So we all have a passion for something in life. Games, food, music, dance, you name it. My issue is I have too many passions. I have a passion for food, passion for fashion, passion for makeup, passion for organisation… the list goes on. So, what do you do when you have all this passion and no avenue to explore? You write.
I’ve always loved writing, well actually in all honestly I’ve always loved reading. From a young age I was a little bookworm, ranging from competing in my local library summer reading competitions to waking up at 4am as a child before school to get the last chapter in. My mum honestly used to switch my punishment of grounding to no reading. I think reading was my way of escapism as it is with many people. This love then extended further to school, then college and finally university.
Colleague I think I was just lucky as I met an incredibly influential women whose passion for writing really blew me away. At this point my confidence was shot and I was a quiet little mouse in the back of the class really struggling to get through lessons as I was too afraid to ask questions and look stupid. Tracey was my tutor at the time and further my English teacher. I’m not to sure what she saw in me but in her I saw possibility. She was incredibly confident and passionate. Discussing her dreams of travelling all over the world teaching English to internationals and checking in at every bar on the way. Her love of craft beer and swear words did not do much for her love life at the time but her personality made me feel safe and awed enough to dream I could do more too.
Tracey was a lecturer who didn’t take any nonsense. She openly defied the controlling methods of academic management and never feared vocalising her displeasure at cutbacks and staff shortages. I’m not too sure what happened at the end of my colleague years but I believe redundancy was on the cards for some staff members and Tracey grabbed it with both hands and ran away to China to start her next adventure.
Home life wasn’t great as there was next to no relationship with my parents and Tracey had presented another method of escapism bar my books. This is where University came in. I had previously created an application for social work as I was from an area that influenced my desire to rid abuse and neglect from a vulnerable persons life. I was in a panic. I had made a mistake. I didn’t want to be confronted with the harsh realities that social workers dealt with on a daily basis as I had seen enough to know I wouldn’t cope. I loved organisation, I loved books and I had Tracey as a person that I was in awe of. A seventeen year old faced with one of the most important choices in their life could only be influenced by what was in their immediate eye line. I wanted to be like Tracey, I wanted her confidence, her candid attitude and her ability to be able to push back to those she disagreed with. That set, I ran to Tracey with my request for her to help me alter my application and reach out to the universities I had applied for.
Thank goodness I had already received five conditional offers, with a little tweaking of essays and Tracey at hand to speak to administrative staff at the universities my next task was to sit tight. Results come around when I’m in Scotland with one of my friends and her family. A,B,C,C. Thank goodness! I pushed away the doubt that my English grade was a C and my Law grade was an A and focused on how good I would be in China working with TEFL teaching English and travelling and reading and writing. That summer, the home situation escalated, I moved out and was an au pair for a month and then moved on site of a hotel working as a coffee shop assistant and restaurant runner (That is an entirely different story in itself).
Moving to university was hard. It was too noisy and busy and I still had next to no confidence so making friends was pretty difficult. My classes started well but I couldn’t help everyone around me seemed a couple of steps ahead. They used words I had never heard. Spoke to one another like they had met weeks before and knew the names of all the fancy authors. Then there was me, again a quiet mouse who loved a good fantasy novel with an author that nobody knew the name of. After a year at university I realised I really didn’t have the confidence to present work. This and the lack of a strong mentor with me led to the decrease in certainty that China needed a good English teacher like me. I struggled with essays and presentations as my voice is simply too colloquial and storyteller-like. That’s how I enjoyed writing so I didn’t understand how it could be wrong.
Back to the hotel for Christmas, a wobble in what I really should be doing and a run in with a crappy guy led even more self doubt to creep in. I forced myself to go back to university and pushed myself to really give it a chance. I followed my housemate to bars, dressed like Thomas the Tank engine for a social and even went to a yoga lesson. To be honest the rest wasn’t that remarkable. I realised university had stripped me of my love of reading. Twenty to thirty books required for the course became impossible when in the past it would of been a two week gift. I couldn’t seem to get off cliffnotes and I was also now facing weekly panic attacks.
I fell into a lot of things that I convinced myself were for me. I became a school mentor, went through a major fitness stage, worked at a student lets company, signed up to complete the great wall of China fundraiser, signed up for three months in Germany and considered a study swap for a year in America and even met a nice guy. The nice guy obviously worked out and pushed all the other events on the back burner. Fast forward three years and I’m still with that nice guy. Even bought a house with him! Have two kittens and have been working as a mortgage assessor for a year. Many factors pushed me to start writing properly. My friend had started her own business making pancakes, a personal dream of ours. My other friend had a year off to extravagant holidays and landed a senior copy-writing position. My nice guy landed a fantastic project management role that finally excited him. And then there was me. Sat listening to the successes of others and being on the edge of my seat, close enough to taste their passion and craving some for myself.
I wrote an article (a pretty shitty one at that). Sent it in to a local website and they published it! I was thrilled and overwhelmed, it didn’t even matter that they had got my name wrong and hadn’t tagged any of my social media pages. I had written something that a professional body had enjoyed enough to share. Three weeks go by and I have written something else! I have literally just submitted it and thought I want to keep doing this! I love so many things to the point I can’t identify which avenue I want to explore in further detail so why not write a little (or a lot!) on everything?
So, now that you are suitably up to date with all the boring bits, I hope I can convince you to continue reading.
