Navigating my Today...Finding my Tomorrow

Yes, yes, I know; I don't blog anymore and it is a terrible thing.

I have no idea when the words dried up or why I stopped writing. The muse went away. Funny enough, I never missed it until it simply wasn't there. My dearly departed compulsion to constantly scribble was something I always took for granted. I thought it was as much a part of me as the birthmark on my left hand. That mark has been there for as long as I can remember, and it was how I learned to differentiate between left and right.

Even today, as a grown woman of 30, I look to my birthmark when faced with the question, "left or right?". It serves as my compass, Old Faithful I like to say. So also have literary pursuits been my guiding light. Throughout the cacophony of being a middle child in a family of three, the pandemonium of being 'different' in an adolescence of sheep desperately trying to be as alike as possible, and the mildly controlled panic that marked my journey of making my way through adulthood two cultures removed from my home base, the books and the pen have been my solace.

But something all that managed to change. Somehow I allowed life to get in the way. It started with the writing and then permeated the reading, until slowly but surely, my life was entirely devoid of literary pursuits. At the beginning of 2009, I declared that it would be my anuus mirabilis, and indeed it was. My beautiful nephew was born, I turned a big corner in my career and I fell utterly and irrevocably in love. Because 2009 felt so right, so perfect, it wasn't until the round up in December that I realised that I had only read 7 books the entire year. Seven. And I had written nothing. This from the person who used to pass entire weekends alternating between the library and Barnes & Noble.

I felt bereft, like my identity had sneakily left me when I wasn't paying attention and I immediately decided that 2010 would be different. I made a pact to read more. I figure there is no point in worrying about the writing at the moment when I don't even read enough. If I get back to devouring books, the writing will come naturally like it used to. The reading is my today...the writing is my tomorrow, wish me luck finding my compass.