Nervous and excited - a little bit of news!

I remember still to this day what she was wearing – black dress that was just above her knee, stripey long socks and heavy black shoes. Her hair was a short bob and dyed a gorgeous reddish colour – she was beaming into the lens. Who knows what her name was – but she was profiled in the teen magazine I was reading, training as an assistant hairdresser and I was hooked – hooked to her style and hooked to the details of the start of her career and the journey she made to get there. I wanted to be a writer for a magazine one-day I decided, I want to meet funky people like that and tell their story. So that’s what I told them when anyone asked. I’m going to be a journalist I said and that was that.

Well actually that wasn’t really that. Isn’t it funny how wonky life can get. When did this clear path and dream get so murky? Who knows, one step there as I chicken out of the journalism course I am all signed up for after my school exams and stay at the same school to do courses I have no real interest in. A family upheaval as we all learn how to live without my wonderful father, limping my way to a university that I generally lacked any enthusiasm for and spent a good deal of my time drinking whiskey and hiding in bed. Then what happened after? Who knows, one job to another in my hometown once I had finished my travelling, hopping from one lame idea to another never really sure what I wanted to do and losing any confidence in my abilities anyway. In the beginning of my journey I let fear of the unknown get in my way and then somewhere I lost all faith in my ability. I had lost my shine and I was completely lost.

Isn’t it interesting though how we come back to ourselves one-day. Actually it isn’t one day; it is in fact 23 years later. 23 years on and I am living “The Alchemist”, I am back at the tree and all my wonky moves have led me to this point, have brought me back to remembering that article of the girl in the black dress and stripey socks. I am saying to myself once more, I want to be a writer. I needed to meet a husband the other side of the world who doesn’t get weathered by storms, I needed to find my place in Canada where you talk about your dreams and people say “yeah you should do that!”, I needed to build up my friends who show me real life stories everyday, I needed a child who would push me to the limits of myself for me to learn what was important in life and what I really needed to hold onto, I needed my writing buddy to tell me – this job is “totally doable for you” and I needed my local paper’s editor to say “I have made up my mind already, I would love you to write for our Island Style section.”