Day Five: What brings you joy in life?
This probably sounds trite, but it is definitely my kids that bring me the most joy in life. I knew from a very early age that I wanted children, so much so that I was already testing out and choosing names in my pre-teen diaries (does anyone still use the word diary or is journal now the wholly accepted term?! I don’t know, but I digress).
I’ve always seemed to connect best with age groups other than my own. I was always the kid sitting at the grown-ups table in the absence of little ones and always the one managing the little ones when they were present. I planned all the kiddie activities for functions and get-togethers, from simple Easter egg hunts for the littlest of the littles and complex riddled scavenger hunts for the older ones; mixing up mocktails and organizing silly little party games to keep them both occupied and entertained… I don’t know, I just really wanted to have kids of my own.
And I did. And it was amazing. And I wouldn’t trade a moment of it for the world. Though sometimes (okay, oftentimes) I wish time could have slowed down a bit so I could prolong that joy which, even in its most difficult times, still managed to be joyful in some way or another—perhaps not always in that exact moment, but the mind is an incredibly powerful tool that does quite the job of filtering memories of child-rearing in such a way that much more of the good remains than the bad. I think it’s an evolutionary sort of thing that guarantees the continuity of the human race. 😉
Day Six: Why do you write?
Full stop honesty? I wish that I wrote. Not that I am not currently sitting here technically writing, because I certainly am. But I wish I was a different kind of writer. A more prolific writer, perhaps. A more well-thought-out writer, even. A better planning writer, for sure. A grab-people-by-the-seat-of-their-pants-and-entrance-them writer.
I’m not. I write mostly personal stuff. Journal-ly stuff. For now, that’s the kind of writer that I need to be: the exploring-myself-and-my-life kind. And I’m doing it this way, at this point in time, because it is 100% the only way I think I may ever get to truly know myself, better understand myself, build better writing habits overall, and even get better at writing itself.
I write because, generally, I love words. I love the way they sound when I’m reading them in my head. Sometimes I love the way they feel when they are rolling off the ends of my fingertips. I write because if I didn’t write, I may implode. I write because the world is full of both amazing, wonderful things and awful, terrible things and I sometimes want (need) to capture glimpses of it all in word-based imagery, that paints a picture in the mind’s eye instead of just presenting it with one.
I write because I forget who I am sometimes. Because sometimes, I’m not even sure I ever really knew who I was. I write because I want to know myself better. Because, someday, I want to finally love myself—wholly and completely. 💜
