Why on earth did I start?

Photo by Sacha T'Sas on Unsplash

I am nowhere.

No further along and no closer to the end or further from the beginning.

But these days I am looking backwards; to the me that was tapping furiously at my mums old typewriter. And I look at the old paper in my purple folder and the words from the imagination of a young girl I can't believe that I ever was.

It is a truth of adulthood that even in your middle age you don't feel grown up and sometimes, just sometimes, you pause and wonder how the hell did I get here. And that is true of me.

How did I get to 49 still feeling the fear and self-loathing of a younger person?

And my thoughts meander and then I am wondering why I even started on this road.

I liked fantasy. I am proud to say that I read all of the Lord of the Rings by the time I was 11 and finished the Game of Thrones before the series caught up but is that a reason to write.

I liked fantasy. I am proud to say that I read all of the Lord of the Rings by the time I was 11 and finished the Game of Thrones before the series caught up but is that a reason to write. The early attempts were just a way of mimicking the writers I loved. I wanted to have heroic little people battling an ancient and lasting evil. I wanted love at first sight that conquered all.

But I was young and scribbling away in turquoise ink on blue paper in the library of Northwest Kent College of Technology I was naive.

As I grew my reading tastes changed, I no longer identified with Frodo Baggins but more with Gollum. And then I found Fuchsia Groan hidden away in her Gormenghast Castle and a twisted cynicism set in.

That is when the happy endings never happened. I wrote the same path but somewhere along the way there was a break in the road, and I took the path through the Misty Woods.

Perhaps is the issue now. Perhaps I am still lost in those woods with my age and experience still holding me back or the moody teenager who doesn't want to find her way out because 'what’s the point'.

I do get the grumps sometimes, I would not be a human being if I didn't, but my grumps are literally what is the point?

Why am I writing anything?

I mean we all die and there is nothing left of. And there is this nonsense part of me that cringes in embarrassment at what they will find or read when I am gone.

But I'm dead. I won't feel anything.

And writing this helps me to relax. I don't have to worry about the true worries of the world. I can be involved in imaginary woes and somehow that is comforting.

Escape my worries but creating imaginary ones.

Strangely comforting.

Right now, the Princess of our tale is sat at a table in an Inn she frequents looking at the man who is the closet person she has left in the world who is telling she must go home.

And she must.

And I must get her there.