Finding My Feet

I seem to spend a lot of my life finding my feet, be it as a student nurse on a new placement, as an agency carer walking into somewhere new or even in my writing, some days to me life feels like you are just treading water desperately trying to keep afloat other days to me I feel like I’m making headway and starting to swim towards the shoreline, then other days it feels like I’m caught in a current that pulls me off course. I’m not ashamed to say I get tired of this; what seems to be a constant struggle to find the shore to find.. well..me..

Behind all this despondency and tired glumness my writing seems to have become a life raft. Much like a good book, I can disappear into it, if even for a few hours. I guess it’s my own personal Fortress of Solitude. Within it’s warmth and comforting ink I have found that characters I had long since forgotten about have also found their voices. They whisper untold stories in my mind just waiting to be told. Others speak to me of their lives, facets of their characters I had not considered that now seem so obvious. For example in one of my stories one of the main characters discovers that everything they have known has been a lie, but it had never entered into my head how they would deal with this. It is as if I was so busy swimming towards the end point I had forgotten to look around me at how the journey would effect them.

This calls into my mind the saying “It’s not the destination, but the journey that is most important.” (I can’t remember who actually said this but I like it!)

And this is something I am ashamed to say I had forgotten. So it’s time for me to quote one of my other favourite sayings but with an amendment…

“Pick yourself up, dust yourself down and start again” Only this time “take the time to look around you and remember the steps you take as you keep swimming and you might just surprise yourself at what you discover along the way”.