the writergirl

Dear Reader,

I should know by now that I can never truly run away from the very thing I was born to do. It feels almost cyclical, the running and returning, the fear and the realisation. The gods know how many times the wheel of this cycle has turned, and now at the age of 27 I have completed one more round.

I’d like to believe, however, that this time it’s different.

To hold a dream is a luxury that every human being has access to. To achieve it, however, is a privilege that not everyone has. I am afraid I belong to the latter—always on the losing end of life, and that when all is said and done and I am lying on my deathbed, my stories remain unpublished and unread, gathering dust and rotting into nothing.

My need to leave behind a legacy with my stories is all-consuming. As I clock in at work, as I sit with my friends, as I drift off to sleep at night, it rests in the back of my mind, a want I cannot deny. A fire I cannot extinguish. I used to think I wanted a simple life—a house in a country I liked with a job I tolerated that paid enough. As I grew older and disillusioned, I often thought to myself if that was what I truly wanted. Mundanity and tolerance. Was this the life I wanted for the rest of my years?

I recall that when I was younger, I believed in dragons. I loved fantasy stories so much that I sat down to write my own to become the ‘world’s youngest published author’. It obviously never came true, but even at 8 years old my ambition was large. I wanted more, I was hungry for everything and anything. I still am, but as someone older there is the heavy weight of fear that often makes me question my wants and goals.

I am not so naïve that I think this path will be easy. I’ve read countless author and agent interviews and have done as much research as I can on the process and the current state of the publishing world. It scares me, how fickle the market is, and how that would affect my own career in the future. I am terrified of the uncertainty and I know that fighting to get my books published will be hard. But the fear of never trying… I know I cannot stomach that at all.

I have always wanted more than what life has given me. I want to achieve what I’ve always dreamed of, tell all the stories I have, and leave behind a legacy to be proud of. I want more, more. I want everything. Why settle for mundanity and tolerance when I could reach for more?

My younger self was different. She was more reckless in her stories, courageous in her writing, and uncaring of how her art would be viewed by others. I am more critical, painfully aware of my own shortcomings and mistakes. But there is a shared fire in us that has never stopped burning—though I may stop writing at times, it is inevitable that I will always come back home to the very thing that fuels the fire in my soul.

Making art is a do-or-die thing. Every creative person I know has that fire burning in them—whether that fire fuels them to create in honour of expression or any other reason, that’s their prerogative. But one thing is true for all us: we create because we must. That is all there is.

As I return home to the house I built when I was 8, I bring with me so much more things that I know will continue to guide my act of creation for years to come. Perhaps the most important are my willingness to stay and the awareness that I don’t have to keep running anymore. If I fail in this endeavour, at least I tried. And if I try and succeed, then it would well have been worth everything and more.

And throughout that, the fire burns. It will keep me warm throughout the colder nights, and I will tend to it even in my busiest days. There will be no more turn of the wheel—that cycle is complete. I have returned to the home I was born in. I know where I belong.

Love,

the writer girl