry and a bit dull.
And yet, I loved reading. Opening a new book was a joy to me; opening a very old one brought feelings of reverential awe. In this case, knowing two languages was double the fun but learning them felt like an uphill struggle. So in the midst of all of this, it may not be surprising to read that little old me never harboured writing ambitions. It never occurred to me. In my childish mind, writers were as faceless and unknowable as ghosts and who wanted to be a ghost?
Fast forward to today and I want to be the very thing I never wanted to be…or do I?… Doubts have plagued me ever since I toyed with the idea of becoming a writer when I was sixteen years old after I, rather surprisingly, won a literary competition at school.
Am I good enough? Who would want to actually read whatever nonsense I create? Why not do something more practical and financially secure? If you really wanted it you would not have these doubts…like ghouls hunting at night have my negative thoughts preyed on my mind.
I wish that I can say that I’m winning the war but since I’m nowhere near a published author I can’t, because for the past decade I’ve listened more to the ghouls. I dropped out of my Creative Writing University course and worked as an administrator in a Law firm and then in a Secondary School because it was what I needed to survive in the big, wide world. I was deluding myself of course because a part of me was actually dying. I left my last job ill, confused and demoralised. And here I am. Trying to mend the wounds that have been largely self inflicted. I have been given a second chance thanks to the sweetest and most patient partner that a woman could ever hope for, and still I draw a blank whenever I try to put my ideas to fruition on an empty, lifeless page. It took me a little while to realise that what I’m going through is called writer’s block and it’s no fun.
I have therefore at the behest of said sweet partner opened this blog to try and draw out the creative juices once more and ‘fight the good fight’. I’m left wondering, however, whether fighting is the right approach…I’m wondering whether instead of going to battle with words as I have always done ever since I was a child, I should dance with them and not with the ghouls.
