How I started writing
I’ve always wanted to dive into how my passion for writing started, but never actually did. Now, considering that being almost 25 years old means reaching a personal milestone of 10 years into writing, I figured that it’s time to take a step back and look at the whole thing from a different perspective… a writing one.
Youth & Heartbreak
“The Love that moves the Sun and other stars” — Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy
It often starts with love.
In truth almost everything does, doesn’t it?
In this case, it did. It started with love — the strong kind, the first one.
Everyone of us has a first time when it comes to falling in love.
It’s usually a platonical thing, our young minds idolize a person and go for a ride on the wheels of imagination that usually ends up with a crash right against a concrete wall called reality check.
That was not my case. I was blessed enough to experience a rare situation of mutual feeling, and as much as this may sound great, it comes with something all things of life come with — a “but” and a catch: I met my idolized one while I was on a month-long vacation in my home country, literally an ocean away from where my life was actually starting to take shape.
Did I know what was I getting myself into? Hell no! And I wasn’t even supposed to, which is the reason why I ended up jumping straight into the pink black hole full of happiness, hormones and denial that was my first-ever approach to love.
The bright side of dark moments
Everything comes with a catch, but I hate negativity so I’ll tell it how I see it: this is true even for a lot of bad things that happen to us in life.
I’ve always believed that one’s true calling, especially when it comes to art, needs to be unblocked by something, like some skill in a video game. I guess it’s because that’s how I feel it happened for me.
Coming back from that trip wasn’t my first heartbreaking experience, but it sure was my first relationship-related heartbreak. I quoted Dante for a reason: love does move the sun, the stars, and everything in-between. After all, it was love that kick-started my writing.
I had been studying the Knights Templar for two years before that vacation, mostly with no purpose, but in february 2010 my purpose appeared.
I told my parents that I wanted to write a book and that’s what I did.
It took me three months of daily writing during the late evening, after I finished studying and doing homework.
Healing & finding a purpose
It was a long, spontaneous and fascinating process that took me from a blank page to a hundred pages worth of my first story.
During those months my mind had little to no real space for school things, and after that time I found out something: writing that story was a cathartic experience that was able to heal me as much as the books I had read up until that moment had helped me push through difficult times.
This was the first hint of a reality I was still too young to grasp — the awareness of the fact that I wanted to do that for a living.
Aside from how that first love ended, it gave me the key to unlocking a skill I had no idea of having. The pain of that experience was something I will be forever grateful for, since it pushed me towards something that I might have otherwise discovered only later in life.
Final thoughts
It’s strange to think that 10 years have passed since that moment, but here I am. I have a fair share of things I think I could’ve done better when it comes to writing, but looking from a more experienced perspective, I’m happy about how this journey has been up until now.
I’ve learned from a lot of mistakes and will learn from a lot more.
I guess this is the funny thing about this whole writing thing, this process we call life: you never stop learning.
The road ahead is long and I have big plans for my writing future, but I needed to sit back for a moment and reflect upon some things before going back to my current projects.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. If you want more content, follow me on Medium (Sebastian Hidalgo) and check out my first article!
